I used to hang around a bunch of poets. Not because I liked them—they were snobbish in their elegiac greatness—but because as poets, they were guaranteed to get rejected more often than I. My novel was dead in the water while…
The slogans zing at writers everywhere we go, from tree-dangling kittens on social media to well-meaning cocktail party guests. Keep the Faith. Never Give Up. Butt in Chair. And we spoon feed it to ourselves as well, suckling at the…
So I did that thing, the very depressing one, where I pulled an old manuscript out of the files with the intention of fixing it. I was confident I knew the problem: it had to be the stakes. The reader…
In my very first college English lit class, the teacher asked us to write a poem on sexuality, and I wrote a limerick about a turtle. It was the only thing I could think of that rhymed with fertile. Of…
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…
I once thought I’d make a pretty good racecar driver. This isn’t like my other delusions, kickboxing or ice-carving, as I had a reason to believe in my driving skills. After all, my brother is a talented semi-pro racecar driver,…