Category: Behind the Stories: Inspirations and Encounters

Shape-Shifters: How Did You Think of That?

SwainsonHawk23One of the hardest questions for a fiction writer to answer is exactly where an idea came from. I was asked that question recently about some of the imagery in one of my books. The short answer is that I imagined it, but the long answer mixes research, experience, imagination and dreams.

In what is basically realistic fiction with paranormal elements, I create some characters who have unusual abilities—psychics, healers, mediums, and shamans. A few can take—or seem to take— animal forms, and my Apache characters speak about this with fear and caution as the sign of a witch. Bearing is a horror story (though gore-free), so in that genre I made the shifting real. In the Mae Martin Mysteries, characters who shape-shift are not physically becoming animals but psychically manipulating others’ perceptions to create the illusion of another creature, or so strongly identifying with an animal that a psychic could pick up the imagery. The power of our minds to share images and information is astounding, and that ability is at the root of the stories I tell.

When I was choosing search terms to help readers find Bearing, one of the ones I chose was shape-shifter, a concept that I associate with skin-walkers and similar witches. I was surprised to find that there are shape-shifter romances. The possibility that this power was romantic had never crossed my mind. To me it’s scary, so it’s an element I use in fiction to give readers goosebumps. What makes an animal image scary to one person and beautiful and powerful to another is often regional and cultural. One of my Apache friends told me some terrifying stories of owl-witches that chilled me to the bone. He scared himself by telling them and said he shouldn’t be talking about the subject. When I was in my teens, I had what turned out to be a premonition, a frightening image of someone prowling outside the house hooting like an owl. Around ten years later, my roommate and I were disturbed at night by owl calls first at the front and then at the back of our townhouse apartment. Her cat’s hair stood on end and he quivered and made pitiful sounds, his fear scaring us all the more. We’d never seen him act like that. My roommate looked outside and saw a man she worked with but didn’t know well, and she called the police. The man admitted to stalking her but couldn’t explain what had gotten into him with the owl calls. Somehow that was creepier than if he knew.

One of my good friends in high school had repeating nightmares about wolves looking through every window of her house, and the way she told it gave me the shivers. When I was a very small child, I had repeating nightmares about bears, including a strange one in which I was a fourteen-year-old boy camping on a hunting trip with an uncle, and it ended with being attacked—I think killed—by a bear. No one in my family hunted or camped, and I had never seen a bear or a gun or even a tent at the age at which I dreamed this.

A little girl I knew years ago liked to think she had hawk powers. We were swinging in swings and she told me the reason she could go so high was this special power she had. She stayed in my mind, too, as another way that people identify with animal spirits.

This can be a “treasure hunt” through the series now. (Obviously the bear story is the standalone Bearing.) Readers will find the wolf, the hawk and the owl in the Mae Martin series. No spoilers. I’ll let you look for them.

Mae Martin Mysteries Book One The Calling 99 Cent Sale #Kobo #Nook and Everywhere

Been meaning to venture in mystical mystery?callingebooknew You can start exploring the series at a bargain price. Through Saturday March 26th, The Calling is ninety-nine cents on Kobo, Nook, Amazon, iTunes and Page Foundry.

The Epidemiology of Peace

Meditate_Tapasya_Dhyana

In 1993, a group of approximately 4,000 people practiced meditation in a focused and consistent way for a measured time period as part of an experiment in reducing crime in Washington DC through creating a more peaceful collective consciousness. The crime rate was significantly reduced. This was a successful, well-designed scientific experiment, and from the 1970s through the 1990s several others were done with similar results. This type of intervention hasn’t become a mainstay of public policy, though a study done in Merseyside, England found that it saved the local government money. Do we need more meditators? More people in in government who pay attention to these ideas?

Though I write fiction that involves psychic phenomena, it’s not the only reason I find the science behind it important. I’m reading Dr. Larry Dossey’s book One Mind, and I’ve been thinking about the effects our multiple minds have on the One Mind we all share—the interaction of our individual psychology with transpersonal psychology. It can be positive, like the meditation experiments. It can be negative, like the rising level of what I’ll call recreational anger in the United States. I get the impression there is an audience for anger—angry radio, angry TV, angry politics—and that the audience is getting pleasure out of this state of hostile arousal. I’m not one to enjoy outrage for the fun of it, so I can’t claim any insider insights into it. As an observer, I wonder, does it create a wave of disturbance leading to additional anger? Do negativity and meanness have a kind of viral quality that can spread through the shared psychic space of a culture? Is there any connection between our level of anger-for-fun and anger that kills? I don’t know the answers.

