Tag Archives: Malpais

On Hiking in New Mexico, On Speculative Fiction, On the Creative Life, On the Writing Life, On Writing, Walking All Day On Stone

Lightning Strike:

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Practicing to Be Lightning

Speculative fiction this time, and a long time coming. I can’t promise never again to release two books in four months–like mesquite bushes, books have deep roots, and the writer can’t always control when the visible part makes it to daylight. But I can tell you it’s been a journey.

For years I’ve been thinking about mining my thirty years of hike notes–about 600 hikes–for the setting for a novel. From the malpaís and beyond, through a portal to another world that is also this world–think Venn diagram–here it is.

About:

For Ben, reality is crumbling …

Pursued by a whistling killer through flash flood, rockfall, and storm, under a sky where even the stars have gone mad, skeptical scientist Ben and intuitive Zuni artist Trace flee across an uncanny desert wasteland, fighting to climb what is surely a mountain—or is it a cloud? 

Ben thinks he’s the rescuer … until he isn’t. Trace has a GPS … kind of. But lovers and nightmares hunt them on the paths of their very neurons. Prisoners of their disastrous pasts, can they escape? Does anyone ever escape?

On an ancient earth where the land itself is alive, Practicing to Be Lightning plunges you into a terrifying quest where the lines between reality and imagination blur, and survival means confronting not just raw nature, but the wilderness of the soul.

And praise:

“A breathtaking book.” —Connie Willis, SFWA Grand Master, winner of eleven Hugo and seven Nebula awards

“A heart-stopping quest through a dangerously beautiful landscape toward a mysterious destination pairs with vivid portrayals of irrational evil and irresistible human kindness.  A fine read.” —Anne Hillerman, author of the best-selling Leaphorn, Chee, Manuelito mysteries

“A good book bridges worlds. A great book drops you into its own. Practicing to Be Lightning is a great book. We can’t help but follow its call into the landscape of the malpaís, all sharp edges and sheer drops, as perilous and beautiful as our inner selves.” —Zach Hively, Reading the West Book Award-winning author of Desert Apocrypha

“In order to understand the truth, you need more than one way of knowing. What Betsy James does here is to meld two ways of thought—science and religion—into a better description of what the world really is.” –Dr. K. Kitts, retired NASA scientist

More in the sidebar … –>

… and an excerpt here.

Bookshop * Barnes & Noble * Amazon

Please choose our indies first.

On Creativity, On Hiking in New Mexico, On Integrating Word and Image, On the Creative Life, Walking All Day On Stone

Another Stone Circle Mystery

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Not Navajo. Often a stone circle is the foundation of a traditional hogan, but this is in the wrong place–over a lava field, no grazing near–and the “doorway” break faces west, not east.

Puebloan? There are tumbled Ancestral Puebloan structures in the neighborhood, but they’re all square-cornered. Nor can it be a kiva, because it was built right on the sandstone slabs.

The fallen ponderosa that divides it neatly in half is old, but thick lichen says the circle is much, much older.

What was it?

On Creativity, On Integrating Word and Image, On the Creative Life, On the Writing Life, Walking All Day On Stone

New Earth, Old Friend

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I forgot my camera. I was indignant until I remembered I’d never owned a camera until a few years ago. All hike records were scratched with a stubby pencil on a 3×5 card.

We went off-trail in the Malpaís. Snow and wind and frost-heaving had smoothed sand over the face of the weathered stone, healing the skin of the desert until we were the first ever to walk there.

Camera or not, it was a good day, though I wish I could have gotten an image of an old friend. Fortunately I already had one; it was taken in a different season, but you get the idea.

On the Creative Life, On the Writing Life, On Writing, Walking All Day On Stone

It’s Real

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East of the Malpaís: worn yellow sandstone patched with gray lichen, overlooking black lava with gray-green sage and lichen.

When I was small, I dreamed about owning a house carved into a rock. Here it was: a hollowed-out, round cave, just the right size for a child. It was cool inside. The oval doorway framed the extraordinary ordinary lava world outside.

On the Creative Life, On the Writing Life, Walking All Day On Stone

Malpaís and Mockingbirds

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Malpaís.  The McCartys flow rivals anything in Hawaii. Underfoot the clink and chink, the almost metallic scraping ring of scoria where flat sheets of it have popped off the still-hot surface.

Black, black. Splits and fissures with grasses, mountain mahogany, and a few cacti clinging to their walls. As we scrambled west—wearing leather-palmed gloves, too aware of our bare legs—we climbed a pressure ridge in the lava, a standing black crest so steep we clambered up it on all fours . In its glassy crevices claret cup cacti  were just beginning to bloom, the most beautiful red I’ve ever seen.

May is mockingbird month, when they return from their winter grounds. We listened to their changing carols all day.

Boots

Boots Malpais copy

On the Creative Life, On the Writing Life, Walking All Day On Stone

Black Glass

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Malpais hikerOn the Malpais, the McCarty’s lava flow, only three thousand years old. The surface looks fresh as yesterday, like Kilauea’s: so crevassed and glassy that Jan said, “On the Malpais, you don’t bruise.” We kept a sharp lookout for rattlesnakes—there’s sure to be a black morph.

The perfect, trembling webs of orb spiders stretched across the black fissures as if to draw the shattered rock together.

On the Creative Life, On the Writing Life, Walking All Day On Stone

Ow!

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Prickly pear 3-27-10The first cactus: I hopped the fence onto the Malpais, and with my first step ran into a cholla. Guess I haven’t been hiking for a while.

The second cactus: side-hilling down from the sandstone ledges, I slipped on the scree and my right hand, which I put out instinctively to catch myself, landed smack in a prickly pear. Stabbed full of big spines, furred with gloccids. I had to stand where I was and pull the spines out; got most of them, but a few I’ll bear to my grave like shrapnel.

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