(Dianne) Fox Writes

I spent last week visiting Anah Crow. What’s a visit between Dianne and Anah like? A lot of work. I arrived Monday afternoon (after a rather long drive and a game of 20 Questions with the border guard) and, after lunch and some downtime, we got to work.

By 1am, we’d finished the final scene in Trammel (sequel to Tatterdemalion) and I went to collapse in bed. Tuesday morning, we got started with the outlines. We settled on four stories to outline, two for submission calls that we’re interested in and two that have been on our to-do list for… years, in one case.

Scene by scene, we outlined a novella and a short story the first day, and were up late into the night hashing out how to structure the first novel we wanted to outline. There were issues — who was the protagonist, why does the protagonist care about the problem, why does the romantic interest care about the problem — but we eventually nailed them down and ended up with a story we could work on. We got through the first chunk of the story that night, and finished up the outline on Wednesday, then moved on to the second novel we’d wanted to outline.

A note about outlining: We discovered, during this time, that it takes us a LONG TIME to choose appropriate character names.

The second novel was easier. We knew how the story was supposed to work already because we’d talked about it before, so we threw out some ideas for key events and crises, and then got started. The fourth outline of the week was finished Wednesday night.

Thursday morning, Anah looked at me and said “another outline?” I almost agreed, but in the end, we decided to put together our submission package for a novel that had been languishing in our files since last fall. I’d recently finished the last scene that had to be written and I’d done some editing in the process, so while Anah read that over and put in her own edits, I started on first drafts of the query letter and synopsis.

Around dinner time, I finished those first drafts and, once Anah finished her edits of the manuscript, we traded. She shorted the query letter and expanded the synopsis. And then we spent — I am not kidding — two hours debating the first sentence of the query letter, the sentence that would serve as the story’s tag line.

Two hours. One sentence.

But finally! Finally we agreed on one. And, looking back, I love it. It fits the story perfectly.

And then we decided to wait until Friday morning to submit. Because, man, after midnight, you do NOT want to turn something in, and then as soon as your head hits the pillow, you realize you were too damn braindead to realize you’d forgotten something major. Or, worse, when you wake up the next morning.

So when I got up Friday morning, we went over the synopsis and query letter one last time — and found things to change in both of them, of course. And then we double- and triple-checked the requirements for submission, and finally sent it off.

Now for the waiting.