Pamela Foster's Blog, page 8

lies

I write cross-genre. Or so the folks that need to know where to put my books on the Barnes and Noble shelf tell me. Since Barnes and Noble isn’t doing particularly well right now, and publishing in general is a kind of crap shoot, I don’t take that cross-genre label too seriously.

However, my newest book, The Perfect Victim, will be released in a few weeks and that’s got me thinking. You see this newest novel is labeled a suspense. And it is. It most surely is. And I’ve not written a suspense...

There Be Monsters

Yesterday Jan Morrill, the award winning author of The Red Kimono, and a good friend of mine, posted a blog about the beast within us all. Her point, if I understood it correctly, was that these monsters must be embraced by the writer of truth and exposed to the reader in all their awesome, horrendous beauty. As so often happens among good friends, Jan’s words came at a perfect time in my own life.

I too am struggling with the exposure of a naked, twisted monster.

The Perfect Victim, my seventh...

Aha Moment

When Mutual of Omaha sent me an email inviting me to participate in their Aha Moment, I knew exactly which moment I wanted to share.

But sharing that moment in a thirty-second commercial? Holy smoke, you all know me. I have no problem exposing my emotional vulnerabilities but it takes longer than thirty seconds for me to say good morning, let alone draw back the curtain verbally to reveal an epiphany.

Still, I put on my makeup, combed my hair and trotted down to Mutual of Omaha’s cute little Ai...

WRITING PROCESS BLOG TOUR

Usually I avoid social media tags. The last one required me to make a decidedly odd post on Facebook in order to support cancer research. How on earth the idiotic post helped cancer research I have no idea, but in the spirit of not wanting to invite the wrath of the cancer gods, I went along with the chain and confused the bejesus out of several friends.

But when my sister-writer Alice White asked me to participate in the Writing Process Blog Tour, I accepted the tag. More as a symbol of suppo...

Truth is Complicated

Much of my writing features a strong father-daughter bond. My newest novel, Noisy Creek is no exception. I’ve talked before in this blog about my complicated and multi-layered relationship with my own father. Much of who I am today came from growing up with a complicated man who loved me to the best of his ability – my strength, my refusal to take guff from anyone, my belief in my God-given worth as a human being – all these came from Dad.

But these qualities did not come to me gift wrapped i...

Killer Cashews

Some of you know all about how Jack and I moved to the country of Panama with two giant service dogs tethered to our wrists at all times. If not, here’s your chance–clickhere right this moment, buy Clueless Gringos in Paradise, and laugh yourself silly. One of the joys of living in a country where you did not grow up and where nearly everything is exotic and exciting is in sampling fruits and vegetable that you’ve never seen before in your life, or in experiencing them in a totally different...

The Best Lies Reveal the Most Truth

Writing westerns takes a little research, especially for a writer like me who writes mostly contemporary fiction and non-fiction. But when, in The Rainmaker, the sequel to Ridgeline, I let my imagination carry Adeline to the western most point in the lower forty-eight, I gave myself an edge. My family has lived on Humboldt Bay, at the very edge of the continent, since the 1860s.
Judging by the descendants, my best guess is that the Foster clan was less adventurous than quarrelsome, more prone...

Conversation Around a Camp Fire

Creation myths reveal the original culture of a people. Oh, we shift and grow and turn to the left and the right over thousands of years, but still our view of this life is colored with how our ancestors explained their existence on this earth.

In The Long Journey Home series, between narrow escapes and the killing of those that need killing, Jeremiah and Montego spend time chewing the fat around a campfire. Part of the fun of writing these novels is the conversations these two men have while...

Why a Western?

Ridgeline is my fifth published book. None of my previous works are westerns.

So then why, at this stage of my career, would I choose to write in a genre that is, according the geniuses in New York, writhing in its death throes? Well, first of all, it’s been a good many years since I’ve given much credence to the opinions of strangers.

Secondly Jeremiah Jones, the main character in Ridgeline, appeared to me, and like most cowboys, the man is as stubborn as a dang Missouri mule. He simply refuse...

Labels? We don’t need no stinkin’ labels.

The other day a fellow writer and good friend of mine posted a blog in which he mentioned that he did not normally read books with a woman protagonist. This acknowledgement of exclusion, thrown out casually, as though accepted by most, if not all, men, shocked me a little. The blog post came a few weeks after another good friend, a male friend, used the term women’s fiction to describe one of my works.

There was a period in the ‘60’s when I read only books written by women. There were, then as...