Jenna Blum is not kidding about either murder nor darlings in her just-published thriller “Murder Your Darlings.”

A wild, often humorous ride through best-selling name brand writers and a maybe-murderous stalker who goes by the nickname The Rabbit, “Murder Your Darlings” is also an insider’s look at fans, book tours and the creative demands of the marketplace.

It’s a familiar landscape for Blum, 56,  a longtime member of Boston’s Grub Street writing center.

“Murder” revolves around an increasingly inter-related trio. Sam Vetiver is a bestselling author suddenly stuck with writer’s block. She finds escape in an affair with the phenomenally popular and wealthy author William Corwyn.

What his fans may not know but his stalker does: He has many hidden, perhaps dangerous, layers.

“I always start with story. For this book,” Blum said in a phone interview, “I knew it was going to be about a mid-career female writer falling for a really successful male writer, whose character she had to question while the bodies were piling up.”

Blum’s original outline dramatically shifted. “People who find outlines constricting should be heartened to know that my outline changed 11 or 12 times. And I’m not exaggerating!

“For ‘Darlings,’ the Rabbit as a narrator did not exist until I was a third of the way. I knew she was there as a stalker but her own voice came one day. I was lying around, got up and wrote the Prologue from her point of view. It was like sticking my hands into an electric socket.

“William also as a character didn’t come in until I got to Act 2. I called my editor to say it would up the stakes considerably if we saw things from his extremely narcissistic and a little scary point of view.

“She said, ‘Go for it!’ And I did. He gives the book this dark electricity, and also that gruesome humor that wouldn’t be there otherwise.”

Her inspiration for William?

“I grew up listening to ‘My Fair Lady’ (which really dates me). William, like Professor Henry Higgins will never use a normal word when a $25 word will do.

“There’s so much misogyny in that musical, so much inflated self-regard, I find the whole thing very funny. So he owes a lot to Henry Higgins as the classic too good to be true.

“I want the reader to question this from the outset. Because when things seem too good to be true, they usually are.

“Sam’s instincts are good, but a bit scrambled because she has this trauma background. People who have that don’t trust their own instincts and it gets them into all sorts of trouble. That’s the journey I want the reader to be on.”

Catch Jenna Blum at these Greater Boston events:

The Cardigan Collection

Jan. 13, 6:30 p.m.

Lenox Hotel, 61 Exeter St., Boston

Wellesley Books

Jan. 21, 7 p.m.

82 Central St., Wellesley

Newtonville Books

Jan. 22, 7 p.m.

10 Langley Road, Newton

Parkside Bookshop

Feb. 3, 6:30 p.m.

260 Shawmut Ave., Boston

Brookline Booksmith

Feb. 24, 7 p.m.

279 Harvard St., Brookline

Jenna Blum (Photo Janna Giacoppo)