Procrastinators

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/05/21/the-big-idea-georgia-summers/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60784

Writing a novel doesn’t just involve sitting hunched over a computer typing away for hours, sometimes it involves wandering through Nordic forests that feel a little spooky, but also extremely magical. Author Georgia Summers went on a journey to craft her newest novel, Trollheim: Tale of Sýstir. Tag along through her Big Idea to see the forest and all it holds.

GEORGIA SUMMERS:

I’ve found that the core idea of a novel is something that I repeatedly return to, in every facet of writing and across all of my books. It’s a question that’s profoundly useful – from making big, crucial editorial decisions, all the way down to how to phrase a sentence or tease out a specific image. Strip away the skin, the muscle, and get right to the bone. But what if you weren’t writing your Big Idea? What if you were writing someone else’s? What does that question look like?

For me, it turned out to be about trees.

When Trollheim approached me to write a book based on Sýstir’s story, I had a lot of questions. I’ve never done IP before, for one. And splashing around in someone else’s world is a nerve-wracking experience; ultimately, your goal is to write a novel that works for their storytelling purposes, as well as a piece of art that you can be proud of. Frankly, I wondered if I was up to the task. But I also wondered what it would be like to let go of the top-level decision-making. Whether it would still feel the same to write, full stop.

(Also, can I write two novels in one year as a slow writer? There are pragmatics to consider.)

There’s a lot about Sýstir’s story that immediately resonated with me. Her arc is one of fairytale tragedy and bittersweet redemption, as she makes the complicated transition from adolescent to adult and her view of those she loves changes with it. As a huldra she straddles two worlds: the human villages and fields; and the Dark Forest, home to väsen. She is neither as evil as those who condemn her would argue, nor as good as she sees herself.

Likewise, the World of Trollheim is rich with lore, rooted in the mystery of Nordic folklore, and grown by artists. But the vast landscape is one that I was unfamiliar with. And in the earliest iterations of Sýstir’s story, one particular note stood out to me: this forest reads too British.

I grew up in a mix of different places, but the times I’ve lived in the countryside have always stuck with me. I’ve roamed across fields and walked below meandering canopies, winced my way through nettle-choked paths. (RIP to my ankles.) My first instinct was to draw from those experiences – and my second was to hesitate. Because none of them quite had the right shape for Sýstir’s small corner of the Dark Forest.

Björne, the founder of Trollheim, invited me to feel and experience the Nordic wilderness. We walked the magical, otherworldly forest of Tiveden, one of Sweden’s many national parks, with its delicate wild strawberries and mossy ground. There are mirror-black lakes with eerie reflections of the treeline along their banks, trees that have grown in odd shapes as others toppled against them and disintegrated over time. Rust-red water lapping at pebbled shorelines, the faint whine of insects, the echoes of the elusive animals around us. It is, in short, hauntingly beautiful – the kind of place that feels magical just to be in its presence.

Not every experience makes it into a single book, but so many of them did from those few short days. The deep pools within the caves, the springy moss beneath my feet, the feeling of clambering over rock. It was easy to picture Sýstir there, running through the trees, ablaze with wonder. This was a forest I could bring to the page. These were Sýstir’s trees.

It can be easy, writing your own stories, to circle back to the things you know best. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this approach – the writer becomes an archaeologist, where the same patch of ground constantly yields new riches to consider. But there’s a really delicious joy in testing new writing muscles, rummaging deep in the writerly toolbox for a fresh way to convey story and imagery to the reader. Sometimes, it’s large structural or character choices, but sometimes it really is about being able to envision a very specific kind of forest.

With those top-level story decisions out of the way, Trollheim allowed me to do just that: to pick up those tools, reexamine what I thought I knew, and push each sentence just that little bit harder. In that sense, it doesn’t matter whether it’s my Big Idea or someone else’s. It’s craft – and trees – all the way down.

