The Dead Author’s Society

Salutations from Texas.

The moon is new, the world is old, and it felt like a good time to start something fun—tariff free.

A weekly-ish series.

Short. Sharp. No second drafts.

It’s a bit of a choose your own adventure.

An experiment.

We’re just playing.

If you love Mallory Blythe—if you want to see how far she can push the line—maybe she’ll get her own book. If not, we’ll find something else to break.

Now: Deadlines.

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Welcome to Deadlines

A note before we begin

This series started the way most things do—with a character I couldn’t shake and a story that didn’t care about behaving.

I also missed blogging. Not the personal part—just the pace of it. The rhythm. The creative hit that comes from writing something short, sharp, and done. Long form takes time. This doesn’t wait.

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 voice is her own. What she says, what she does—it’s all part of the story. If you find yourself wondering where the line is, that’s fine. Just don’t assume she’s asking you to follow it.

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

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The Dead Author’s Society

Installment One

The first time Mallory Blythe rewrote a dead man’s ending, she was drunk on boxed rosé and unpaid royalties. It was a Tuesday. They always were.

She sat at her antique desk—something her ex-husband had once referred to as “a real conversation piece,” though they hadn’t conversed in years—surrounded by the broken spines of novels she’d read to the bitter end and found wanting.

Hemingway had once said the world breaks everyone. Mallory found that deeply optimistic.

She reached for The End of Everything, a Booker-nominated darling where the heroine forgave her abuser and walked barefoot into a sunset. Mallory preferred sunrises. And knives.

So, she opened her laptop and did what any self-respecting psychopath with an MFA and a grudge would do—she rewrote it. Her version ended with a fire, a very satisfying insurance payout, and the heroine standing over a charred skeleton with a cigarette and no regrets.

She posted it anonymously on a dark little corner of the internet called AlternateEnds.net. It went viral in four days.

By Friday, she had a fanbase. By Monday, she had a lawyer.

***

“You can’t just… rewrite people’s books,” her agent, Lillian, said over a lunch of cucumber water and existential dread.

Mallory stirred her vodka with a rosemary sprig. “I’m not rewriting the entire book. Just fixing the endings.”

That wasn’t exactly true, and Lillian lifted an eyebrow. “They’re calling it fanfic with a body count.”

“I call it quality control.”

Lillian looked at her like she was the problem and the solution all at once. “All invention and art are just evolutions of something that came before. You didn’t create the trend. You just made it look criminal.”

She took a sip of cucumber water. “You’re also being sued by three literary estates and a woman named Taffy. That’s not even a real name.”

Mallory smiled, slow and wide. “There’s plenty more where that came from. Tell them to get in line.”

***

The first death was arguably unrelated.

A fellow author—J.T. Dillard, purveyor of twisty thrillers where the murderer was always “the least likely suspect”—was found face-down in his koi pond. His final manuscript, The Wife Did It Because Trauma, had been posted on AlternateEnds with the following correction:

No, actually, she did it because you were insufferable, Jackson. Rest now, you tedious fraud.

Mallory insisted she hadn’t written that version. Not publicly, at least.

Still, the timing was awkward. Especially when a second author drowned in a bathtub filled with unsold copies of her own book.

Mallory never lost much sleep over it.

Literature was a lineage of better liars. No one started fresh. The smart ones just sharpened what was already bleeding.

***

By the time the third body dropped—a memoirist who had ended his tale of corporate fraud with a full pardon and a book deal—Mallory was getting fan mail laced with lipstick and death threats.

Some were disturbingly well written.

One envelope contained a kill list. Her name was at the top. Beneath it:

• Poe
• Dickens
• God

“Well,” she said, sipping a martini in her writing nook as a thunderstorm performed Hamlet outside, “at least I’m in good company.”

***

The thing about thrillers is that someone always dies. Usually not the right person.

Mallory had never minded that. She just believed the wrong person should at least die interestingly.

So when the police came, tipped off by a neighbor who claimed to hear a typewriter at 3AM followed by what she described as “manic laughter and suspicious plot development,” Mallory opened the door in a silk robe and a look that said: yes, officer, but have you read my work?

They never found the evidence. Just a folder labeled Endings That Deserved Better and a heavily underlined copy of The Great Gatsby.

She was never charged. Of course not. Women like Mallory didn’t get charged.

They got book deals.

*** 

The memoir—Death by Edit: How I Killed the Literary Canon and Found Myself—hit The New York Times bestseller list within a week.

The final page read:

I lived. They didn’t. That seems fair.

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

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