Seven fandoms in a trenchcoat…

"Kill your darlings" means "if something is holding you back, get rid of it, even if it sounds pretty."

That's it! That's all it means! It means if you're stuck and stalled out on your story and you could fix the whole block by removing something but you're avoiding removing that thing because it's good, you remove that thing. That's the darling.

It does NOT mean

That you have to get rid of your self-indulgent writing

That you should delete something just because you like it (?wtf?)

That you need to kill off characters (??? what)

That you have to pare your story down to the absolute bare bones

That you have to delete anything whatsoever if you don't want to

The POINT is that you STOP FEELING GUILTY for throwing out good writing that isn't SERVING THE STORY.

The POINT is that you don't get so HUNG UP on the details that you lose sight of the BIG PICTURE.

recycle your darlings

Rest in peace to the incredible Anthony Stewart Head (20th February 1954 - 1st June 2026)

Erika, referencing ebenezer scrooge: You, boy! What day is it?!

Not just as an actor, although he was a blast to watch in everything he did.  He’s one of those actors who’s just clearly having a whale of a time, no matter how bad the film is.  He’s just genuinely happy to be there (it makes his villains a particular delight, and he played a LOT of them).

But did you know that he was also on the PFLAG board after his daughter came out to him?  And that he was one of the earliest celebrities to speak out against the silence surrounding the AIDS epidemic?

Did you know that when his daughter came out to him, he admitted to her that it had been difficult for him during his first two marriages, because his wives had not been pleased to find out that their husband was just as interested in men as they were?

That’s right, kids, Vincent Price was BISEXUAL AS FUCK, and it was one of those open Hollywood secrets.  And his wife Coral Browne?  The one he grew old with and wrote cookbooks with and was basically ridiculously sweet with?

Also bisexual as fuck.  They were the queer power couple of Hollywood in the 70s.  His daughter, Victoria, grew up around Rock Hudson and members of the LGBT community.  When she came out, Vincent Price became a board member of PFLAG and was just about the most accepting and awesome dad.

Did you know that Vincent Price played Oscar Wilde in a one-man play, and when it was denounced by anti-gay activist Anita Bryant, he dismissed her right back, saying that Oscar Wilde had already come up with a term for her: a Woman of No Importance?  Because Vincent Price was deliciously witty and an awesome person.

Let me conclude with a quote from his daughter (from this article, where I got a lot of this information):

‘“In a funny way, and I think I’m going to cry, he understood me at 22 better than I understood myself then,” Price concluded. “Of course, he was in his 70s and lived a hell of a lot longer than I had, and he understood that at the end of the day it’s about who and what and how we love. And I have not been a person who has been very successful at conventional relationships, but loving well and loving deeply has been the most important thing to me.”’

“Cowbook! Like cowboy! No…Readcher? Like Rancher? No, fuck this is hard…”