Ree's Dw circle

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/26/the-big-idea-bernie-jean-schiebeling/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59632

Like blue eyes, height, or left-handedness, how much of our temper and ill manners can we contribute to our genetics? Author Bernie Jean Schiebeling explores the breakage of inherited anger, and what it’s like to fall victim to the temperament our parents passed unto us in the Big Idea for their newest novel, House, Body, Bird.

BERNIE JEAN SCHIEBELING:

My great-grandfather was not a good man.

Without getting into too many details, he was angry and abusive, so much so that my great-grandmother was able to divorce him in the late 1920s without too much trouble. After the divorce, my great-grandfather left—possibly fled—and then committed a string of burglaries across Kentucky and Tennessee while working as a door-to-door salesman. Many years later, my father met one of his ex-colleagues, who said the man had been incredible at sales. Less so at stealing, since he kept getting caught. “And,” he said, pointing at my dad’s breakfast plate, “I can tell you that you take your scrambled eggs the same way. So much pepper.”

Dad never met my great-grandfather (even Grandpa hardly knew him, since he was just a toddler during the divorce). But they both liked peppery eggs, and so do I.

Other echoes persisted too. Anger sometimes exploded from my grandfather, though less than the previous generation. My dad is calmer than his father, and I am calmer than him. Still, rage sometimes rises in me with the inevitable force of a king tide. I hear the ocean rushing in my ears—

—And I breathe through the impulse. I don’t have to do this. I don’t have to continue this tradition that—I hope—none of us wanted. 

Inheritance is never clean. We gather too much over the course of a life, too many objects imbued with too many memories, to ever pass on an uncomplicated story to our descendants. In most cases, this is a gift, the last we give to our loved ones. Sometimes, however, it is a weapon, sharp-edged and dangerous to hold, and we have to figure out how to carry it anyway, or how to put it down in a way that hurts no one else. This is the big idea of House, Body, Bird. 

The idea was larger than I expected. I didn’t mean for this to be a novella; I thought it would be a short story too long to sell to most markets, like most of the work I have in my drafts folder. I was about 15,000 words deep by the time I realized I was writing a book. 

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been that surprised. Stories find their ideal length through their subject matter, and the more I thought about House, Body, Bird’s family and their home-slash-haunted-dollhouse-museum, the more I realized that the sheer amount of stuff in main character Birdie Goodbain’s inheritance—both dollhouses and the history behind those dollhouses—needed to show up on the page. I started including imagery wherever I could: descriptions of dolls, of difficult memories, of how haunted the body becomes from those memories. In the story’s earlier scenes, I wanted to crowd Birdie, make her tuck her elbows in as she navigated the rambling, watchful house.

Of course, this is only the first half of the difficult-inheritance-problem, the “Someone has willed me a weapon” half. I still had to find a good way to explore the second half of “Thanks, I hate it.” Birdie couldn’t stay scared. Thankfully, I had a solution; I just needed to reorganize some clutter.

When I first started writing the would-be short story, I had alternated between two point-of-views for Birdie, third-person limited and first-person. This created emotional whiplash as Birdie went from a meek third-person POV ruminating on the house’s creepiness to a furious first-person POV bashing through the walls with a meat tenderizer. By grouping all the third-person scenes together and following them with the first-person ones, Birdie had much cleaner character development. It’s relevant that the switch in perspective happens once Birdie commits to escaping and seizing her freedom. In that moment, she moves from third-person, where an unseen narrator observes and objectifies her (like a doll!), to first-person, where she narrates her experiences. While imagery had pushed up against the margins in the third-person section, Birdie’s opinions, observations, and memories pepper her own telling of the story. She gets space to breathe. 

In keeping with the novella’s spirit of excess, Birdie’s sections are interspersed with ones from the haunted house’s point of view. Originally, this was useful because it allowed me to reference the previous Goodbain generations with a level of detail that wouldn’t have been possible for Birdie, but the house eventually became the story’s second emotional heart. Although I worried about overwriting throughout the drafting process, a maximalist approach to storytelling was what I needed for House, Body, Bird. 

It’s funny—early on in the story, Birdie’s messed-up dad tells her, “We build, and build, and build.” The Goodbain family built and built and built their house as a way to create a family narrative worth passing on, as an attempt to build livelihoods and lives and love, and I did the same thing. I built and built and built the story to understand how Birdie’s family history loomed over her, and how she could create a new, more loving life in response to it. 

House, Body, Bird: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Books-A-Million

Author socials: Website|Instagram|Bluesky

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/26/the-big-idea-bernie-jean-schiebeling/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59632

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/25/the-big-idea-jeff-somers-2/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59613

Five funerals may seem like a lot, but this number is actually cut down considerably from author Jeff Somers’ original idea of 26 deaths. Put on your best black tie and follow along the Big Idea for his newest choose-your-own-adventure, Five Funerals.

