Tag: New Mexico

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.

 

The Same Only Different, by Amber Foxx

~ Amber Foxx ~ 2 Comments

Every plot is the same. But they’re all different. If the story is written well, the reader is aware of the difference, not the sameness. The sameness is structure. No one looks at a dog and says, “How boring, it’s got four legs and a tail.” That’s the structure. What we notice is the difference. My friend Bob’s dog is golden brown and sort of dingo-ish. He says she looks like a kid’s drawing of a dog. She has a black spot in the middle of her tail and another one in the middle of her tongue. She loves all humans, dislikes other dogs, hates skateboards, and is scared of cats. It’s the differences that makes her interesting.

A trail I like to run is the same 1.5 mile loop every time. I go up the same hills, around the same curves, past the same desert shrubs, three times per run. It’s not boring. The plants change with the seasons. Wildlife varies from day to day—the creatures I see as well as the tracks others leave in the sand. In the winter, I encounter other people. In the summer, I only meet lizards and jackrabbits.

A freak snowstorm this month dumped five or six inches in one day. (I should add that all snowstorms are freaks in southern New Mexico. We can go years with only a few random flakes.) The same mountains I see every day looked entirely new, with snow on their contours and ridges outlining textures not normally visible. Turtleback Mountain’s Turtle seemed to be wearing pinstripes, a nice look on him.

Normal winter temperatures are in the fifties and sixties, and the next day went right back to normal. The remaining patches of snow from the day before changed not only my running pace on the trail but my perception. Most of the snow had melted, but I came across islands of it I had to detour around, going off the trail to avoid slipping. If thorny plants denied me that option, I had to slow down and walk through it for a couple of steps. The detours gave me the unexpected perception that certain features of the land were the trail, when they were actually smooth, flat, winding channels where water had run. Several times, I nearly followed one, then realized I was heading off into unmarked areas.

The second lap was faster with more snowmelt and fewer detours. Footprints became sun-warmed hollows of open sand. On the third lap, I only had to go through one stretch of snow with no way around it. The same only different.

And this, of course, is a metaphor for the craft of writing.

 *****

Images of Turtleback Mountain and of cactus in snow are by Donna Catterick, whose photography is on the covers of Death Omen and Shadow Family, books six and seven in the Mae Martin Psychic Mystery Series.

Book one,The Calling is free now through April 23.

Obeying her mother’s warning, Mae Martin-Ridley has spent years hiding her gift of “the sight.” When concern for a missing hunter compels her to use it again, her peaceful life in a small Southern town begins to fall apart. New friends push her to explore her unusual talents, but as she does, she discovers the shadow side of her visions— access to secrets she could regret uncovering.

Gift or curse? When an extraordinary ability intrudes on an ordinary life, nothing can be the same again.

The Mae Martin Series

No murder, just mystery. Every life hides a secret, and love is the deepest mystery of all.

 

 

New Release from Amber Foxx—Which May or May Not Be a Holiday Mystery

~ Amber Foxx ~ 4 Comments

When I was working on Shadow Family, I didn’t think of it as holiday book, even though it starts on Christmas Eve and includes an unconventional New Year’s Eve celebration in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, the Turtle Ascension. (We don’t drop a ball; we raise a turtle in Healing Waters Plaza.) The season is part of the story, and the book came out in December, so maybe it is, in a no-tinsel-no-snowmen way, a holiday mystery. Or maybe not. I’ll let readers decide.

Happy New Year, and here’s my new book.

 

Shadow Family

The Seventh Mae Martin Psychic Mystery

An old flame, an old friend, and the ghost of an old enemy.

 As the holidays approach, Mae Martin thinks the only challenge in her life is the choice between two men. Should she reunite with Hubert, her steady, reliable ex-husband? Or move forward with Jamie, her unpredictable not-quite-ex boyfriend? But then, two trespassers break into Hubert’s house on Christmas Eve to commit the oddest crime in the history of Tylerton, North Carolina.

Hubert needs to go home to Tylerton and asks Mae to go with him, though it’s the last place she wants to be. Reluctantly, she agrees, but before they can leave, a stranger shows up at her house in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico looking for her stepdaughters, bringing the first news of their birth mother in seven years—news of her death.

