Julia Fine’s debut novel What Should Be Wild, (Harper, 2018) is a modern gothic fairy tale, animated with toppled tropes and dark, unexpected secrets. The novel follows Maisie, a young girl cursed with the power to give and take life…
As an out writer in a large writing community, I sometimes get questions from fellow writers about writing gay characters. Typically, there’s some low-level anxiety about “getting it right.” I love these questions. It means that the writer has or is…
Jenna Blum, a 20+ – year Grub Street teacher and New York Times bestselling author of Those Who Save Us (Harcourt, 2002) and The Stormchasers (Dutton, 2010), has just published her third novel, The Lost Family (Harper, 2018). Already it…
Note: Except for posts from occasional guest bloggers, Dead Darlings posts are written by graduates of Grub Street’s Novel Incubator program in Boston. To find out more about the program, click here. This advice is poorly timed because the “new”…
Do you remember that John Cusack movie from the 80s Better Off Dead? It was a humorous take on a traumatic time in a teen boy’s life. His girl dumped him for the popular boy, and he was left rudderless…
This past week I’ve heard from a lot of writer friends who are having a tough time, mostly with their writing. As one friend put it, “hard to write with all this treason.” It got me to imagining a 911-type…