Category: New Mexico Mystery

Reviews and Author Interviews

Did You Miss Something? Gifts and Thefts on Sale

Book 7.5 in the Mae Martin Mystery Series, Gifts and Thefts, is on sale for 99 cents through the end of July. This suite of six short mysteries fills in the year in Mae’s life between the end of Shadow Family and the beginning of Chloride Canyon. I had fun bringing back several characters from earlier books for roles in the short stories. Readers shopping on Amazon can click on a button to buy the series or remaining books in the series, but that click will deliver only the books with whole numbers. Other retailers sometimes show Gifts and Thefts on the series page, but they don’t have a series buy button. And you don’t want to miss this book. A lot happens in it!

Rodeo Regrets: Will Baca receives a cat from an anonymous giver, and his girlfriend suspects it’s from another woman. Mae Martin’s psychic journey into Will’s past on the rodeo circuit takes a puzzling twist while she’s solving the mystery behind the gift.

Responsible Party: Mae’s internship in fitness management gets stressful when her supervisor starts accusing other employees of theft and tells Mae to find the responsible party. Her efforts bring results neither of them expected.

Guardian Angel: When Jamie stops at a roadhouse in west Texas, a woman who won a pool tournament is in trouble and needs a guardian angel. Is he up to the job? Was he somehow called to it?

 Hidden Fish: Mae’s stepdaughters create an elaborate trivia treasure hunt as a Christmas gift for their Uncle Vaughan, leaving a trail of clues and origami fish hidden around downtown Truth or Consequences. But the fish vanish before Vaughan can solve the puzzle, and the children ask Mae to find out what happened. At Jamie’s New Year’s Eve concert, she’s caught between the suspects.

Tipped Off: Who would leave a hotel housekeeper that big a tip, and why? Montana Chino has a birthday surprise for Mae, but first she needs Mae to do a psychic investigation into the suspiciously generous tip. Was there a mistake, or did the guest have mischief in mind?

Elephant: On the weekend Mae and Jamie attend two weddings, she can tell he’s keeping something from her. He has to resolve a problem before he can talk to her, though. A problem that began almost a year before, with the arrival of Will’s gift cat.

The Annual Whole Series Sale for 2024

The entire Mae Martin Mystery series is marked down through the end of May. Book one, The Calling, is free wherever you buy eBooks, and the rest of the books in the series are discounted to $3.99 each. Book 7.5, Gifts and Thefts, the short story suite that bridges the time between Shadow Family and Chloride Canyon, is always $2.99.

If you prefer paperbacks and are one of those series fans who likes to drive to Truth or Consequences from Albuquerque to buy from Black Cat Books, you should know Black Cat will be following a T or C summer custom and closing for the off season. So, do your shopping in May and stock up on summer reading. They have the best prices on my books—and are simply the best, period. Enjoy soaking in hot springs and going to galleries while you’re in town. See if you can recognize the ones that are in my books.

Book nine, which I think will be titled Smoking Mirror, is almost ready for my beta readers and critique partners. Unless they find something dreadfully wrong with it, it should be with my editor by the end of summer and published in the fall. I hope to be able to show you the cover art soon.

Experimenting with Paperbacks, Round Two

Since removing my paperbacks from Amazon, I’ve had excellent sales at the local bookstore, but only one paperback sale through my web site. This makes sense. Buyers of physical books do much of their discovery by browsing shelves.

So, I’ve been thinking about the tourists who picked up book one, The Calling, at Black Cat Books and Coffee. If they want book two, Shaman’s Blues, will they look at the end matter, find my web site, notice the “buy paperbacks direct” link, and order from me? Will they remember the name of the bookstore and look up its contact information and order from them? More likely, they’ll look on Amazon and not find a paperback. Maybe they’ll buy the eBook, but probably not, if they’re the type of reader who likes to hold what they call “ a real book.”

My plan was to eventually republish the paperbacks with Ingram, Lulu, or Draft2Digital, but the prices on any of them would have put my books out of range for the average book buyer. Paper is expensive stuff. My books are longer than average, which obviously means more paper, and with the books going through a distributor, the prices increase. Will readers spend twenty-four dollars for a paperback? The same book published through KDP print can be priced six dollars lower. Despite my reluctance to drive business to this company, my ultimate goal is to make books available and affordable to those who want them.