The girls are finally ready to learn about her, but she was a mystery, not only to the husband and children she walked away from, but also to the friends in her new life. Now her past throws its shadow on them all. Through psychic journeys, unplanned road trips, and risky decisions, Mae searches for the truth about the woman whose children she raised, determined to protect them from the dark side of their family.

The Mae Martin Series

No murder, just mystery. Every life hides a secret, and love is the deepest mystery of all.

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Stories Behind the Story

~ Amber Foxx ~ 3 Comments

Amber in tree final

It was the mystical—some people would say woo-woo—aspect of Santa Fe that inspired the plot of my new book Soul Loss.  I had a friend there, an actress and water aerobics instructor, who channeled beings from the Pleiades, and her husband, an actor, did a little energy healing on the side. Through them I met a man, a gardener by trade, who could see energy. He said that most people had a dark crystal over their heads, and if they were ready, he could remove it, but the spiritual opening would be intense, and once it was off, it couldn’t be put back. This is only a small sample of the diversity of other-worldly connections I’ve encountered in the City Different.

When I started writing it four years ago, Soul Loss was meant to be the second book in the Mae Martin series. I began with the scene that is still Chapter One, in which a fortune teller gets a strange and chilling client. I knew what Mae’s role would be, and the nature of the mystery, which revolved around the troubles affecting a psychic fair. Then, about five chapters into the first draft, Jamie Ellerbee popped up out of the blue as a minor supporting character. With his eccentricities, his complex history, and his intense personality, he took over the book. I set Soul Loss aside and did the final revisions on The Calling, in which Mae’s life took an unexpected turn and a new world opened up for her. Parts of my original draft of Soul Loss split off and became Shaman’s Blues, and then Snake Face, giving Mae time to get to know Jamie and to adapt to living in New Mexico. Then, I could finally get back to what was now book four.

The seed for the scene I mentioned was planted by a sign I saw on the garden wall of a small adobe house many years ago: Fortune teller. Palm Readings. Tarot. I was curious and wanted to go in, but didn’t have time to stop. Later, when I thought to look for the sign again, I couldn’t remember which street it had been on. The idea of a traditional fortune teller in Santa Fe stuck in my mind, though, mixed in with a memory of a young woman of Romani ancestry I’d met while I was in graduate school. She gave occasional Tarot card and palm readings in the lobby of the campus center. I don’t remember what her reading for me said, but I couldn’t forget her forthright personality. She didn’t fit the stereotype of “Gypsy fortune teller,” but she was one. I began to picture her as the person inside the little house with the sign I couldn’t find again.

Another encounter that became a seed of this story took place at a complementary and alternative medicine conference. The workshops and presentations were enlightening—except for one, with a famous neo-shamanist. I wondered if the people who said they had visions and met guides were making things up, or if I was biased by prior experience with more traditional ceremonies. A few years after that, I met two women in a small town who conducted shamanic journey groups for twenty-five dollars a session. Their credentials?  A weekend training with this same famous teacher. Could they really have learned to be shamans? The question stayed with me and found its way into Soul Loss as part of a mystery only a psychic could solve.

soul ebook

Soul Loss

The fourth Mae Martin psychic mystery

Spring winds blow strange times into the City Different:

Mae Martin’s friend Jamie Ellerbee has dropped out of her life—and perhaps his own life as well. A teenaged model breaks contact with her parents after an encounter with a Santa Fe shaman. A psychic fair can’t recruit any psychics. Something is wrong with all of them … except one.

Faced with mysteries that reach into in the spirit world, Mae takes on her most challenging work yet—work that puts her gifts as a psychic and a healer at risk.

The Mae Martin Series

No murder, just mystery. Every life hides a secret, and love is the deepest mystery of all.

To learn more about the background behind the book, check out my guest posts on these great blogs:

On a yoga’s healing process: http://killerhobbies.blogspot.com/2015/06/yoga-stories.html

On the concept of soul loss: https://awomanswisdom.wordpress.com/2015/06/08/guest-blog-losing-and-recovering-the-soul-by-author-amber-foxx

To help new readers to get caught up on series, the first three books are discounted to $2.99 through August 18th. Happy summer reading!

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Goodreads giveaway for Soul Loss: https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/143009-soul-loss

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