After being rejected again and again by traditional publishing companies who refused to publish her book “Alabastra,” Yuma author Deborah Foxford was ready to throw in the towel. but then her tale was saved by technology.“Basically I just decided I would forget ever trying to get it published, because I had received 121 rejections in the mail,” Foxford said. “If an author wants to find a literary agent that will accept them — it’s like a spit in the ocean trying to find the right one. you almost have to know someone or have slept with someone, or be related to somebody.”then electronic books or e-books came along, and Foxford submitted her book to Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble. much to her delight, they liked her story, and as of may, now sell it online. Foxford gets a percentage for each electronic copy sold.“What that did for me was give a desire to even write more,” Foxford said, explaining it had been hard before to find the time or the energy to write after getting home from her full-time day job. “I just had a resurgence about writing again and it infused me with that passion again. It really feels good after all these years to finally share what I’ve written with others.”“Alabastra” is a psycho thriller that delves into to the mind of a fictional serial killer named Lawrence Cowell who lives in Yuma. “(Readers) are going to ride shotgun with him all the way through it,” Foxford said. “It is a nightmare and will keep you awake.”â?¨The story begins with a gruesome murder at Laguna Dam.“the first death is very descriptive, what he does to this woman,” she said. Foxford named Cowell in homage to serial killer Ted Bundy, who was born Theodore Robert Cowell.“Lawrence is actually a very rich, very handsome, tall, well poised, elegant man. he is something every woman would want in their life. but he is a real crud bucket. his psychosis drove him off the deep end. he is all kinds of screwed up. That disturbs me. In fact, I was scared when I wrote it. I wasn’t married at the time when I was writing, and I gave myself the creeps.”when asked why she explored such a dark topic, Foxford said, “It is my lack of understanding about what makes people do what they do. Why would you hurt innocent people? That bothers me. I am not a paranoid schizophrenic but there is that imaginative side that knows what the world really is like. It is a dangerous place for all of us to live.”Foxford has been writing her entire life. “I love words. Words are so fantastic. It is better than math by a long shot.”one of her first projects actually got her in trouble with her parents and her neighbors during summer vacation in the 1960s.She decided it would be a good idea to listen in on her neighbor’s conversations and write an article about it in a homemade newspaper, which was distributed to the block, rolled up and wrapped in a bow, by her little brother.“bill and Mirna, the neighbors, I wrote the most about because they were having an argument and were talking about getting divorced,” she recalled. “so I put it in my little tribune. my mom spanked me really badly because all the neighbors ended up, at different times throughout that afternoon, asking her why she had let her daughter write gossip about the neighborhood.”Later in her youth, she wrote a story called “and then we Will Die.”“It was about a family that crashes into some mountain range and they have just a little bit of food left, and then they will die,” she said.despite the morbidity of her stories, Foxford said she actually grew up a quiet introvert in California before eventually settling down in Yuma.“I was a nerd. I was always the one people tried to copy off of my homework. I was really tall, blonde and really, really skinny. I was very quiet and I am still quiet as an adult, believe it or not.”Foxford now lives in Yuma with her husband Ken. “I really like his last name. That is the only reason I married him,” she joked.Foxford is currently working on a new story she has titled “Asphyxia.”It’s about drowning, choking and the inability to breath, she said.“I told you I was gruesome.” for more information about Alabastra, log on to amazon.com or barnesandnoble.com.
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