Opening Old Boxes
The end of year always puts me in the mood to clean. A new year might be an arbitrary marker of time passing, but finishing up a calendar fills me with the desire to say good-bye to some things, to…
Category: The Writing Life
A Writer’s Guide to Fashion
It has come to the attention of the Dead Darlings Editorial team that our website is a source for writers wanting to know what to wear to a Writers’ Cocktail Party. While we normally prefer to confine our content to…
YA Wednesday: Morally Complicated YA Books
The blogosphere has been abuzz over a six-figure deal for the rights to a year-old self-published debut novel, The Cruelty, by Scott Bergstrom. The firestorm began with a November 24th article in Publisher’s Weekly, “YA Debut Gets Six Figure Deal,…
Friday Feast: Overlooked Books, Sexist Male Writers, Why Fiction Matters, Editor Apologies, and Love Letter to a Sloppy First Draft
Happy first Friday of December. All those tasks put off last week have to be dealt with this week. On top of workload grumpiness, I suspect everyone is super cranky this week because they’re off their normal feeding schedules, like…
Writing Dude: How I Did Pandering Wrong
In her recent essay, “On Pandering,” Claire Vaye Watkins records the shock of discovering that she wrote, primarily, for old white men, members of the literati like Franzen, Roth, et al whose approval she sought and to whose tastes and…
To A Troubled Writer on Thanksgiving
I’m going to keep this short so you can get back to your turkey, your pumpkin pie, your pinot noir, your attempts to ignore your racist uncle, back to the bathroom where you hide to regain your composure and your…