Trollheim: Tale of Systir: Amazon|Amazon UK|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Bookshop UK|Waterstones

Author socials: Website|Instagram

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/05/21/the-big-idea-georgia-summers/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60784

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/05/20/the-big-idea-caitlin-rozakis-3/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60768

Excel spreadsheets, water-cooler talk, and demons are all things you’ll find in the corporate setting of author Caitlin Rozakis’s newest novel, Startup Hell. Log on to her Big Idea as she begs the question: who is more of a monster, a demon, or a CEO?

CAITLIN ROZAKIS:

I’m not saying that startups, or tech companies, or tech startups in particular, are evil.

Well, not all of them.

I’ve spent more than fifteen years working in startups and tech, and in that time, I’ve gotten to work with some awesome people and on some cool products. I do believe that technology still has enormous potential to make our lives easier, safer, more fun.

But I know I’m not alone in feeling increasingly cynical about the tech industry these days. The “move fast and break things” approach to infrastructure and people’s lives that should never have been broken. The disruption of industries so we can replace things that used to work well with subscription models of things that don’t quite work as well. The enshittification. I’ve seen companies who have a product that is working great and is depended on by customers be told by investors that their current business model doesn’t have a big enough revenue multiplier.

And then I’ve watched them pivot, and pivot again, trying to appeal to a wider audience while betraying the initial customers who relied on them, all in search of that billion-dollar valuation. It’s not enough to do a thing well and make a steady profit. If the revenue numbers don’t go up by an exponential quarter after quarter forever, it’s a failure. Never mind that Earth and its resources and its population are finite.

There’s plenty to write about there. But none of it’s fun.

One of the things I’ve noticed is how often fantasy terminology comes up around tech. A side effect of the victory of the geeks, I suppose. Every company has a story about how their app is going to change the world. (I should know; as a tech marketer, I’ve had to come up with ways to describe the deep storytelling roots and potential to bring a golden age of knowledge that’s created by, say, targeted TV advertising tech. My apologies. The rent was due.) But it’s more than the savior complex by an app that promises to revolutionize your approach to air freshener plugins. We talk about angel investors. Vampire capitalists. Unicorn startups. And the usual jokes about selling your soul and deals with the Devil.

That, I can work with.

Startup Hell started with an image. A junior employee at a crappy Manhattan tech startup stays late trying to make her quota. She walks into her boss’s office and finds him face-down on his desk, dead. And the demon he summoned to make his own quarterly target is still there, trapped in the circle.

She’s a junior salesperson. He’s a junior salesdemon. They both have impossible KPIs (that’s key performance indicators, for those of you lucky enough to live free of corporate jargon). They both have terrible, ruthless bosses. Are their situations really all that different?

Writing both offices (human and Infernal) was enormous fun. Well, fun for me, not so much fun for Morgan and Lucareoth. Along the way, they end up having to survive company-sponsored goat yoga, a bloodthirsty corporate shuffleboard tournament, a siege warfare lunch-and-learn, an angel-infested tech conference, and a lot of dubious free snacks. (I’ll let you guess which office has which.) 

Along the way, the supporting cast filled itself out. Morgan, who is depressingly mundane, acquired a kickass demon-slaying mother whose black leather outfits and back tattoo would be at home on the cover of any paranormal romance. Poor Morgan grew up aware of the hidden magical world, but her magical dyslexia leaves her a major disappointment to her parents and lacking an obvious career path. Lucareoth, on the other hand, has Rix, a not terribly bright hellhound whose drool can eat through flooring. Rix is the very bestest boy, by the way. He has no particular talents, he’s just happy to be participating. Good thing it’s a dog-friendly office.

So now Morgan has an inconveniently cute demon sleeping on her couch and masquerading as the latest sales intern. And she owes the Infernal Plane one human soul (it doesn’t have to be hers). While her demon-hunting mom sniffs around for rumors of startups making Infernal pacts. Morgan and Luke need to make some choices—in today’s capitalist hellscape, do you even have a choice about selling your soul? And who is worse—the literal forces of hell or a tech bro CEO?

(Let’s be honest, we’re all picking the same answer.)

