In almost every movie or show featuring writers, you’ll see it—that one scene with the awkward pause as their fingers hover over the keyboard. A cursor ominously blinks onscreen, its on-and-off motion magnifying the intense whiteness of the blank page….
Dialogue for All by Katherine Koller
I began writing for radio drama, so for me, dialogue is everything. Music, sound effects, and silence also contribute to audio plays, but the main ingredient is dialogue. When I read fiction, nonfiction, or poetry, I’m attracted by the dialogue…
Results of Our Rise or Ruin Prize (Winter 2025)!
Can we have your attention, please? We finally have the results ready for our 2025 Winter Prize with theme, Rise or Ruin! As usual, you all have blown us away. The Black Fox team had the best time reading these…
A Conversation with DeAnna Beachley
A resident of the West for most of her adult life, DeAnna Beachley has grown to love the Mojave Desert and the Colorado River Basin. She is a bird watcher, hiker, teacher, historian, poet, and essayist. Her poetry and essays have appeared in Red Rock Review, Sandstone & Silver, The Nature of Our…
2025 Winter Writing Prompts (Part 1)
There will be no writer’s block on our watch this winter! We have a new batch of winter prompts as promised. We hope to keep posting prompts, so be on the lookout for part two next. If you do end…
Guest Post: A Late Bloomer’s Guide to Publishing by Chelsey Drysdale
Until I walked into a UCLA Extension personal essay class in January 2013 when I was 39-years-old, I was an unpublished perfectionist with a fear of failure so debilitating I hadn’t written a word in two years. I was a…
You Are a Writer: Dress the Part
Some say you are what you eat, while for others it’s all about what you wear. We can achieve a lot in our fiction by how we dress our characters: clothes can indicate setting, either geographical or historical; can reflect…
Rejection Equals Success
This week I received my first rejection of 2014. This may sound odd, but I hope it’s the first of many. You see, receiving rejections means two very good things. First, my work is out there in the world being…