Goodreads asked Amber Foxx:

What mystery in your own life could be a plot for a book?

Amber Foxx Situations in my life have turned out to make great instigating events for mysteries, rather than wholeplots. Discovering a psychic ability is the instigating event in my Mae Martin series. I started dreaming the future and having accurate premonitions when I was twelve years old. I told my father and he was very accepting of it, explaining that his grandfather had the same gift. He seemed pleased that I’d inherited it. (Other people have been more skeptical, of course.) In The Calling, my protagonist first experiences her psychic ability when she’s thirteen, and her mother is far less understanding than my father was, warning Mae that “the Sight” is a wicked and dangerous thing that runs in the family and cautioning her not to use it.

A number of years ago, I met a woman at a neighbor’s dinner party who could hold an object of yours and go into a trance to answer a question for you. Rather than viewing the future, she could have a vision of something from your past, or of something or someone connected to you in the present, seeing at distance. This was more detective-like for a mystery, so I gave my protagonist a variation on this ability rather than one like my own.

In the fifth book in my series, Ghost Sickness, I introduced a twelve-year-old Apache boy, Ezra Yahnaki, who has the gift of dreaming the future. His dreams add layers to the mystery. Like mine, his dreams can be literal, an exact representation of something that will happen the next day, or symbolic but detailed previews of something in the near the future. In that book and the one in progress, I use the interaction of these two characters’ different psychic abilities along with some logical problem-solving and sleuthing to work through the mysteries—which are never murders. I suppose that’s another way my life shows up in my books. I’ve never encountered a murder, but I’ve run into people with layers of secrets. Mystery doesn’t have to be a violent crime.

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