Tag: The Calling

Book Club Discussion Questions

~ 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.

 

 

Hidden Tracks

~ Amber Foxx ~ 2 Comments

Amber in tree final I have files with titles such as “Accidental Shooting Settlements” and “Art Authentication” as well as “Pricing Art” and “Parrot Questions.” I finally deleted the one on 1989 Aerostar vans. The struggling old van made it through Shaman’s Blues and Snake Face and retired, with no one commenting on how I’d handled its various mechanical problems. That’s how it should be. I want to hide my tracks. Readers usually shouldn’t be paying attention to my research, but since this is a blog about writing, I’m going to go backstage and show the process.

Readers notice all the scholarly articles in The Calling. This book may look as though I worked harder on research compared to the rest, but in fact it was the easiest. I didn’t venture outside my areas of expertise, and I set it in places I knew well.When I lived in Norfolk, I’d visited a number of alternative healers there and several psychics in Virginia Beach—out of pure curiosity, with no idea they would end up as background for a book.  An important character in this story is a professor in health sciences and so am I. To find the material on alternative medicine and research in the field, all I had to do was relocate the right articles. I knew where they’d been published and I remembered the content.

More often, I don’t realize how much I’ll need to know about a subject until I’m into the first draft of a book. I immediately start keeping research lists, things to look up or ask experts about, and I dig into these questions as I go along.

When the character of Jamie showed up in Shaman’s Blues, I read books about current Australian Aboriginal culture in order to understand his roots. I studied Aussie slang and was blessed with an Australian critique partner who could tell if I got it right. And then there’s his van. It’s close to being a character in the next book, Snake Face. I took notes during Car Talk. I looked up timing belts and timing chains, I looked up the last year that these vans were made with carburetors, and I looked at pictures of their engine parts. A musician who had toured with a band read the manuscript to make sure I portrayed life on the road correctly. And I consulted a couple of lawyers about a major plot point. I double-checked some details of the medical treatments and outcomes for a particular injury. And I searched out the name of a Greek drinking dance. This is, I think, typical in the creation of a book, more typical than the ease with which I could pull together the seemingly obscure scholarship in The Calling.

For Soul Loss I reread some books on neo-shamanism to refresh my memory of a strange workshop I once attended as part of a conference, and I researched Tarot cards and Cochiti Pueblo beliefs about the dead. I also had to find out what was involved in setting up a festival. For Ghost Sickness I had to study up on parrots, since several play roles in the story, and also looked into rodeo injuries, and many matters related to art. Even though I’d set the story in familiar places, I revisited the Mescalero Apache reservation and took a careful, observant walk through Truth or Consequences to make doubly sure that certain events could happen as I wrote them. I could go on and on. It’s amazing what I discover that don’t know—or what I’ve forgotten that I thought I knew. But that list with the heading “Look Up” eventually gets crossed off and ideally readers have no idea I had to work so hard on that van. All they need to care about is the character driving it.

Amber Foxx Interviews Amber Foxx

~ Amber Foxx ~ 5 Comments

AmberMysteriousOn my other blog, I enjoy doing Amber in tree finalinterviews and coming up with questions for the authors whose books I’ve reviewed. So, when it came time to write this introduction, I knew what I had to do: talk to myself.

Q: How did you decide to become a writer?

A: It never occurred to me not to write. I grew up in a word-loving environment. My parents owned—and often played—audio recordings of Shakespeare’s plays, and they frequently brought my sister and me to live theater as well. As a child, I wrote stories influenced by Nancy Drew and poems inspired by Dr. Seuss, and had a short story published in a teen magazine when I was twelve. I think I got paid twenty-five dollars for it.

Q: Do you write full time or do you have a day job?

A: I have two day jobs. I’m a college professor and a yoga teacher. Those jobs overlap, since I’m in Health and Exercise Science, and I teach yoga as part of my course load as well as off campus.

Q: One of the characters in your first book, The Calling, is a professor from New Mexico who practices yoga. Is Bernadette Pena based on you?

A: No, though I do have some things in common with her. When I was working at a college in the South a few years ago, I taught some courses on alternative medicine and non-Western healing traditions. For many of my students, it was their first opportunity to explore scholarly research on things like shamanism, Ayurveda, herbal medicine, energy healing, and other practices. One of those courses on made its way into The Calling. Its potential to disrupt assumptions about the nature of reality fit perfectly into the plot.

Q: Is your protagonist, Mae Martin, based on you?

A:  Mae is modeled after a good friend I met through my work as a fitness director and yoga teacher in northeastern North Carolina. Aspects of The Calling were inspired by some of her life experiences. I admired her combination of practicality and spirituality, and her intense determination to be herself in a situation where few people supported her.

Q: Did you set out to write genre-blending mysteries? You’ve had favorable reviews in which reviewers seem to have a hard time finding the right genre label for your work.

A: When I decided to write mysteries without murder, I wasn’t thinking about stretching the genre so much as being true to the stories I wanted to tell. I’d tried writing a mystery with a dead body in it but half-way through, I realized I couldn’t keep putting Mae in that situation. It didn’t feel right for the character or for me. There are ways people hurt each other, short of killing, that lead to layers of secrets in families and friendships. Phenomena such as psychic ability fill life with mystery as well. As long as there’s something that the protagonist doesn’t understand and neither does the reader—and solving for that X in the equation is central to the plot—then the story is a mystery.

Q: You mentioned psychic ability as if it were a real thing. Do you think it is?

A: Yes. I could take up pages with my personal experiences, and at every college where I’ve taught, students have confided some remarkable psychic events. And then, I’ve lived in Santa Fe and in Truth or Consequences. In both places, not only are art, music, dancing, and eccentricity part of everyday life, so are psychics and alternative healers.

Q: Is that why you moved the series from the South to the Southwest?

A: That’s one reason. In the new location, Mae “fits in” better because she doesn’t have to try to fit in anymore. It’s hard to feel like a nonconformist in New Mexico. There’s not much to conform to. The other reason is to move the plots in new directions. Living in a place where her gift is more readily accepted, Mae encounters new kinds of mysteries, as people ask her for answers only a seer could find. The setting also lets me bring in some of the stranger aspects of “the woo-woo,” with a questionable health-nut psychic in Shaman’s Blues and everyone from a celebrity modern shaman to an artist who claims she channels angels to a medium who speaks with dead in the upcoming June 15th release, Soul Loss.

Q: Thanks. Is there anything else you’d like to add?

A: Just this:

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