Book Club Discussion Questions

September 27, 2018September 26, 2018 ~ Amber Foxx ~ 5 Comments

I recently created a set of reading group discussion questions for the first book in my series, The Calling. An unconventional mystery with a coming of age element, set in rural Northeastern North Carolina, I’ve always thought it had “book club” qualities.

As I wrote the questions, I visualized the revision grid I used while I worked on the book, with the themes and plot elements mapped out, and it struck me that imagining a book club discussion could serve as a revision tool or even a plotting tool (for those who actually plot) for a work in progress.

I was in a book club for many years in Virginia. We read fiction of varied genres as well as a good selection of nonfiction, and we had some great discussions about style, structure, themes, and characters, often disagreeing and enjoying our varied points of view. These are the questions I came up with for The Calling and added to its page on my web site.

How did you respond to the book’s mixed genre? It’s been reviewed as mystery, women’s fiction, paranormal, coming of age, and literary fiction. Did you want it to fit a genre more neatly?

Mystery can mean an enigma, a puzzle, a secret, or something impossible to explain, as well as a novel about solving a crime. Without a crime to solve, what were the mysteries?

Were there any characters you had especially strong feelings about? What was it about them that affected you?

Is there a villain in The Calling? If you think there is, who is it and why do you see this person in that role? If you think there isn’t, explain why not.

Themes in the story include power, professional ethics, personal fulfillment, and privacy. The questions that follow explore those themes.

If you had the gift of the Sight, with the same limits and abilities that Mae has, how would you use it? Would you be tempted to use it in ways that might cause you some ethical misgivings?
The nature of Mae’s gift provokes concern about privacy in the course of the plot. Are there ever considerations that take priority over privacy?
How does each of these characters—Charlie, Randi, Malba, Deborah, and Mae—approach his or her professional ethics?
How did you see the issue of power play out in the story, in both personal and professional relationships?
The story takes place before the #MeToo movement. What might be different if it was set in 2018?
Mae’s desire for personal fulfillment is a driving force in the storyline. Did you identify with any of the obstacles and conflicts she faces?
Religion and spirituality—Christianity, Buddhism, indigenous shamanic religions, New Age beliefs, and more—are important to many of the characters and to the development of the plot. Where did you see religion misused, and where did you see it supporting a character spiritually?

Now I need to write discussion questions for the other five books that follow. Even if book clubs don’t use them—though I hope they will—I can use them to analyze my protagonist’s character arc and the themes I’ve explored throughout the series. This will lay a foundation for a thoughtful revision of the work in progress, focused on the layers of depth and meaning behind the plot as well as the events that structure it.

*****

The Calling is free on all e-book retail sites through September 30th.

Dosha, Character and Setting

May 26, 2016May 25, 2016 ~ Amber Foxx ~ 1 Comment

It feels strange to say that I create characters. They show up, complete with names and complex personal histories, and it’s my job to get to know them and understand how they tick. One of the tools I use for this is the concept of the three doshas—patterns of body type, personality and preferences—from Ayurveda, the traditional medicine of India. I had some introductory education in Ayurveda in both of my yoga teacher trainings, with the Temple of Kriya Yoga and with Integrative Yoga Therapy.

The three doshas—vata, pitta and kapha—are associated with combinations of the five elements. Vata is space and air. Pitta is fire and water. Kapha is earth and water. In each person, these manifest in both healthy and unhealthy ways. An individual might be a pure type or a blend of types. Sometimes intuitively and sometimes intentionally, I use the doshas in analyzing my characters and how they interact with each other and the world around them.

An idea that intrigued me in one of my classes on Ayurveda was that not only people but places and seasons have doshas. There is nothing more vata than spring in New Mexico, with the desert wind blowing, and it reaches its hottest and driest in June. I used that season in Soul Loss, which takes place from March through June, primarily in Santa Fe, a vata setting. Even its river is inclined to be dry and is irregular in its flow. Vata is changeable, creative, humorous, erratic, and sometimes spacey. No wonder Santa Fe is home to so many creative people, and also spiritual healers and psychics. That’s who the primary characters in Soul Loss are, and even the crime takes place at the spirit-world level.

I think people feel most at home in a place that complements their dosha. Athletic, competitive, and focused, my protagonist Mae Martin is a pitta type, mind and body. Even her red hair is a classic pitta trait. She loves Truth or Consequences and its hot springs, and thrives on the energy of New Mexico’s July-August “monsoon” season. In the first book in the series, The Calling, she’s living in Tylerton North Carolina, which has a wet and heavy climate, and it doesn’t suit her. It’s too kapha in every way, culture and land and weather. When she first gets to Santa Fe in Shaman’s Blues, the altitude makes her feel spacey, and this bothers her, while vata-kapha Jamie Ellerbee is truly at home there.

The oppressive East Coast weather in Snake Face is vata-kapha, windy yet wet and heavy, and it takes place in winter, a kapha season disrupted by an abnormal vata event, a December hurricane. The windstorm is something out of balance. Jamie gets caught up in both the hurricane and a storm in his inner life. His creativity and humor are healthy vata, and his music—voice and woodwinds—is based on air, vata at its most beautiful. His mood swings, short attention span and anxiety are the other side of vata. His unshakeable loyalty in love and friendship is kapha, but his tendency to depression and weight problems are the kapha shadow. I used the hurricane as background music that builds up along with the troubles that are chasing him.

