This month, the DeadDarlings team shared what's worked for us when we've taken a red pen to our writing. Each of the featured bloggers are graduates of Grub's Novel Incubator program.

Character Count

Sharissa Jones exceeds 144 characters to examines sentences that work in Jumping the Cut: Writing Transitional Scenes in the Netflix and Twitter Age .

Debut Deadline

Belle Brett shares her preflight checklist for marketing her novel Six Months until Publication: Tentative Tips from a Debut Novelist. 

Existential Editing

Looking for Ten Tips for Losing a Hundred Pages? Emily Ross has ...

 It’s been an exciting ride for former journalist and long-time Grubbie Kim Savage, who just released her third YA novel, In Her Skin, following the success of After The Woods in 2016 and Beautiful Broken Girls (one of Kirkus’s 10 Best YA) in 2017

Make your characters want something right away, wrote Vonnegut, even if it’s only a glass of water.

And as soon as we pick my four-year-old up from pre-school and strap her into her car seat, she tells us that she wants some water.

But a narrative, at its most basic level, is driven by the relationship between what a character wants and the obstacles in their way, and it just so happens that my daughter’s water bottle is empty.

Guest post by Nadia Colburn, PhD

Nadia is teaching "Poetry as a Contemplative Practice" on May 18th, 10:30-1:30. Click here for more info. Nadia holds a BA from Harvard and a PhD in English from Columbia University

All too often authors use a push strategy in their social media efforts, sharing out messages to their audience without engaging with their audience at all. To do so is to ignore one of the most effective marketing tools in the marketing arsenal, the power of 1:1 conversations.