Still, I’d suggest that each individual contribute his or her drop of peace to the ocean of the collective consciousness through actions, thoughts and words as well as meditation. It’s an experiment worth trying. Imagine what would happen if we all practiced self-forgiveness and self-study. If we humans all sought moments of stillness and awareness of beauty. Paused to reflect before speaking and acting. Made a daily practice of seeing what Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield calls the “inner nobility” of others, whether they are family members, friends, opponents, or strangers. Perhaps we can change the world-mind, one careful, loving person at time. Our peace-minds would be the psycho-spiritual equivalent of the sterile male mosquitoes that scientists release into disease-ridden areas. No one gets killed. The problem stops reproducing. To continue my epidemiological analogy, when the effort is dropped, the mosquitoes find fertile partners again and the diseases they spread come back. We can’t take peace and wisdom for granted. Meditation is a called a practice for a reason.

Do you notice changes in your life if you keep up the practice?

Recommended Readings: Psychic Science Redux

Nadia's_Psychic_Readings_01

Recently, I got an e-mail from a reader who was curious how I learned about various healing and psychic phenomena. I studied energy healing as part of my yoga therapy training years before I wrote my first book, and I visited a variety of healers and psychics (some gifted, some questionable) as part of my research. And of course, I read. Two years ago, when this blog was new and not many people had found it yet, I wrote about some of web sites, books and scholarly journals I’ve used as resources. This week, I’m bringing it back for new readers. The post is recycled below.

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After I taught a stress management workshop as part of one of my college courses, a young man came up and asked me if I knew anything about being psychic. (He must have been psychic to think to ask me.) He had recently started having precognitive dreams and wanted to learn more. These are some resources I recommended to him. If you read my books, you may also be curious.

I list references in the back of The Calling, including some of the articles and web sites used in the course Bernadette and Charlie teach. In the scene where Mae and Hubert read the about PEAR lab studies, I tried to give readers a sense of the solid scientific support there is for remote viewing and also remote influencing of what should be random events. (PEAR stands for Princeton Engineering Anomalies research.) The articles from the PEAR lab, and the ones on affecting the output of random event generators (REG) are a little dry, as scholarly articles can be, but the site can give you a summary of the work done there.

For more accessible reading on the subject, I suggest Rupert Sheldrake’s book The Sense of Being Stared At. The title refers to one of the topics he has studied in depth. Yes, we do feel it when we are being stared at.

A fun yet solid book exploring energy healing and the power of the mind to influence events is Afterwards You’re a Genius by Chip Brown. (Published in 1998, it’s now out of print, but used copies are available on Amazon.)Brown enrolls in an energy healing course, and fills in the science around the story through research and interviews. The title is a quote from Dean Radin, a scientist who studies such things as the ability of human intentions to influence REG machines and robots. His point was that when you first start studying wacky stuff, you’re a wacko, but afterwards,  when your work is accepted, you’re a genius.

I found a trove of fascinating stories on the web site The Archives of Scientists’ Transcendent Experiences. Scientists may not like to admit that a mystical or psychic event happened to them. This site served as a safe community for those who had such a story to share. It is currently inactive—no new posts—but readable.

The journal Explore is wonderful. I recommend subscribing if you are seriously interested in healing studies. I encourage you to sample the brilliant editorials of its editor Larry Dossey.

When he was editor at Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, the peer-reviewed journal I cite often in The Calling, I used to look forward to his editorials as the highlight of the journal. He unites science, poetry, and wit with a unique voice. He can integrate the most unlikely images into a coherent, thought-provoking essay.

I also recommend Dossey’s book the Power of Premonition.

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I’m currently reading a book which looks like promising addition to my list, Dr. Larry Dossey’s most recent work, One Mind. I’ll review it here when I’ve finished. Dean Radin’s Supernormal is waiting in my Nook, and when I get to it, I’ll share my thoughts on it as well.

Image from Wikimedia Commons, courtesy of Bohemian Baltimore

 

Joy is Healing

There are days that don’t promise much. Too busy. Too cold. And then there is the endless business of being human, being a body. It’s a resilient organism but it’s also vulnerable to the strangest injuries from the most random, unlikely sources. On a day like that, where will joy come from?

I was stuck having to run indoors today due to all of the above. One of my most reliable joy sources, nature, was only outside the windows. I decided to make up for it with music. Most people who like Krishna Das’s music use it for yoga, but I needed the uplift of his voice while I ran. His voice is a gift to the world, rich and warm, full of feeling. Because the songs are in Sanskrit, I don’t get lost in words, I simply respond in my heart.