JEFF SOMERS:

WHEN I was 14 years old—chubby, prone to wearing tie-dye t-shirts for no known reason, and gifted with inexplicable levels of confidence—I wrote a novel in just under three months. Nothing’s impossible when you have no job and live on a diet of Cookie Crisp cereal and RC Cola, and the whole writing thing is so fresh and new, you haven’t yet developed a nose for your own bad writing. Writing novels sure is easy, I thought, and for a long time I actually believed that.

35 years later, I was staring up at a poster of Edward Gorey’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies that I’ve had since college. If you’re unfamiliar with The Gashlycrumb Tinies, it’s a parody of old-fashioned alphabet books depicting how 26 blank-faced, Dickensian children die via gorgeous, intricate drawings and a series of simple rhymed couplets. I’ve been fascinated by it for most of my adult life, and I wondered what those doomed little urchins were like, how the full story of their freakish deaths would actually play out.

In other words, I wanted to write a novel about them. As with most of my thoughts, this seemed pretty brilliant to me (the inexplicable levels of confidence have only inexplicably increased with age), and somewhere in the background there was 14-year-old Jeff whispering yeah, and writing novels is easy!

Five years later, I’d filled a hard drive with trash.

It was a problem of structure: If you do the math, in this story, 26 people have to die in horrible, hilarious, darkly whimsical ways. Is 26 deaths in a single novel a lot? It is! Especially when each death needs to have unique elements and a lot of focus and page-time.

I tried structuring it like a detective novel, with one of the characters trying to figure out why all their old classmates were dying. But this quickly became repetitive—there’s a reason detective characters usually don’t investigate dozens of separate murders. You either wind up with a 1,000,000-word novel or you have to cut some corners.

I tried a draft where the deaths happened in chronological order. But this approach got tedious, because I was introducing characters just to kill them. While this was a lot of fun, it didn’t feel like a novel, like a complete story. The collapse of this draft did give me an idea, however: Short stories.

Anyone who has ever talked writing shop with me, or attended one of my Writer’s Digest workshops, knows that I am an enthusiastic short story writer (and reader), and that I regard short stories as the general cure for all writing woes. Any time I run into any sort of writing challenge, from writer’s block to Oh No I’ve Created an Insurmountable Plot Paradox (Again), my immediate solution is to stop trying to write a novel and start writing short stories about the universe and characters. This almost always works and, even when it doesn’t, I usually end up with some good short stories out of the deal. (As all working writers know, short stories are worth tens of dollars in today’s economy.)

So, I started writing stories about each character’s death, as an exercise. I didn’t worry about narrative cohesion, or pacing, or tying the story into the main novel at all. I just had fun writing 26 stories about people dying in variously hilarious, tragic, and sad ways extrapolated from Gorey’s work.

As I did this, I realized what the problem had been all along: Five Funerals isn’t a story about a bunch of kids who die and maybe deserve it. Well, it is that, but it’s also a story about loss. And memory. And how we hold people we’ve lost touch with in a kind of amber in our memories, unchanging and eternal. It was a story about that moment when you hear that someone you used to know—someone you maybe used to love—has died.

In those moments, we experience something strange: That person who’s been preserved in our head suddenly (and violently) transforms. After years or decades of being young and alive in your memory, they’re abruptly aged up—and gone. It’s a sobering, disorienting experience, and I realized that’s what I wanted Five Funerals to be—a funny, dark, hilarious story that mimicked that sense of the past rushing forward to catch up with the present. 

The short stories I’d been writing evolved into a choose-your-own-story engine, disrupting the reader’s groove and forcing them to reckon with the sudden, unwanted knowledge that this character had died. And since no one experiences time or loss the same way, readers can choose how they experience it here: When a name is flagged with a footnote in the novel, you can choose to flip to the story it’s pointing to—or not. If you do, you might find out how that character died, or discover a bit of funny or heartbreaking backstory.

You can keep following the chain of deaths, or you can return to the story where you left off. Or you can ignore all the footnotes and just read the book straight through, or randomly, or in sections. Just like we all grieve in our own way, you can read Five Funerals in your own way.

The end result, I think, is a book that explores how time slowly strips those yellowing old memories away, replacing them with the harsher truth of death and loss. Even if those losses are sometimes so weird and unexpected that you have to laugh.

Five Funerals: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Apple Books|Kobo|Ruadán Books

Author socials: Website|Instagram|Bluesky|Threads

Additional links: Animated cover on Instagram and on Bluesky.

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/25/the-big-idea-jeff-somers-2/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59613