I risk Amazon once again discounting the paperbacks to the point that I lose money on eBooks with their “price match” game. But I also risk losing readers who want the rest of the series in paperback after they passed through Truth or Consequences on vacation. The readers win.

I’m republishing on Amazon. I’ve also made the books available for expanded distribution, meaning other online stores may carry them if they chose. If you want to support small business, you can buy paperbacks for a slightly lower price from me or from Black Cat.

Shaman’s Blues 99 cent sale

No murder, just mystery.Book two in the Mae Martin Psychic Mystery series is 99 cents in all eBook stores through the end of January. The book that brings Mae to New Mexico!

 

Spinning Off

I’m letting the ninth Mae Martin Mystery rest a while, though I’ll be back to work on it soon. I’m taking an intensive course on revision and self-editing. Even after ten years as a published author, I can learn and improve. Meanwhile, I’ve begun the first draft of the first book in a spin-off series featuring Azure Skye, the Santa Fe medium who plays an important role in Soul Loss and in Shadow Family.

The creative challenges are exciting. The kind of mystery Azure will solve is different from the ones Mae is asked to handle as a psychic. Azure’s gift is communication with the dead. I’m disinclined to have her solve murders, but the question of how someone died has already come up. So far, it looks like Azure and Mae will need to collaborate to find the answer. Of course, I’m only on chapter two, and I don’t plot. I put the characters in a difficult situation and see how they react. Azure is in a situation only Mae can help her out of, and Mae has a problem she hopes Azure can solve.

The biggest challenge for me is that Azure wants to speak in the first person. I didn’t plan that she would, but that’s how she’s coming through.

Three of my novels use only Mae’s point of view, but I still had certain freedoms. I used prologues and epilogues in other points of view in two of those books. Mae’s visions as a psychic revealed events in in the restricted point of view of a silent witness. First person is the opposite of that. It gives me too much information to work with. I have to hold back some of what Azure knows, thinks, feels, and recalls about her past, her work, and the people close to her, in order to keep the story flowing. But I can share her inner life at the right moments more easily, since I never get outside her head.

Will I stick with first person or change to close third? I don’t know. For now, I’m getting to know Azure this way, like an actor exploring a role. Then I’ll have to set her story aside for about six weeks while I work on Mae’s most recent story in the revision class. Once that’s polished enough to send to my critique partners, I’ll plunge back into the spin-off.

*****

 Book two in the Mae Martin series, Shaman’s Blues, is on sale for 99 cents in all eBook stores though the end of January.

 

Revising with Help from My Characters

I finished the second draft of the ninth Mae Martin Mystery. It took two drafts to find out who was the real “villain” was and why they acted as they did. Now I’m reading through the book and taking notes on what works, what needs to be changed, and what might be okay to cut. I find this stage of the revision process absorbing and challenging. I have to get creative within the existing framework and pay even closer attention to my characters’ inner workings. When a scene needs alteration, it’s often because I made someone do what they really wouldn’t do. I’m critiquing and analyzing my book in progress, but the characters are guiding me through it.

More from the Archives of the Little Pink Phone: Character Insight

When I found pictures of the stairway descending from the mesa at Acoma, I recognized an image I used in Ghost Sickness, the fifth Mae Martin mystery, and looked for the scene that featured it. In my search for the word “stair,” I assumed I would find the gallery scene with the paintings of the stairway.

 The stairway

I found it, but first, I discovered a connection I hadn’t consciously created. A major character in the book, Acoma Pueblo artist Florencia Mirabal, left her family—one of the last families to live on the high mesa—and eventually settled in Truth or Consequences. For Florencia’s house in T or C, I selected the one that is, like Acoma Pueblo, perched up high, with an extraordinary view … and a stairway. Writing the book, I was unaware of the parallels.

Mae pulled the truck into the weedy patch of dirt that qualified as a side yard, drawing near to the porch’s side steps. The front steps led to a long, winding set of stone stairs set into a steep cliff, giving the little house the feeling of a castle. On their way in, she and Niall paused on the porch, looking down at Main Street and the view of the Rio Grande and Turtleback Mountain beyond the town.

 Mae said, “This is such a perfect place for an artist to live. It must have been hard for her to leave.”

