There are days when the scalpel feels lighter than the pen.
People imagine that writing is the hard part. It’s not. Writing is breathing — or at least it should be. What’s hard is finding the oxygen for it when you’ve spent sixteen hours inhaling recycled hospital air, listening to the constant chorus of machines beeping, phones ringing, doors swinging, and someone somewhere yelling for “a stat consult, now.”
Being a surgeon — and an emergency doctor, to make matters worse — is not a lifestyle. It’s a sustained act of defiance against sleep, sanity, and sometimes gravity. It means forgetting what mealtimes are, forgetting that the outside world has daylight, and remembering, with painful clarity, that human beings are fragile, leaking, mortal creatures. It means holding hearts that have stopped and cutting through skin that trembles because it wants to live.
And when you go home — if you go home — you don’t always remember how to be yourself. You hang your white coat like an exoskeleton and stand in the quiet, trying to remember what silence sounds like. The world is still moving, but you’re not entirely sure you are.
That’s where the stories start.
In the long, grey hours between surgeries. In the 3 a.m. lull when the emergency department is a fluorescent ghost town and your brain starts whispering, “What if?” In the dark hour of the soul, when exhaustion has stripped you of pretense, and all that’s left is a pulse and a question.
That’s when the characters come — women who carry their own storms, who build empires and then burn them down. They walk into my head wearing heels sharper than scalpels and demand dialogue. They argue about ethics, about love, about power, about how far you can go before you lose yourself.
I write because if I didn’t, I’d be lost entirely to the noise. Writing is the one place where the beeping stops, where I get to build worlds instead of stitching them back together. It’s the only time I can make chaos mean something.
People ask why I write sapphic stories — why the Byrne Saga and its empire of women who love women, who love fiercely, dangerously, beautifully. The answer is simple: because the world needs stories where women get to be everything. Brilliant and broken. Sharp and soft. Commanding and kind. Because in medicine, we see people at their most human — raw, undone, defenseless — and in fiction, we get to honor that vulnerability and give it language.
And maybe, on some level, because saving lives isn’t enough if you can’t also save a piece of yourself in the process.
Who I Am as a Writer
I’m Deb Baron, a woman with American/German/French/Russian roots living in the Netherlands, a surgeon and writer who spends her days in operating rooms and her nights building empires of women who love fiercely and think dangerously. My stories are about power and tenderness, ambition and heart — and the quiet, unglamorous truth of what it costs to be human.