ARCHIVE FOR Dead Darlings: Everything Novel

Take a walk with us. Last month the Dead Darlings team wandered the earth, summoned divine spirits, unearthed some ghosts and muttered magical incantations – all in pursuit of better writing. Here are some tips on how to make your words go the distance – in this world and the next:

X Marks the Spot
Lisa Birk looks at the importance of setting in Without Geography You’re Nowhere.

“Did you hear that?” The Dead Darlings offices were filled with sound this month. Whether it was the productive click-clack of keys, the scratching of pen to paper or those voices in our heads – we picked up some rhythm and wrote these posts:

Listen to the beat

In Love and Its Representations in Literature Sharissa Jones explains how a syllabus full of love her get at the heart of her writing life while Bonnie Waltch juggled synonyms in Everyday Expressions of Emotion & Other Wearisome, Well-Worn Words 

Speak up

Michele Ferrari compares her experience with live story-telling to novel-writing …

Building on her critically acclaimed debut novel The Quickening, Michelle Hoover’s gripping, brilliantly crafted new release, Bottomland, follows the Hess family’s struggle to stay together on the Iowa plains following the mysterious disappearance of two family members during the years after World War I

Dawn Tripp is a favorite among Boston-area writers and readers—and for good reason. I first met her at the Boston Book Festival where I moderated a fiction panel we quickly dubbed “Three Blondes and a Brit.” There we were: James MacManus, author of the acclaimed forthcoming Midnight in Berlin, Holly LeCraw, best-selling author of The Half Brother, Tripp, who nailed the Massachusetts Book Award with her second novel, and me. Though I hadn’t met Dawn before or known her books, she had such an open-armed kind of warmth, and such a passion for other writers and their work, …

Over at DeadDarlings we’ve been embracing the fickle weather patterns by getting lost in good pages. Whatever mood you are in – ready for summer getaways or holding out for the last snow days of the season, we’ve got you covered. Check out some of our favorite posts from January.

Be a hero at home