Perhaps I Sensed 20 Years Ago Where I Would Ultimately Land

In addition to the stock market crash and myriad other fiascos taking place in our current mess of a nation, it’s also been a real-estate-rollercoaster of a week in my personal abode, which I have been attempting to sell for weeks now.

I had glimmers of hope these past two days, but now I’m in waiting mode—which sucks, quite frankly—so I decided to share a recent photo I took, and therein provide a distinctive clue as to where I plan to land next. One hopes such forward-thinking positivity might actually begin to move mountains (faster) to make it freaking happen.

Many folks find relocating difficult because it involves change. What I’m finding agonizing— having made up my mind—is waiting for others to do the same and actually act, in some semblance of a timely manner, upon their decision. Because this crap-all situation is mood-altering and downright maddening.

So, back to the photo accompanying this post, which depicts rubber stamps I purchased when I first began paper crafting (and collecting rubber stamps) while living in northern Virginia roughly twenty years ago. These are particularly fancy ones, in that the stamping image is lasered into the wood. I recently stumbled upon them as I was organizing my craft room to begin purging in anticipation of eventually packing up for a move.

Each time I relocate (yes, I’ve done more than my share of it in the past 45 years), I get rid of hordes of crafting supplies via donation, including some rubber stamps (I have literally hundreds), and boy howdy am I glad I never parted with any of these.

What I hadn’t previously realized was these stamps were created by a place called Stamp A Mania in Las Cruces, New Mexico, which alas is no longer in operation—like the store in Virginia (Angela’s Happy Stamper) where I obtained them. It’s a bummer, as Las Cruces is one of the locales where I’ve done exhaustive internet house searches in the past couple of months.

Because, wouldn’t you know, I’ve decided to move from one famed southwestern alien locale to yet another. Going from a state that encompasses the vast land mass known as Area 51 to a place with a town called Roswell, which now hosts the International UFO Museum and Research Center, not to mention the Museum of Space History in Alamogordo.

I haven’t yet been to either museum, but the vicinity of Alamogordo is where I hope to soon reside, which is also the land of pistachios. One might call that uncanny, given the whole pistachio-shaped spacecraft theme in my Other Worldly novels, wherein protagonist Rowan Layne has a cherished rubber stamp collection.

Rowan, like me, also has a mug collection, including one from the White Sands/Alamogordo area I visited about 20 years ago (so maybe that’s why I ultimately bought those particular rubber stamps?) that depicts the nearby Three Rivers Petroglyphs. It is wild that I still have that mug and managed to refer to it in one of my novels?

I have mostly mentioned Rowan’s coffee mugs and rubber stamps with snarky sayings and/or alien themes, so I haven’t included these distinctly New Mexican stamps, but it got me to thinking about all of the New Mexico references throughout my  OW series, beginning with the second novel, Feeling Alienated.

Early on in Feeling Alienated after Rowan moves to North Las Vegas, she meets the stealthily seductive Oswald Winslow, aka Win, a former CIA clandestine officer, and learns that he grew up in…Alamogordo. Win’s not an extraterrestrial alien, but he does have the same alien DNA percentage as Rowan, though unlike her, a portion of that DNA hails from Pleiades.

Win, an associate and advocate of aliens prior to Rowan also assuming that role, previously appeared on TV in the first OW novel, Alienable Rights, to explain how the storied Roswell crash was an accident involving an alien entity whose intended destination was the Sandia Mountains of…none other than New Mexico.

Hence, there are a few more references to the Sandia Mountains in my OW novels, but the most featured site of interest in New Mexico is Chaco Canyon National Historical Park, where ancient Puebloan buildings, without precedent in prehistoric North America, are precisely aligned with cyclical positions of the sun and moon during solstices and equinoxes.

Advanced masonry techniques of these structures of Chaco Canyon, unique for their time, remain an enduring enigma for researchers, along with the mysterious disappearance in the late 1200s of the people who lived there. All of which has provided endless fascination for me over the years.

I therefore employ a bit of literary imagination to fashion a fantastical answer as to why (and how) those ancient Puebloans vanished without a trace in Altogether Alien, sixth novel of the OW series, when Rowan finally travels there, as I did decades ago. She also travels from there with Win to…Pleiades.

Because, as Win explained to Rowan back in Feeling Alienated:

               “Pleiades is a star cluster also called the Seven Sisters, but with thousands more stars than that, plus what we now know are planets like the ones my DNA derives from. What you might find interesting is that on Earth there are multiple structures, on multiple continents, built by multiple cultures, with one thing in common. They were all placed in alignment with Pleiades, which they revered.”

               “Do we have such a structure in the US?” I knew the answer almost as soon as I asked.

               “In New Mexico. Chaco Canyon.”

Moving to New Mexico would enable me to return to Chaco Canyon, though it is remotely located in the uppermost northwest portion of the state when I plan to live in the lower southwest corner. But there’s one other thing I’m seeking.

I’d like to be able to look up the night sky, sans the ridiculously extensive light pollution plaguing my current location, and see the Milky Way again. Including Pleiades. Plus I really have a thing for adobe houses.

I also plan to finally make it to Taos in person, because in Altogether Alien Rowan briefly visits the Taos home of a Puebloan farmer first introduced on a space tour in book five, Alien Sensation. Not to mention a whole host of other fascinating locales to explore and petroglyphs to see—and perhaps write about.

And while the timeline stress of trying to sell my Vegas house sot I can buy my dream abode has pretty much prevented me from focusing on writing these past few months, I suspect New Mexico might also ultimately feature in the eighth and final OW novel in progress, Alien Origins. With any luck, I’ll be living there, gazing up at the stars on a regular basis, when I finally finish writing it. I just fervently need those stars to align for me in the here and now to make it happen.