Want romance?  Meet Harlequin author Roz D. Fox

by Ed Severson
ARIZONA DAILY STAR - Sunday, February 11, 2001

Roz D. Fox of Tucson has written 20 Harlequin romance novels, assisted by her husband, Denny, who helps with technical accuracy. The couple also enjoys scouting locations together for Fox's novels.


Feel it?

Valentine's Day is around the corner and love is in the air.
But Roz Denny Fox doesn't have to wait for Valentine's Day.
Romance writing is her job.

Six days a week, Fox sits down at the Hewlett Packard Pavilion 6460 in the office of her comfortable East Side home and composes her happily-ever-afters from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Surrounded by her notes, research folders and reference works, including "Writer's Guide to Character Traits" and "Profiles to Human Behaviors and Personality Types," she brings the same efficiency to her craft that she once displayed as a 9-to-5 secretary.
Only now, instead of writing from midnight to 3 a.m., after her eight-hour job, she spins out romances full time.

One recent morning, she took a break from working on her current book, a romance involving a mountain climber.
On her computer, her hero was about to rappel down a cliff.
Fox had written that "He didn't make note that he'd ruffled her feathers by insinuating as a woman that she might not be up to the task. . . ."
Nearby, her "Pictorial English Dictionary" was open to illustrations of climbing gear.
"That saves you from having to go out and climb mountains," Fox said.
Sooner or later, her hero and heroine will, shall we say, mingle.
"Writing love scenes is tough," Fox said. "You're always reaching for something new and different."
She said that she also feels a responsibility toward her readers.
"You know, I usually have them (her characters) use protection and so forth," she said.
When finished, her book will be one of the three 85,000-word Harlequin romance novels that she turns out each year.
All of them are about the kind of folks that readers wouldn't mind having over for dinner.  "Harlequin wants their people likable," Fox said. "You couldn't have a hero or heroine who did something really bad."
Alcoholism, for example, is all right, if the character overcomes it.
"They would have to show growth and be a really good person at the time," she said.
Her 20 books, which have been published in 15 languages, include "Baby, Baby," "Mom's The Word" and "Mad About the Major."

"I believe in romance," said Fox, who prefers to keep her age to herself.
"I've been married for 42 years and have two daughters and five grandchildren, so that'll give you some idea," she said.
Her husband, Denny, a retired telephone engineer, is the Denny in Roz Denny Fox, her writing name.
Over the years, they've lived in Oregon, Hawaii, California, Texas and, for the last six years, Tucson.
"I gave him credit from the beginning, because he was so helpful," said Fox, who published her first romance, "Red Hot Pepper," in 1990.
Before she knew how to handle a computer, she wrote her first three books in longhand.
Denny input them for her.
"He still reads them all for technical things," she said. "Like if I put an airplane in there, he knows that the airplane is right."
In "Sweet Tibby Mack," for example, Denny helped plot a golf game.
"I laid it out so the score at the end was exactly how she wanted it to come out," Denny said.
With each revision, he had to juggle the game around a bit to fit the story.
"I think all of us were sick of the book by the time we got done," Fox said.
Both of them enjoy researching locations for Fox's novels.
"Wherever I set a book, I like to go there and absorb the setting," she said.
For one of her books, "Anything You Can Do," the pair traveled the length of the old Santa Fe Trail.
"It's about a professor setting up a wagon trail," Fox said. "He wanted to prove that modern women can't handle what pioneer women did."
"We actually drove it all the way to its origin in Missouri," Denny said. "We saw all the old forts and old schools and anything that theoretically had something to do with the trail."
In Fox's books, "commitment" is the operative word.
"They cannot imagine not being with that person," she said.
That's pretty much how it works for her and Denny.
"He's a nice person, interested in everything," she said. "We like to do things together, go places, hike, poke around and look in little hidey-hole stores," she said.
"We just hit it off," Denny said.
For Fox, romance novels reflect real life as she's lived it.
However, she admits that writing romances has its drawbacks.
"People don't respect you, unless you write a literary book," she said. "I don't even like to read those, because they're so depressing."

* Contact Ed Severson at 573-4137 or severson@azstarnet.com.