Amber Foxx's Blog, page 14

Nothing but Nature

To my surprise, I hardly miss my favorite trail. By leaving it to the unmasked dog-walkers and the political sand-scribblers, I’ve found peace. Peace along the sandy lake shore, a strangely un-desert-like experience, running only inches away from the vast blue water and little peeping beach birds. Even deeper peace in my secret place, running on a set of hidden trails with bizarre rock formations, some like geodes made of geodes.

When the weather was warm, bees greeted me two days in a row when ...

A Writing Lesson

Those of you who’ve followed this blog for a while know that a certain trail in Elephant Butte Lake State Park is my sacred space, my refuge where I run in beauty. This fall, it began to lose some of its peacefulness to people who vented their feelings by writing. They could have done it in journals, blog posts, poems, or song lyrics—but they wrote in sand and on rocks.

Today, I decided to do something about it while in the park and later by writing a letter to the editor of the only local print...

Not shutting the door

Though I’ll be glad to see 2020 end, I’m not slamming the door on it. And I’m not fantasizing going back to exactly the way things were before. I want the whole world to be wiser. More compassionate. More aware. More cooperative and creative.

Nightmares are our teachers

Like leaks from neglected infrastructure

Erupting into the sunny streets from below,

Bad dreams reveal the unseen we need to know.

2020 shocked us into vision.

We’re not who we thought we were.

Some of us became much more;

And s...

New Mae Martin Book Coming in March 2021

If you’ve just discovered my work, you may be wondering if this is all you’ll get. It’s been a year since Shadow Family came out. I’m hooked on several series, and I want the characters to stay in my life. I realized I should update my progress when a reader asked if there will be an eighth Mae Martin Mystery. Yes, there will. And even sooner, there’ll be a sort of a “book 7.5” in the series.

Gifts and Thefts, a short suite of six Mae Martin stories, picks up where Shadow Family left off, follow...

Rock Watching

Trying new running routes, I have to be mindful, a rock watcher, even on a broad, sandy trail. I dare look up only for seconds at a time to admire the view—a cliff in the distance, blue water even further off—under the bluebird-blue sky. Little flying silhouettes might be bluebirds, but the light is so strong behind them, they have no color at all. The same slant of light does wonders for the view at my feet, though. The late afternoon sun makes them stand out in the sand and dirt, dull gray tri...

Scaring the Bluebirds

I felt bad for alarming them. They’d settled into the tall junipers on either side of the trail. But if I let them sit, I’d have never finished my run. So, three times, making laps of my favorite trail, I scared the newly-arrived flock of bluebirds into flight. Once they were aloft, it was moving, magical, a soul-stretching experience. Thirty or forty bluebirds, the males’ wings flashing like fragments of the New Mexico blue sky.

I have to upend my characters’ lives. Make them fly. It brings ou...

Whole Series Sale

In the mood to curl up with a good book? How about seven? The entire Mae Martin Series is on sale through December 16th. The Calling is free, Shaman’s Blues is $2.99, and the rest of the books in the series are $3.99 each. If you haven’t caught up with all seven, this is a great time to do it.

Uncertainty

It’s Tuesday night as I write this, 11:30 p.m. Mountain time. I turned off the election updates over an hour ago and focused on critiquing a fellow author’s historical mystery. I didn’t listen to news all day, but did my every-three-week grocery run to Natural Grocers in Las Cruces. I did housework and yoga, took a brisk walk after dark, listened briefly to the election results trickling in, and let it go. Not that I don’t care how it turns out. I do. I did everything I could to assist the outco...

How Plotting a Novel is like Planning a Yoga Class

For me, teaching yoga and writing fiction are about the deeper aspects of being human, not simply about executing poses or providing entertainment. The asana practice or the entertainment is the container for the inner process.

There are two main ways I approach my work in both cases: structure and improvisation. For example, I have general sense a story is about a certain theme and a certain problem affecting a set of characters in a specific setting. There’s interaction among these elements, a...

Charley’s Last Walk

I never appreciated dogs until I met Charley. She and Bob lived next door to me for a while, and as I became friends with him, I became friends with her. Charley and I truly bonded the day she crawled out from under the fence around his backyard during a thunderstorm when he wasn’t home. I found her flattened on the sidewalk with a foreleg stuck through her chain collar a result of her desperate scramble. Unable to move, terrified by the thunder, she gave me the most pleading, vulnerable look I’...