Even when I haven’t consciously chosen to use the doshas of character and place and season, when I look back on their interactions, I can see that I did it intuitively. When two characters are in a lot of conflict, it’s often in the way they manifest their dosha. Mae and her mother are both strong pitta types, destined to butt heads, and one of the antagonist characters in the upcoming Ghost Sickness is also a pure pitta type who turns everything into a competition. Mae is attracted to men who manifest healthy kapha , a solidity and stability that she finds appealing, but their earth-water qualities can also make her feel that they are stuck in the mud.

Here’s my simplified short list of the dosha traits and seasons.

Vata: space and air. Thin, asymmetrical, distractible, creative, changeable. Default stress reaction: anxiety. Spring and fall.

Pitta: fire and water. Medium build, strong, competitive and driven, capable of prolonged intellectual focus. Default stress reaction: irritability or anger. Summer.

Kapha: earth and water. Can be big and muscular, womanly and curvy, or overweight. Steady, enduring. Can have calm, peaceful energy or a tendency to lethargy. Default stress reaction: procrastination or depression. Winter.

Do you see the doshas at work in your stories?

Location, Location: Using Real Places in Fiction

March 24, 2016 ~ Amber Foxx ~ 2 Comments

When I read books set in cities I know well, I enjoy recognizing familiar locations. It makes me feel like I’ve set foot inside the story. There are good reasons, however, to invent addresses, businesses, even entire towns. The usual rule seems to be that if you say something bad about a place or set a disturbing event in it, make it fictitious. In Sacred Clowns, Tony Hillerman gave New Mexico an entire new pueblo, the fictitious Tano Pueblo, because he had a murder take place during a ceremony. He used real reservations for his other books. Every city, town and reservation has its problems, so it’s not maligning the entire place to write about a crime there, but he felt that the particular one in Sacred Clowns would be objectionable. He included spiritual ceremonies in a couple of other books, but not as crime settings, and only shared what was open for non-tribal members to know. Based on Hillerman’s wisdom, I’m setting a number of scenes in my work in progress at a Mescalero Apache ceremony, but the misdeeds take place in private homes or in other towns.

In my first book, The Calling, I “invented” two entire towns, even though they are intimately based on real places, because my protagonist doesn’t like living there. (I had fun coming up with the name Cauwetska. I looked up words in the Meherrin language that would make good place names, since many Southern towns’ names come from local Indian words.) I actually loved the little town that I turned into Tylerton, but the way its fictitious residents treat Mae wouldn’t reflect well on it. I invented Coastal Virginia University, too, because I wouldn’t want to attribute a professor like Charlie Tann to any real college.

I’ve sometimes invented houses or businesses because I needed specific architecture to suit the plot rather than because I was avoiding insulting anyone, but in certain cases real locations are the best.

How could I imagine anything as remarkable as Sparky’s Barbecue and Espresso in Hatch, New Mexico? It has crazy local color and live music, and I needed a setting where my protagonist encounters two musicians in a key event that ties three plot lines together in Soul Loss. The eccentricity of Sparky’s décor struck me as a perfect background to frame one of the characters. The establishment’s owner, who knows me as a regular Sunday afternoon blues fan, was happy to let me set a scene there.

In my work in progress (Ghost Sickness, book five in the Mae Martin Series) I set several scenes in Truth or Consequences’ popular coffee shop, Passion Pie Café, with the owner’s enthusiastic permission to employ a character as a barista there as well as to have a little drama take place during the busy breakfast hours. She even gave me a great idea for that scene. I needed Passion Pie because of their wonderful local artist table tops. The mystery revolves around an artist with a secret, and my plot required that his work grace one of those tables. Rio Bravo Fine Art’s owner also let me set scenes there and allowed me to have a fictitious artist exhibit in his gallery. One of T or C’s best-known artists, Delmas Howe, gave me permission to use one of his paintings in the story. It’s great having my New Mexico town come to life in this book.

I had to give Santa Fe a new exotic bird store, though. The owner of Feathered Friends of Santa Fe helped me with my research, and we agreed that I should invent some fictitious competition for her shop, a new and less well-run parrot store, because, well, something happens there. I can’t say what it is. But it involves parrots, two pueblo potters, an Apache cowboy and a struggling photographer, and something illegal. Stay tuned. Ghost Sickness will be released this summer.

Meanwhile, if you’re curious to get started on a mystery series without murders, you can go to Northeastern North Carolina and Norfolk, Virginia in The Calling, Santa Fe and Truth or Consequences in Shaman’s Blues, on a road trip across the country in Snake Face, and back to Santa Fe and T or C (and Hatch) in Soul Loss. Just for fun: Mae and Hubert’s house in Tylerton, Bernadette’s tiny Norfolk apartment, and Mae’s pea-soup-green converted trailer in T or C are all places I’ve lived in.

The Calling is on sale for 99 cents through this weekend on all e-book retail sites.