I review so much in this genre, I think my blog followers may appreciate this sale.
While it's organized on the link above to emphasize Amazon, my book, Shaman's Blues, is available on Apple, Kobo and Barnes and Noble as well, and some of the others may be also. Try a new author for 99 cents. You might make a great discovery!
All books in the award-winning Mae Martin Psychic mystery series are on sale for $2.99. Marked down from $3.99. You could think of it as “buy three get one free.”
Learn more about the books at
https://amberfoxxmysteries.wordpress.com
Sales links for all retailers (Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Apple, ScribD and more)
https://amberfoxxmysteries.wordpress.com/buy-books-retail-links
A reader asked if I find it hard to write outside the mystery genre. Actually, I feel as if I’m always both in and out of it. I’m a genre nonconformist. My series not only blends genres within books, but shifts genre to some extent as it moves along.
My decision to write this way came after I tried to write about crime, death, and violence and realized I couldn’t do it. I wasn’t going to be a happy writer, and my protagonist was going to be damaged by repeated exposure to things like that. I read murder mysteries but that’s a different level of involvement than creating them. There are more ways in which life presents mystery than murder, and some periods of life are more romantic, others more suspenseful, others full of family difficulties and personal growth, and there’s often something going on that we don’t understand—a mystery, but if we’re lucky, not a murder. Human behavior is often bewildering. And those phenomena we can’t explain—shared thoughts, psychic experiences—those are their own kind of mystery. My protagonist is psychic.
In The Outlaw Women, the free short story that’s a prequel the series, there’s precognition and a psychic connection, but no mystery to solve. The story is classified as literary fiction and contemporary fiction, which may be a good way for readers who enjoy what I write to find my series.
The Calling has been reviewed as literary fiction, or realistic fiction with paranormal elements, and as mystery in the sense of finding out secrets, but not a whodunit. All true. I put a tag line on my series, No Murder, Just Mystery, so readers won’t be waiting for the body, the shot, the explosion, the kidnapping, the more violent elements of a standard mystery. In The Calling the only things that blow up are people’s relationships and hopes and plans—and ideas of about the nature of reality. Shaman’s Blues gets closer to a conventional mystery. There are missing people, and a puzzling death in the past, but still no violence. The real mystery in this book is a person, in a twist on romance that turns most of the elements of that genre upside down. The third book, Snake Face, coming out in the fall, gets close to being a suspense novel.
Why all these genre shifts? Different things are asked of Mae Martin as she develops as a person, and as a psychic and healer. In the fourth book, Soul Loss, now in progress, the mystery surrounds events happening to other healers and psychics, and Mae’s role is that of a professional in those fields, asked to help in a realm only such a person can access. The fifth book (working title, Haunted) is looking like it will have a streak of horror in it (spiritual and psychological, not gory) when woman studying a healing tradition find herself entangled in its shadow side. The sixth book—no working title yet and only a few chapters written—revolves around a mystery in art authentication, art theft, and a stolen parrot. Detective work, but no murder. Rolling through genre according the pattern of my protagonist’s development, I still see a foundation of mystery under it all. Sometimes the question is, “who are you, really?” or what someone has done, rather than “whodunit,” and when Mae is finding out who did something, it’s not who killed someone. No murder, just mystery.
I do have a horror short story and fantasy novella on the back burner. It wasn’t harder to write them in terms of plot, but I love my series so much it’s been harder to make revision and publication of these other works a priority.
Four summers ago I was staying in in the same eccentric roadside motel in Maine where I am now, and I’d brought Chris McDougall’s Born to Run as my vacation reading material. I loved everything about the book—the colorful characters who take part in ultra-marathons , the Tarahumara runners, the settings from Leadville CO to the depths of Copper Canyon in Mexico, and of course I was fascinated by the research. Having spent much of my working life in either the fitness industry or in various colleges’ departments of Health Sciences, I paid close attention to the information on the development of the modern running shoe and on the mechanics of barefoot running. I had to try it.
I’ve never run on pavement except in my few races, even when I wore conventional shoes. I always ran trails and parks. This motel has a huge lawn all around it, a green perimeter bigger than quarter-mile track. One day I ran in my conventional, cushioned running shoes, and the next day I ran barefoot. Born to run? Born again! I didn’t want to stop. This lawn was the perfect place to run with no shoes at all. Most places have too much in the way of thorns, rocks, sticks or dog poop for me to want to run skin-to-earth, but this was a cool green carpet all the way. I knew better than to do my usual distance with this new technique, but my soul wanted to. Flying on the rebound from that soft landing reminded me of the way I felt back when I was a ballet dancer, taking off in a soaring leap or a springy allegro, wearing only those pliable slippers.
When I got home I invested in Vibram five fingers, and I soon felt like I’d gotten a new right knee. After running in the old cushioned shoes with a heel strike, my right kneecap used to stick so badly for thirty minutes or so that I could hardly go upstairs. Barefoot, no sticking. Because of that I couldn’t bring myself to transition as slowly as I should have, so I earned sore calf muscles and a cramp in my flexor hallucis longus (a big toe muscle) that I could feel all the way up the back of my lower leg. The scene in Shaman’s Blues where Mae overdoes her first two barefoot runs, with a cascade of consequences, was informed by that experience. I didn’t cramp my legs as severely as she does, but then I didn’t go to Santa Fe Bandstand and dance for hours afterward. The worst thing that’s happened to me running in my barefoot shoes has been stepping a big thorn that reminded me to update my tetanus shot. Compared to the sticky patella or the sprained ankles from falling off those old high-heeled marshmallows, an occasional thorn isn’t bad at all.
I celebrated my barefoot running anniversary today with four miles of mindlessly blissful laps around the grass. I did go dancing afterward, but with four years of training my legs and feet are up to it. Cap’n Frank Bedell and the Torpedoes were playing at Schooner Landing in Damariscotta. People of all ages, locals and tourists, partied to great old rock’n’roll on the pier with a view of the Damariscotta river and the boats on the blue water. I danced with happy feet.
Shaman’s Blues
The second Mae Martin psychic mystery
Mae Martin gets a double-edged going-away gift from her job as a psychic and
healer: beautiful music by a man who’s gone missing, and a request to find him. When she arrives in her new home in New Mexico, aiming to start life over as she
comes to terms with her second divorce, she faces a new challenge in the use of
her gift. Her new neighbors are under the influence of an apparently fake psychic who runs the health food restaurant where they work. When Mae questions the skills of the peculiar restaurateur, the woman disappears—either to Santa Fe, or another dimension. The restaurant’s manager asks Mae to discover which it is. Finding two missing people proves easier than finding out the truth about either of them, or getting one of them, once found, to go away again.
Kindle ASIN: B00IJMZP60
Barnes and Noble
Log in with Facebook 