The physical, spiritual and mental journey of Jax Sharkin, the royal and bi-racial main character created by Park City-based author C.A. Fox, comes to a close in the new novel, “Praxis.”
The book, the final volume of Fox’s “Paradox” trilogy that is currently available at Dolly’s Bookstore and in physical and Kindle form on Amazon, also marks a three-decade voyage for the author.
“I’m really happy with it,” she said. “I feel I did with it what I wanted to do, and now it’s out there in the world.”
On the other hand, Fox confessed she is sad.
“I would sit down and write Monday mornings, and that was a great source of solace and energy for many years,” she said. “I don’t know what I’m going to do next.”
Still, Fox will celebrate with a free book signing from 5-6:30 p.m. on Jan. 28, at Dolly’s, 510 Main St., and she is looking forward to meeting people and talking a bit about the 30-year ride.
“I knew I was writing a trilogy when I started, and I’m a jump-right-in-with-two-feet kind of person,” she said. “So I don’t outline, and I tend to write scenes that interest me at any given time. I’ll write something over here, and then I’ll see what’s happening over here and I’ll write something over there. Then I have to figure out how they connect.”
When Fox finished what would become the trilogy’s first book, “Paradox,” she sent the manuscript out to readers and had an agent.
“That book had a lot of iterations, and I had to figure out where it stopped and where the next one started,” she said. “That was a challenge.”
In 2011 readers gave Fox some thought-provoking feedback.
“I decided to stop and go back to page one and write everything from start to the finish,” she said. “So, it wasn’t until ‘Praxis’ was finished that I went back to the whole body of work, where I could read it all the way through and make sure the plot holes were filled in and the threads wove together.”
After checking those boxes, Fox began publishing the books, which features cover art by Michelle Rayner of Cosmic Design, one volume at a time — “Paradox” in 2023, “Prophesy” in 2024 and now “Praxis,” through Surrogate Press, founded by local author Katie Mullaly.
“Even then, as the books were published, things in the story would change, and that caused a domino effect,” she said. “If something changes in book one or book two, you have to make sure you brought it around in the other books. So, I made sure ‘Praxis’ weaves everything together.”
While many fantasy and science fiction trilogies follow a pattern — introduction, conflict cliffhanger and resolution — Fox decided to add her own spin.
“One of my premises is that I don’t think war solves problems — I think it causes more problems that it solves,” she said. “In great speculative fiction, there is usually a final battle, so I thought what if I took that out as a plot device and then figured out a different way to end book two.”
So “Prophesy” didn’t end with a big external battle, Fox said.
“It’s about Jaxim losing everything and finding a way to put himself back together and survive a big shift in his life,” she said. “There are external pressures on the characters, and it’s about how they come to some resolution. So, an internal battle has won.”
“Praxis” starts with that resolution, but not everyone is quite on board, Fox said.
“So it is about how they all get to the end,” she said.
As Fox wrote, she found the most effective way to convey her thoughts and ideas is to let the story take the lead.
“I think one of the reasons I love the writing process is that I have to get out of the way,” she said. “So, it’s not necessarily me who is doing the writing, and it’s such a glorious experience to tap into whatever that is.”
Still, Fox had an idea where she structurally wanted the story to go.
“In speculative fiction, there is a quest, and I knew there would be a quest,” she said. “But what got discovered in that quest changed and morphed and those who were met changed and morphed.”
Fox started writing the trilogy because she couldn’t find that one special book she wanted to read.
“The thing was that the book I wanted to read when I was 25 was different from the book I wanted to read when I was 35 and 45,” she said. “So my own reading and my own thinking evolved over time.”
Fox reconciled her evolving tastes with her writing through “ruthless editing.”
“I would read stuff that I had written years ago and say, ‘Wow,’” she said with a laugh.
While Fox did know that Javix, who is also known as Jax, would still be an outsider — and an insider, due to his discovered lineage — the other characters would go through surprising changes.
“That was the most fun thing of all,” she said. “I think a lot of people, when you start writing, especially in genre fiction, put in a little fan fiction. Writers are inspired by the people we know or things we see, people who annoy us or people whose thinking surprises us, and I wanted to explore why that happens.”
Because of that, Fox’s perspective on her characters shifted over time.
“Jax was always my favorite because you can’t spend all this time with him and not sympathise with what he’s going through,” she said. “But as I read and reread and friends who would read and ask me questions, I was able to hone in and make sure that the other characters were portrayed in a way that made sense.”
Fox also reflected on how she was going to portray evil.
“Having grown up reading Tolkien and the others, when evil shows up, it’s ugly, it’s vicious and it’s merciless, making it OK to kill it,” she said. “But I think when evil shows up in our real world it is much more insidious and a lot harder to face and kill. So, the question is, ‘If we don’t recognize it, how do we fight it?’ And there are times when some of my main characters do things that are evil, but they don’t see it that way.”
Fox hopes readers will enjoy “Praxis” and take something away from the story.
“We do learn so much from reading fiction,” she said. “It’s one of the ways to develop compassion because you get to be somebody else and experience what they experience.“
Author Book Signing with C.A. Fox
- When: 5 p.m. on Wednesday, Jan. 28
- Where: Dolly’s Bookstore, 510 Main St.
- Cost: Free
- Web: dollysbookstore.com
For information about C.A. Fox and her ‘Prophesy Trilogy” books — ‘Paradox,’ ‘Prophesy’ and ‘Praxis’ — visit cafoxbooks.com.