The catharsis of joy mobilizes the chemistry of healing. It also broadens the spirit, touches the soul. Spirituality is hard to define, and yet when I hear this music, I know it, and sense that the singer lives it. It’s not solemn or rigorous, but full of melody and rhythm, love and life.

Listen at http://www.krishnadas.com

Have a joyful day.

Reading it Forward with my Team

Writing may seem like a solitary occupation, and it does involve long hours alone, but like most work done well, it also involves a team. In the past week I’ve finished the second draft of the fifth Mae Martin book and sent it to critique partners. I’ve also critiqued two short stories by fellow writers and am one-third of the way through another’s full-length work in progress. None of us could do it without each other.

I have two writing support networks. For some reason, in each trio I have one British partner and one Australian. My “mystical mystery sisters” Virginia King and Marion Eaton share similar readers, people who like mysteries that go off the beaten track and have an element of non-religious spirituality, so we share not only writing ideas but marketing. My other writing trio includes two authors of humorous mysteries, J.L. Simpson and Jordaina Sydney Robinson. They both have a knack for tight plotting as well as comic timing and can tell me when I’m going off track. I can’t imagine producing a book without them.

It doesn’t feel like work to take the time to read and critique their books. I’m honored to be part of these authors’ teams and would like to introduce them to my blog readers who may not already know their work. Virginia King did a guest post on this blog, and Marion Eaton joined me for an interview.

https://amberfoxxmysteries.wordpress.com/2015/04/16/virginia-king-mything-in-action

https://amberfoxxmysteries.wordpress.com/2015/03/24/interview-with-m-l-eaton-the-mysterious-marsh

Their web sites are:

Marion Eaton

http://www.marioneaton.com

Virginia King

http://www.selkiemoon.com

J.L. Simpson is part of the group blog Ladies of Mystery with me.

http://ladiesofmystery.com

Learn about her Daisy Dunlop series here

http://www.jlsimpson.com/?page_id=77

Jordaina Sydney Robinson’s first book, Beyond Dead, will come out soon, and I’ll be one of the first to spread the word. I mentioned it midway in this blog post a while back:

https://amberfoxxmysteries.wordpress.com/2015/09/17/karma-and-creativity

(Note: the giveaway in the link at the end is long over.)

Teaching Myself to See

Years ago, at a party on the Damariscotta River waterfront in Maine, I met an artist with whom I struck up a long, thoughtful conversation. We stayed in touch for quite a while, but what I remember most about him is this. He said, “I paint to teach myself see.” I was making my living acting at the time, so I responded, “I wonder if I act to teach myself to feel.”

Writing, I have to be actor, artist, and playwright, teaching myself to observe more mindfully, to listen to others and the sounds of the world, to experience my own emotions with awareness, and to notice textures and scents. A smell can trigger a memory more powerfully than anything else. The more I pay attention, the more seeds I have in the seed bank of ideas from which stories, scenes and characters grow.

As well as being part of the creative process, this practice of awareness pops the bubble of busyness and brings me into the present moment. It’s an eye-wide-open meditation I can do at any time, cracking the shell of the ordinary to reveal its depth.

Phew! Yee-ha! And a Pitiful Cry

I know life is made up of moments lived, not a series of goals and strivings, but I love how it feels when I get something done. Today I finished preparations for the course I’ll teach over the three-week January term. It’s hardly an adventure, more of a task, leading to a mere “phew” of satisfaction. The fun will come when I have students next week, new people with fresh ideas and thoughtful questions. I can’t have the fun, though, without the work.

With writing, the joys run backwards. Today I also finished the first satisfactory draft of the next Mae Martin mystery. I describe it that way because my writing process goes through so much ongoing revision and recycling that it’s hard to call anything a first draft. The moment of knowing that this is the plot that works and this is the ending is exhilarating, a big “yee-ha!” I dance quite a bit at this stage of writing, something I don’t do in my college office. I’m excited about revising the book, too, and sharing it with critique partners and revising it more. I even enjoy the picky details of word choice and sentence structure, of deciding what to cut and what to add, and experimenting with the best way to describe certain feelings and actions. It’s work that doesn’t feel like work, all the way to the final draft.

Getting sales and reviews is the work that feels like work. A book isn’t fully alive until it has readers, just as a planned-out college class is nothing until it has students. I have to do this work, but I look at Twitter and Facebook, trying to think of witty snippets of chat, and I shrivel. No, please, there has to be better way. My New Year’s resolution is stop whimpering and become a marketing genius without boring or annoying anyone. (That’s what would make me a genius.) I need to learn to dance with delight about filling out an advertising form, or at least look forward to the “phew” of having done it. Instead of just tweeting links, I will take up the challenge of composing something original and intriguing in 140 characters or less. Follow me on Twitter and see if I succeed. But don’t hold your breath. I’d rather be writing a hundred thousand words of fiction, or even next semester’s syllabus.

