Working Drafts: A Writing Podcast Ted Fox

Ted is joined by Johnny Compton, a Stoker Award-nominated, San Antonio-based author of horror stories whose debut novel, The Spite House, was released in 2023. In its review of the book, Esquire noted that “You can trace the tradition of the American ‘Bad Place’ from Edgar Allan Poe through Shirley Jackson, Richard Matheson, and Stephen King, all the way to Johnny Compton and The Spite House.”

Johnny’s work in progress (at least for the purposes of the discussion here) is a book you’ll be able to read later this year. Titled Devils Kill Devils, it’s about a woman who believes she has a guardian angel who has saved her life multiple times—only to see that same entity show up on her wedding night and murder her husband. This begs the question: What has this supposed angel been saving her for?

Johnny and Ted start out talking about pacing, which in Johnny’s case, changes depending on the type of horror he’s writing. He then unpacks the connection he’s always seen between writing horror and writing comedy and the challenge that arises in both from readers knowing what type of story they’re in while the characters don’t. Johnny also discusses not wanting to kill a particular character even though he knew he had to and his relationship to horror movies.

And because he is technically done writing Devils Kill Devils and is already onto his third novel, Johnny and Ted talk about that one, too, including the 3-D chess writers play with themselves when trying to title the book they’re working on, knowing full well that it may have to change down the road.

Find Johnny Online:
Website: johnnycompton.com 

Working Drafts episodes and info for requesting transcripts as well as more details about Ted and his books are available on his website, thetedfox.com.

In this solo pod, Ted talks about the challenges—both external and internal—that come with navigating the months in between when you submit your final manuscript and when the book actually comes out. For him (and many others), that task is complicated by the anxious and depressive intrusions that come with just living life in general.

He goes on to discuss how one of his most effective strategies for managing these feelings is to get started on a new project, the ability to get words down on the page offering a degree of control in an otherwise largely uncontrollable process. It’s only fitting, then, that he shares the very beginning stages of his own new work in progress, a novel where he plans to play with dual timelines (sort of).
Working Drafts episodes and info for requesting transcripts as well as more details about Ted and his books are available on his website, thetedfox.com.

Ted is joined by Lauren Wilkinson, whose debut novel, American Spy, was a Washington Post bestseller, an NAACP Image Award nominee, an Anthony Award nominee, and an Edgar Award nominee. President Obama also included it on his 2019 Recommended Reading List, a fact that continues to fill Ted with no small amount of envy.

Lauren’s work in progress is a classic whodunit murder mystery set in the present and featuring a Black woman who is a social media influencer as the detective. With this novel, Lauren aims to both follow the beats characteristic of the genre and subvert some of those expectations in the third act.

Or at least that’s the plan at the moment. She just started writing this book in the last few months and is therefore still seeing how it takes shape. In addition to talking about her vision for the story, Lauren and Ted discussed the importance (and the challenge) of getting a novel’s first 50 pages right, those expected beats of murder mysteries, how her recent work as a TV writer is influencing her approach, and using your writing to shed light on issues beyond your pages.

Find Lauren Online
Website: lauren-wilkinson.comWorking Drafts episodes and info for requesting transcripts as well as more details about Ted and his books are available on his website, thetedfox.com.

Ted is joined by Bianca Marais, author of the bestselling The Witches of Moonshyne Manor, the beloved Hum If You Don't Know the Words and If You Want to Make God Laugh, and the Audible Original The Prynne Viper.

Alternatively, we could’ve just told you that Ann Patchett (yes, that Ann Patchett) has declared “Bianca Marais is a genius.”

When she’s not authoring, Bianca co-hosts the popular podcast The Shit No One Tells You About Writing, which is aimed at helping emerging writers become published.

Her work in progress is a novel titled A Most Peculiar Tale, Indeed. A closed-room mystery chock-full of puzzles for readers to solve, it has been pitched as “Glass Onion meets the magical family equivalent of Succession” and will be published by Mira in early 2025.

Just a couple of weeks removed from sending her manuscript to her editor, Bianca talked with Ted about plotting versus pantsing (i.e., flying by the seat of yours), how she approaches editing her own work before her editor sees it, letting your books tell you what they want to be, managing multiple points of view and backstories, and entertaining your readers while still making them think. She also shared a most outstanding wrinkle to the puzzle-solving in A Most Peculiar Tale, Indeed, that serves the dual purpose of keeping down the publisher’s printing costs.

Find Bianca Online:
Website: biancamarais.comPodcast: The Shit No One Tells You About WritingWorking Drafts episodes and info for requesting transcripts as well as more details about Ted and his books are available on his website, thetedfox.com.

Ted flies solo this month and uses it as an opportunity to presume you might be interested in him telling you how he approaches the entire book-writing process. Which on the one hand is a little vain because it's not like it’s Colson Whitehead or Emily Henry or Stephen King or whomever sitting down and telling you these things. But then again, if you're listening to this show hosted by some random author in the first place, maybe his advice is more relevant to you than one of those household names.

That’s the backdrop for his presentation of his four P’s: passion, persistence, patience, and perseverance. You can be the judge of whether they’re actually four different ideas (his wife remains a little skeptical). He then wraps up by sharing the three-word takeaway that encapsulates the four.

We’d tell you what it is here, by then why would you listen?
Working Drafts episodes and info for requesting transcripts as well as more details about Ted and his books are available on his website, thetedfox.com.

Ted is joined by Patrick Carey, a 2023 graduate of the Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Creative Writing program at Colorado State University.

Patrick’s work in progress is the thesis he wrote as part of that program. Tentatively titled Keepers, it’s a novel set roughly 25 years in the future when the United States is mired in a second Great Depression. This has prompted the government to basically invent jobs for people to do, including reinstalling lighthouse keepers across the Great Lakes.

The book follows three such keepers working on an island in northern Lake Michigan who are instructed daily via fax machine to build parts of something without knowing what it's going to become. Not knowing why they’re really there, they start experiencing things suggesting there might be a supernatural presence or an unacknowledged human history on the island.

Patrick and Ted talked about the process of choosing a thesis/novel topic, the different considerations that would lead you to write in past versus present tense as well as first versus third person, writing workshops, crafting a story about lighthouse keepers when you yourself are not one, and how there’s no one way to write a book.
Working Drafts episodes and info for requesting transcripts as well as more details about Ted and his books are available on his website, thetedfox.com.