Startup Hell: Amazon|Barnes & Noble

Author social: Website|Instagram|Bluesky

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/05/20/the-big-idea-caitlin-rozakis-3/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60768

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/05/19/the-big-idea-mary-berman/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60760

Ring the wedding bells and toast your champagne glass, author Mary Berman has brought us a tale of love. Or, more accurately, a tale of being afraid of ending up alone, in the Big Idea for her newest novel, Until Death.

MARY BERMAN:

In 2021, I met my now-husband on Hinge. (This was before the death of the algorithm, RIP.)

On our first date, he asked, “So, are you looking for a relationship?” and I said, “No.” And he said, “Oh… so you’re just looking for someone to hook up with? I’m not really —” And I replied with something like, “God, no. I’m just afraid that if I don’t find a partner now, I’ll be alone in thirty years when my parents die.”

#

Two years later, in 2023, I found myself surrounded by weddings. My cousin got married, my other cousin got engaged, my best friend’s other friend got engaged, someone else kept texting me about her coworker’s crazy wedding in Italy, etc. I truly had no desire to be engaged yet — although my partner had, after that first conversation, mercifully decided to hang around, and we were still together — but I was still out here making wedding spreadsheets for fun. I couldn’t help it. Weddings were everywhere. We were all losing our damn minds. It was as Jia Tolentino had written in her very excellent essay “I Thee Dread”: “I, on the topic of weddings, like so many women before me, had gone a little bit insane.”

And at some point I thought: Oh, there’s a thing that makes everybody insane? I could write a horror novel about that.

#

That was my moment of inspiration: Ooh, a horror novel about wedding planning! I also had my protagonist, Ophelia, right away. She, like me, would start out thinking, Mmm, I’m not sure this whole relationship business is for me. But over the course of the novel, she’d get dragged into a marriage. Unlike me, though, she would not be dragged into it by Love. No, she would be ensnared by Something Bad. But what Bad Thing could get someone to make a huge decision like that?

And then I thought: Maybe, like me, she’s also terrified to end up alone.

And — because I love to turn shit up to eleven — I thought, Maybe she’s a lot closer to that point than I was when I met my partner. Maybe her dad is gone already, maybe her mom is sick. But sick is too easy, it’s too black-and-white. What’s worse than sick? What’s worse than dying?

#

I have two family members who died of dementia. The first of these slow declines, I witnessed as a young teenager. Because of this, I spent a surprisingly long time thinking dementia and aging were the same thing — which is to say, I didn’t think there was a way to do the latter without the former.

Here is what I thought would happen to me, and to everyone else as we aged:

We would grow old. And as we grew old, we would lose bits and pieces of our memory, like an old coat losing shreds of itself to moths’ teeth in the dark.

Eventually, we would lose so much memory that would no longer remember our own histories. We would have no lingering understanding of our selves. We wouldn’t remember our spouses, or our children. We would catch sight of our own hands and panic because they were the gnarled hands of an old woman and we believed ourselves to be twenty-two. We would call our daughter and our granddaughter by the same name, because we would think they were two versions of the same person and our grasp of time would have grown so tenuous that this would not alarm us. Eventually we would also lose our mobility, and our speech.

We wouldn’t lose our lives, though. Those, for some strange reason, we would keep. Some tiny, unquenchable fire would burn inside us still. It would always leave just enough of us to give our loved ones hell.

#

That was it, then. Ophelia’s mother would be diagnosed with early dementia. And Ophelia, who up until this point would have felt, for reasons I shall not spoiler here, that marriage was a bad idea, would suddenly be staring down the barrel of a life without any family in it.

This, to me, is really what makes Until Death a horror novel. Not the wedding planning (well, that too), and not the supernatural element (well, that too). But those things come later. The horror, though, is always in the novel, even before Ophelia makes the decision to get married. That’s because the horror comes from Ophelia’s mother’s illness, Ophelia’s own sense of obligation, and her terror of being alone.

—-

Until Death: Amazon|Barnes and Noble|Bookshop

Author’s Socials: Website|Substack

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/05/19/the-big-idea-mary-berman/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=60760