IndieBRAG Christmas Blog Hop: A Free Holiday Short Story

ALL-ABOARD-with-medallionB.R.A.G. Medallion authors are taking you on a holiday tour through their blogs. On this stop, enjoy my new short fiction for the season.

Santa Claus Checks in at the Fat Buddha Spa

Mae Martin raced her twin stepdaughters to the pasture fence and almost let them win, making it a three-way tie. The llamas looked up from grazing on the dry winter grass, blinking their long lashes. Taking walks to visit the neighbors’ animals had been a favorite pastime for Mae and girls when she’d lived with them. Now, on her first holiday visit after separating from their father, she was trying to keep everything as normal as possible. As the six-year-old girls clambered onto the fence, Brook shouted. “That’s what I want for Christmas. A llama.”

“Are you sure?” Mae picked up a small purple glove from the weeds and put it in her pocket. The late December day was growing warm and both girls had taken off their gloves and hats. “I thought y’all wanted a tarantula.”

“We do, but Miss Jen is scared of spiders.”

Their father’s new girlfriend didn’t share Mae’s appreciation for crawly critters. “She might think a llama was cuter, but I don’t think anybody can afford one right now. You do know your presents come from family, right? Your daddy said y’all don’t believe in Santa anymore.”

“Yeah. We figured it out.” Stream perched on the top rail, swinging her legs. “We watched this TV show with Grampa Jim and Granma Sally about these people who have reindeer in some place near the North Pole.”

“Lapland?”

“Yeah. And those things are big. There’s no way they can fly.”

“What about magic?”

Brook sat beside her sister. They studied Mae as if they felt sorry for her. Poor mama. She’s not caught up with us yet. “Magic is for little kids who can’t figure things out. We’re gonna be bug scientists when we grow up—”

“Nun-uh.” Stream wriggled and sat straighter. “That’s your job. I’m gonna be a race car driver.”

Mae walked up and placed her hands on their knees. She loved their independence and eccentricity, but they could be tactless about how smart they were—like her ex-mother-law—and she needed to take that attitude down a notch. Gently. “Now what in the world is Santa Claus gonna do if all these kids don’t believe in him?”

Brook frowned, saying he couldn’t do anything if he wasn’t real, but Stream started to laugh. “He’ll pop like a bubble.”

Mae did her best to act serious. “Did you tell your friends there’s no Santa?”

The girls exchanged glances. Brook said, “We got in trouble for it at school. It made some kids cry.”

“It might be hard on ol’ Santa, too. Popping like a bubble. Before you tell any more kids he’s not real, I think I’d better give him a call and see how he’s feeling.” Mae took her cell phone from her jacket pocket and pretended to make a call. She rolled her eyes and sighed as if waiting a long time for an answer.

The girls poked each other and giggled. Stream whispered to her sister, “She can’t call him. She’s making believe.”

Mae raised her eyebrows, giving them the oh yeah? look, and then a triumphant smile as if she’d finally heard a voice. “Well hey, Santa buddy. What’s up? You know Summer Stream and Autumn Brook Ridley don’t believe in you anymore? … Oh. Of course. I can’t surprise you. You know who’s naughty and nice. “

Brook protested, “We weren’t naughty. We told the truth.”

“But did you tell it nice?” Mae turned away, lowering her voice to resume her conversation with Santa. “I hope they didn’t hurt your feelings. They told half the kids in Hertford County, North Carolina—You’re kidding! … So what are you doing now? … Really? Shut up! I live there. I just left for my vacation.” She put her hand over the phone. “You won’t believe it. He’s checked into a spa back in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. So many kids stopped believing in him, he’s taking this Christmas off.”

“What’s a spa?”

“It’s sort of like a motel with extra stuff. The ones where I live have hot springs and massages. People go there to relax and get healthy.” She got back to Santa Claus. “Which one? You at the Charles? La Paloma? … I never heard of that one. The Fat Buddha? … Oh. Reckon I wouldn’t see it.”

She explained to the girls, “He’s at a spa for supernatural beings. Regular folks can’t see it.”

Both girls frowned, and Brook asked, “A spa for what?”

“Supernatural beings. Kinda like ghosts or angels, but not exactly. It’s run by a big fat Buddha. You know who he is?”