Then, I found the scenes featuring Florencia’s stairway paintings.

  • Several small canvases with what appeared to be drafts of the work she had in mind stood around her, images of a narrow rocky staircase like a crevasse in a mesa.
  • Clemens circled the room again and paused in front of a pair of paintings. Both showed the exact same scene, a stone stairway winding between steep rock walls. The perspective was slightly distorted, suggesting multiple parts of the twisting path seen from different angles. A shadow of someone’s legs and a foot lifted to take a step fell on the stairs, but no human figure was shown. One version of the painting was in shades of yellow, brown, and gold, the other in shades of blue.

Much of the mystery centers around Florencia’s art and her separation from her family. I knew I was writing that part. But I didn’t realize how her choice of a home reflected the one she left but never let go of in her paintings. And since I didn’t realize it, I think it was her choice, not mine.

The view from the stairway

Inspirations: From the Archives of the Little Pink Phone

My sister called it a Barbie phone. It’s tiny and pink, circa 2009. I used it through 2019. I’d given no thought to the pictures on it for years, and had never downloaded them while it was my working phone, so I’m not sure why I finally did—but I’m glad I did. On it, I found pictures of Truth or Consequences and Santa Fe in the years during which my books are set. The work in progress, book nine, takes place in 2013.

When I took these photos, I was collecting material for my books. I chose the settings through Mae Martin’s eyes, her delight and awe in discovering New Mexico, and the feeling of deep change and emergence that her new home gives her.

In Shaman’s Blues, Mae is often struck by the intensity of the light in Santa Fe. Encounters with outdoor art trigger key moments for her, for Jamie, and for the boy Jamie tried to help.

The nearly-dry Santa Fe River plays an important role, as does the image of the Lady of Guadalupe. I took a picture of this blue door in Santa Fe one year, and the next year the Lady had been painted on it.

As I look at the colors in my old pictures, the book’s title echoes them. Blues.

I’ve also photographed settings that had meaning to other characters or played roles in later books, and will share some in future posts.

Boxed Set Sale, Book Club Discussion Questions, and Work in Progress

The boxed set of the first three Mae Martin Psychic Mysteries is on sale for $2.99 through April 26th.

Is your book club reading either The Calling or Shaman’s Blues? These have become book club choices, I think, because of their genre-spanning qualities, with elements of women’s fiction, mystery, and the mystical/paranormal. After discovering how much my book club likes using the suggested questions for books, I’ve created a Book Club Discussion Question page on my web site. (I’ll eventually get around to adding the link to the end matter of the books. So far, I’ve added the task to my to-do list.)

Book nine in the Mae Martin series is in progress. I’m a slow writer, so it will probably take another year to bring it to its final form. Using the almost-finished first draft and an earlier, unfinished half draft as foundations, I’m creating anew while revising and recycling the earlier material. Always an adventure—following where the characters lead me.

Writers Don’t Work Alone

My first completed manuscript was awful. I’ve saved it, but shared it with no one. It was an exercise is completing a plot and proving to myself I could do it. My second completed manuscript was awful, too, but I thought it was better, and I shared it with my first writing critique partners, fellow members of the Guppies (Great Unpublished) subgroup of Sisters in Crime.

I was so lucky. One person hated it and didn’t finish it, and her harsh critique was pretty accurate. The other found the strengths in the mess, the gems in the muck, and supported me. She loved my characters so much she took an incredible amount of time to graciously point out my beginner writing mistakes and to explain why they were mistakes. She was under no obligation to work that hard for no pay. Yet she did. She was more experienced, and she saw promise in this beginner.

My first book, The Calling, emerged from that manuscript a few years later. It has many of the same characters. It has the same theme. But not the same plot. My style and structure improved. I read books on writing, took classes on writing, and worked with additional critique partners. With all that the help over the years of revision and polishing, I crafted a solid, favorably-reviewed book.

This week, I finished a critique of a first-time novelist’s manuscript. I’ve read three versions of it, investing in this book the way my early critique partner invested in mine. The author is gifted. She made newbie errors, but I could see the gems beneath them, as could her other beta readers. She had an original idea, fascinating characters, and outstanding research. I’ve been a published author for going on ten years now. It felt good to “pay it forward.” I may be alone at my desk tonight, but not a single book I’ve published has truly been written alone.