Writing Under Surveillance

When the state decides who stays, who raises, and who watches

Readers kept asking me the same question: What happened to Sam, Rylee, and Allison?

It wasn’t a small question. After everything that happened in The Motherhood Mandate and The Fatherhood Mandate, there was a sense of unfinished business. What does it look like when the state forces two people to become a family, not because they chose each other, but because they were told to?

That’s what I wanted to explore.

Sam and Rylee come from wealth. They share a religious foundation. Neither one is drowning in student loans or scraping by. So from the outside, maybe it doesn’t seem like a big deal. They should be fine, right?

But even with every supposed advantage, they’re still trapped. Not by each other, but by a system that never lets go. A system that says the moment a fetal heartbeat is detected, you are no longer in charge of your future. A system where raising your child becomes a court-enforced performance of stability, no matter how unstable things actually are.

I wanted to push that further.

So I changed up the ingredients. I imagined two people from different economic backgrounds, bonded by a shared religious community but shaped by very different lives. I threw in a flood of mandates, assumptions, interpretations, and obligations. And I kept turning up the heat.

A Ward of the State is what happens when you keep saying “personal responsibility” until it becomes law. When we stop asking if a policy makes sense and start enforcing it just because it exists. It's about children growing up under court supervision, not because their parents are dangerous, but because they were never allowed to choose anything else.

This isn’t a story about romance. It’s not about second chances or even happy endings (although there is one!).

It’s about what happens when freedom is replaced by compliance. When your rights are not earned, but rationed.

That’s why I wrote this book. For the ones who never got to choose. For the ones who were told that survival meant gratitude. For the ones who are still being watched.

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