Kill Your Darlings, Especially Him

Greetings from the Lone Star State,

If you missed the first installment of my new series Deadlines—where Mallory went from anonymous edits to a cease and desist (and a body count)—start with Installment One →.

Otherwise—Theodore’s ego is waiting. Mallory brought her red pen.

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Welcome to Deadlines
A note before we begin

Deadlines follows Mallory Blythe, a writer who doesn’t just revise the endings she hates—she rewrites everything. Fiction. People. Outcomes. It’s satirical. It’s dark. And sometimes it gets a little close to the bone.

These are fictional stories. That part’s not up for interpretation.

Mallory’s opinions and actions are hers—and hers alone.

Each installment stands on its own. But together, they build something messier. More dangerous. And, I hope, fun.

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Kill Your Darlings, Especially Him

Installment Two

People love to write about me. They usually get the bones right—antique desk, unpaid royalties, the koi pond incident. But they always skip the part that matters.

I’m not a cautionary tale.
I’m the editor.

The first time I saw his face on a poster, I was halfway through a turkey club and already annoyed. 

Not because I recognized him—I didn’t.

But I’ve met the kind—usually right before the plot turns fatal.

Anyway, there he was: Theodore Strang.

Literary darling. Winner of the Penzler Prize for Discomfortingly Masculine Fiction. His novel—Her Silence Was the Loudest Scream—had just been longlisted for an award with a name so pretentious it needed its own foundation.

I recognized the ending immediately.

It was mine.

Not legally, of course. Not in any way that would hold up in court. But in the I rewrote this train wreck and uploaded it to a niche corner of the internet after two gins and a personal crisis kind of way.

In the original, the heroine retreats into silence—dignified, bruised, apologetic. In mine, she poisons him slowly over three years using artisanal honey and weaponized restraint.

Apparently, his editors loved it.
Called it “elegant.”
“Subversive.”
“A bold meditation on gendered power.”

When I wrote it, they called it “concerning.”
When he wrote it, he got a podcast.

****

So, obviously, I went to his reading.
What am I, emotionally stable?

It was held in a bookstore with exposed beams, Edison bulbs, and no discernible sense of humor. The kind of place where grief gets a section and joy does not.

He read slowly. Painfully. Like each syllable cost him something. The audience nodded along—hunched and reverent—as if absorbing scripture, not a paragraph about a woman staring at a window for twenty-three pages.

“What inspired the ending?” someone asked.

He smiled. The kind you practice if you’ve been called brilliant for using a semicolon and never told no with any conviction.

“It just came to me,” he said.

I bet it did.

****

Now listen—I don’t care that he used it. I really don’t. Art is theft. Fanfic is currency. Plagiarism is mostly a matter of timing.

What I care about is this:

I wrote that ending.
And when I did it, I was a liability.
When he did it, it was a revelation.

There’s a particular kind of literary amnesia reserved for women who write with teeth. I’ve been called “aggressive,” “unstable,” “too online.” 

A reviewer once said my work read like “revenge with a thesaurus.”

Well. The thesaurus was a gift.

****

I didn’t out him. That would’ve been too generous. I rewrote him instead.

A novella. The Ghost of Strang.
Self-published. Anonymously, of course.
A. Nonymous. (I was in a mood.)

It followed a man who made a career writing about women he never understood. He won awards. Wrote longhand. Used words like “viscera” when he meant “sad.”

Eventually, he ran out of women. So he wrote about himself.

That’s when the critics turned.

Because no one wants to read about a man with no metaphors left.

****

My novella took off. It shouldn’t have. It was messy. Petty. There were footnotes. At one point, I said his prose felt like listening to someone explain their dreams. Slowly. And without being asked.

But something about it caught fire. Probably the footnotes.

People called it bold. Scathing.
“Exactly what literature needs right now.”

Theodore never responded publicly. But I did get a cease and desist letter. And a bouquet of passive-aggressive lilies.

Didn’t matter.

Because here’s the punchline:

They optioned my novella.

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A streaming deal. The kind with subtitles and tortured color grading. They wanted to adapt The Ghost of Strang into a “darkly comedic limited series.”

They asked if I’d write the finale.
I said only if I could kill him in it.
They said yes.

So I did.

****

The show premiered in the spring. People called it cathartic. Risky. Feminine in a way that didn’t apologize.

I didn’t attend the premiere. But I did send a note. Typed. On a card. Cream stock. Black ink.

Thank you for your service.
I hope it hurts.

I didn’t sign it. I didn’t need to.

****

Interestingly, I received a new letter last week. Unmarked envelope. No return address. No note. Just a marked-up copy of my novella.

Every edit circled in red. Every margin said the same thing:

Do better.

I looked at it. 

Then I did the only thing left to do.

I opened a new document.

“Fine,” I said. “I will.”

New installments post Sundays at 10AM CST. Newsletter subscribers get them Saturdays.

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