Category: Amber Foxx

Amber Foxx’s Goodbye Post: On Reading Diverse Mysteries

~ Amber Foxx ~ 8 Comments

I realized this month that it’s time to move on, so I say goodbye with my final installment on this blog. I hope you enjoy it, and that it helps you discover some new authors.

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 I caught myself in a reading rut. I’m not the first person to have this experience, and others have addressed it already. Nonetheless,  here’s my take on the problem as a mystery reader.

What made me notice it was a book in which all the characters were white. I suppose such towns exist, but I’ve lived most of my adult life in majority-minority places. This book woke me up to the fact that almost all the authors I’d read recently were white. Most of them write a broader range of characters, but still, I want to hear from other voices. So, how did I end up buying books this way? What was I thinking?

Actually, I wasn’t thinking. Just clicking. We often get reading recommendations through algorithms. Goodreads or an online bookstore will send reminders that a favorite author has a new book, or suggest that “If you liked X, you’ll love Y.” Authors advertise on the book pages of what they perceive to be similar books. Other ads target fans of what are referred to as “comparison authors.”  It’s a system that promotes sameness, not diversity. For that, I had to exit the net of recommendations and start searching.

I liked this article from Writer’s Digest, in which writers of color discuss their experience. I agree with those who say there is an audience for their work, but publishers may not realize it.

This site is a great shopping resource: I Found This Great Book: A Home for Readers of Diverse Books. Its creator says he loves to browse bookstore and library shelves and discover new authors because of a cool cover, and he set up the directory—quite successfully, in my opinion—to give you that feeling. He gives a lot of space to indies, which I appreciated, since I love indie fiction. I wish more of those indies published wide, not exclusively on Amazon, but I still found new mysteries to read on my Nook.

Another site I used for discovery is Crime Writers of Color.

As a New Mexican, I have to recommend the Sonny Baca  books by the late Rudolfo Anaya. Most people know his classic coming of age in New Mexico story, Bless Me, Ultima, but he also wrote a series about a private investigator. These crime novels blend in much of the mysticism and cultural depth found in his better-known works.

I plan to read not only diverse American authors, but authors from other countries, other continents. African and Asian and Latin American writers. I can’t go anywhere in person during the coronavirus pandemic, but my reading can take me all over the globe into the worlds of people whose lives are not like mine.

My writing has me at home in New Mexico, of course. Working on the eighth Mae Martin mystery. And I’ll still be blogging. Follow me on https://amberfoxxmysteries.com, where you can also sign up for my newsletter.

Au revoir and Namaste.

Amber

Questioning Everything

~ Amber Foxx ~ 2 Comments

This is actually a good place to be, though it sounds dismal. I’m questioning why I’m writing my work in progress. Readers get very attached to my series characters, but in each book there needs to be something meaningful to engage them as well. The story needs marrow in its bones. The key question is: why do I need to tell this story?

The problem with my work in progress is that the initial idea intrigued me and amused me, but it didn’t make me excited or impassioned. The villains were “inspired,” if I can call it that, by people who annoyed me, not people who outraged me. None of my villains are murderers, but they use, betray, and manipulate people in a variety of ways, based on actions that have appalled me in real life. A clever plot and a great setting blinded me to the weaknesses in the work in progress. I started it three years ago, set it aside to write book seven, Shadow Family, and now that I’ve resumed revisions on book eight, I understand why it’s been so hard to finish.

Perhaps I can recycle elements but change the villains and the crime. Or perhaps I simply need to start over from scratch. What matters is the quality of the book, not the speed at which I finish it. I’ve always been a slow writer, and I’m willing to slow down more to get this book to work.

As I said, I’m questioning everything, and glad I’m doing it.

A Pantser’s Kind of Outline, by Amber Foxx

~ Amber Foxx ~ 2 Comments

I sometimes say I don’t outline, but in a way I do—backwards. After I write a chapter, I take notes on the plot progression, including the events that might be clues or might be loose ends. This becomes a clean-up guide as well as a quick review of the story structure when I finish improvising and following my characters where they choose to go. I also note emerging themes and subplots. Later, I use the notes as revision tools. They help me in deciding what to keep, expand, or cut.

