(Dianne) Fox Writes

My partner was playing Bioshock recently, the original one. Not the sequel. We haven’t gotten that far yet. Despite the post-apocalyptic title, Bioshock is actually a art deco post-WW2 objectivist dystopia set in an Atlantis-like underwater city. With addiction and mind control and zombie-like things you kill with a wrench. Yeah, there’s a lot going [...]

Anah and I wrote Slow Bloom about two years ago, now. We’ve gotten better at this whole writing thing since then, but the themes Slow Bloom deals with haven’t stopped being interesting to us. The year over which the story takes place is an important one in Ricky’s life — not just because he falls [...]

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 [...]

Just before I left to visit Anah, I color-coded my April calendar and sticky-tacked it up to the door of my office, complete with arrow-shaped sticky note on top for my list of goals for this month. I do this at the start of every month.
It begins with my pink highlighter pencil (Faber-Castell Textliner [...]

Anah and I just finished up chapter 9 of Trammel a couple days ago and have a little bit of the last chapter left to go. Now, all these chapter markers are coming straight from the outline. They definitely don’t reflect where the chapters will be once we’re finished with edits, because 10,000 words is [...]

You won’t find any April Fool’s jokes here. I’m not that funny.
I’m just settling in to the idea of a new month. Next week, I’ll be visiting Anah Crow. Other than that, it’s just lots of dayjob and writing goals.
Right now, one of the big foci in my writing is setting details. The [...]

Today is the last day of March. Where did the month go?
*looks at Trammel file*
Oh. There. Right.
So the lovely Anah Crow did some checking and, since March 9, she and I have written more than 60,000 words on Trammel. It’s not quite finished yet (we’ve just started the last scene in Chapter 8 of [...]

Squeezing some writing in between everything else, today. I usually only write on Tuesdays and Thursdays (my days off from the day job), but my breaks at work today have been pretty productive all around. I’ve fit in a lot of errands, and still managed to write half a scene in One Real Thing, a [...]

Back in November, Anah and I wrote the outline for Trammel, the sequel to Tatterdemalion (out in May from Samhain). In February, we revised it, adding several more chapters to bring the outline to a better ending point. And a couple weeks ago, we started writing the first draft. The first chapter went quickly, and [...]

This morning, I got an email that brought an immediate smile to my face. Final cover art!
Not too long ago, our editor for Tatterdemalion sent us an early draft of the cover art, and then another, and another, each time asking for our opinions. We were pleased with the first draft we saw, but by [...]