The_Laughing_&_Lucky_Buddha!_A_stroke_of_Luck!_(413428647)

Stream nodded. “Granma Sally has his statue on her desk. She says he helps her stay calm when she does taxes.”

“He’s helping Santa, too. And they’re hanging out with another fat supernatural, Ganesh. He’s this Hindu god with an elephant head.”

“An elephant head?” Stream whooped.

Brook asked, “How come they’re all fat?”

Mae repeated the question to Santa and listened while she worked on an answer.

“He says it’s because they’re supernatural. They don’t have to be in shape to be healthy. Ganesh …” She had to stop and think again. Her neighbors in T or C were into yoga and they had a Ganesh poster in their living room. Finding it strange but beautiful, she’d asked Kenny to explain it. “Ganesh is fat but he’s big and strong, too. People call him the remover of obstacles. Like an elephant can pull a fallen tree off a road but a human can’t.”

Ganesh_2Stream looked skeptical. “Do people believe in the elephant-head guy? Like they believe in Santa?”

“Some do, but a lot of people just believe in what they all stand for. Like being generous and happy and enjoying life. Santa says they’re hanging out in the hot spring together and these other guys helped him with something he was worried about. So, you did him a favor, giving him a vacation, but he wants to go back to work next year, and he’ll need kids to believe in him again.”

“We can’t make them.”

“No—but you can keep it to yourselves if some new believers come along. You know why he wants to go back to work?”

Brook asked, “Does he get paid a lot?”

“No—he does it to be kind. And this is what those other fat dudes at the spa told him. He’s been too generous. See, they don’t get as carried away with their roles as he does. They help people by changing their lives, not giving stuff. He’s been giving people way too much expensive stuff, and they’re starting to think Christmas is about getting big, fancy gifts. So next year, he’s gonna cut back. Give stuff that means more and costs less.”

Mae took a deep breath and let it out. She hadn’t known she was going to say that. But as a college student with a part-time job and not much cash, she’d had to buy small gifts this year—child-sized team T-shirts for the College of the Rio Grande Tarantulas and a pair of stuffed toy versions of the mascot. She’d wanted to do more, but the trip east had cost all she could spare, and yet she didn’t want the girls to think she loved them less because she didn’t live with them anymore.

“Like when we make you presents,” Brook said.

“Exactly.” Mae smiled in relief.

“Good,” said Stream, “because we—”

Brook dug a fist into her sister’s arm. “Sh. You can’t tell her.”

“That’s right.” Mae put her phone in her jacket pocket. “Being surprised is part of the fun.”

The girls stared at her pocket. “Mama,” Brook said, “That was rude. You hung up on Santa without saying goodbye.”

“Oops. Look like I’ve been naughty, too. Good thing he’s taking the year off.”Santa_Claus

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This interlude occurs offstage during the third Mae Martin Psychic Mystery, Snake Face.

Snake Face and Shaman’s Blues (book two) received B.R.A.G. Medallions.

Dive into the series at a discount. E-books are on sale for $2.99 on all major online bookstores, paperbacks have been reduced from $17.99 to $13.99, and the series prequel, The Outlaw Women, is free. Sale ends January 10.

https://amberfoxxmysteries.wordpress.com/buy-books-retail-links

https://amberfoxxmysteries.wordpress.com/free-downloads-retail-links

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For links to all stops on the blog hop, go to: http://www.bragmedallion.com

 The next stop on the indieBRAG Christmas Blog Hop is today, December 18 with Malcolm Noble

While We Hold Still, Time Doesn’t

I came across this phrase years ago in my fitness work: While we hold still, time doesn’t. When we procrastinate exercising, we don’t maintain the status quo but get into worse shape. The same is true of the planet. While world leaders and national leaders put off serious action on climate change for too many years, the process didn’t pause and wait for them to get around to something. I want to believe that the new agreement forged in Paris will lead to action, finally. While conscious pausing can be positive—taking time to deliberate and then choose an action—inaction can lead to negative consequences as powerfully as any unwise action might.

I’ve been thinking about my own areas of procrastination. I don’t wrestle with the behaviors people typically make New Year’s resolutions about, such as eating right and staying fit. However, there are plenty of things I put off as if they will take care of themselves—tedious paperwork chores that are much less fun than running. Choosing between what feels good today that will lead to something bad tomorrow and something that calls for discipline and discomfort today that will lead to a greater good tomorrow seems to be the key issue in procrastination—along with the delusion that time holds still with us. Meanwhile, the forces of physics, the marketplace, biology and karma keep moving.