Having reached the near-end of my work in progress, the crisis and the partial solution to the mystery, I now have the denouement chapter to write, the one where I tie up the last loose ends. In looking back over my notes, I find about half are tied up. As for the remaining ones, many are so minor I can cut the lines that set them up, while others are significant questions that have to be answered. I’m glad I kept that list. Now I have something bordering an outline in advance for the final chapter, as well as a plan for future cuts and reorganization.

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The sale on books one and two in the Mae Martin Psychic Mystery Series will end June 13. Until then, you can still download The Calling free and buy Shaman’s Blues for 99 cents. No murder, just mystery.

Neither Holding On nor Pushing Away, by Amber Foxx

~ Amber Foxx ~ 3 Comments

A yoga teacher I studied with years ago gave this guidance for how to be with one’s thoughts during meditation: Neither holding on nor pushing away. It helps me now with writing in addition to meditation and life in general—neither holding on to my old normal nor pushing away the present. I’m experiencing writing now as a balancing act, both a remembering practice without holding on and a letting-go practice without pushing away.

My work in progress, book eight in the Mae Martin series, is pre-pandemic. My books are always set several years in the past because I want to get the context right. While I don’t write directly about current events, they exist in the background and have a realistic impact on my characters’ lives. Eventually, maybe in three to five years, I might set a book in the spring of 2020. It’s too soon to write fiction about what’s happening now, and too soon for anyone to want to read it.

I’m keeping notes, though, and making an archive of how we live through this in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, since my stories take place here. Maybe I’ll never write the book, but preparing as if I’m going to helps me process everything and stay focused. As well as saving copies of statewide public health orders and keeping track of the news, I’m writing down daily observations on life in our community during our present challenges.

I haven’t decided what the mystery in that distant future book will be. My books aren’t about murder, but other types of wrong-doing. I’ll have a better idea by the time I’m ready to write it, in whatever kind of world we live in then. Preparing the background for that book is part of releasing both worry and expectations. I record the full spectrum of events, and then I can let go of them for the day. I can’t plan the plot yet, because I can’t know what the future holds. Meanwhile, I’ve sketched out possible scenes with my characters in a state of not-knowing and uncertainty, of real loss and potential loss, as they struggle with the sudden change. So far, a lot of the dialogue in these quick drafts is humorous, as are many of my conversations—on the phone or six feet away—with my neighbors and friends. Dark humor at times, but it’s part of how we cope.

Meanwhile, my main creative focus is on a book in which people visit each other’s homes, go out dancing, meet for coffee, take aerobics classes and college classes in person, and share hugs. This is my remembering practice. Not clinging to what was normal once, but honoring it.

 

The Best Opening Line Ever? Not Really. By Amber Foxx

~ Amber Foxx ~ 2 Comments

I cut what I had thought was the best opening line ever written, making a major change in my work in progress, the eighth Mae Martin psychic mystery. A critique partner loved the line, too. It was fun, attention-grabbing, intense, and colorful. But the event had nothing to do with the mystery or with either of my lead characters’ goals. It was an external imposition that required a reaction, and I couldn’t make it work as a thread in the story. The advice to authors to “kill your darlings” is so wise. Cutting that line (and all the forced plot turns it required) was like pruning an overhanging branch that was blocking light on the real nature of the story.

Now I’m reconsidering an important question: where does the book really begin? Is the whole first chapter necessary? Maybe chapter three in the current draft should be chapter one. It was, before I got so attached to that opening line.

After a certain number of revisions, I reach a point where I question every scene in the book and every angle of the plot. I’ve saved three earlier versions in case they’re actually better than I thought. But as I reviewed my notes on the first version, I realized why I cut and changed so much of it. The odds are, what I decide to remove or alter now, I probably should. With several of my books, only the characters, the setting, and the basic nature of the mystery—a missing person, a family secret, art fraud, fakery in spiritual healing, and so on—stayed the same from first draft to final. The work in progress is set in a New Mexico ghost town. The mystery is about paranormal investigation and a woman who claims she’s being haunted. Everything else about the book may be different by the time I finish.

Free and Discounted Books

I’m sure a lot of us are reading on a tight budget and will be for a while. The first Mae Martin Psychic Mystery, The Calling, is still free. Prices have been lowered to $2.99 on the other books in the series. You can also read them through Scribd, an unlimited reading subscription for e-pub e-books, which is offering a free one-month introduction. If you’re not going out much, you can do quite a bit of reading in a month. Stay well.