Dream Totem

In Sedona, and other spots around the world that some people regard as sacred, people build little stone totems. Here’s a photo of a common example of a rock totem:

People build rock totems to honor a place that touched them, and allow them to leave a bit of themselves behind when they have to move on.

I came across a really special one some months ago, on a trail at the Airport Mesa vortex. You might have heard about our energy vortices, and you may or may not believe in them. But vortex energy only factors into this story peripherally. As I was saying…I don’t like the airport vortex too much. It’s the most easily accessible of all the vortices — doesn’t require any serious hiking from the trailhead — and that might explain why it seems to attract the most ill-behaved of all of Sedona’s tourists.

Most of the visitors to Sedona are respectful of the landscape. But too many of the people who flock to this site don’t seem to realize that other people hike to find peace and solitude. Instead, they sit on the knoll where they’ve been told they should feel some unusual energy flow, and their screams and laughter and cell phone conversations echo for miles.

I don’t know why I went there that day. And my hike didn’t start out well. A family of three males — a father and two burly preteen boys — along with a simpering mother, had cornered a lizard in the brush and were shirking in glee. I don’t usually say anything, but the sight of the family Cro-Magnon on their lizard safari annoyed me. I snapped for them to leave the wildlife alone. One of the boys spat at me, in a tone of fierce anger, that wildlife was supposed to be hunted down. His parents looked so proud.

So...I wasn’t in the best of moods when I walked on. But then I came upon it, one of the most magnificent totems I’ve ever seen. It was huge — probably more than two feet high and three feet wide, and clearly took quite some time to construct. Its spectacular design was not a matter of stacking rocks on other rocks — no, this person had build an edifice with actual chambers.

The totem builder had also sprinkled money on all the crossbeams. Not a lot, just pocket change. I spotted one quarter, lots of dimes and nickels and a whole mess of pennies that glistened in the sunlight. While I doubt it totaled much more than a dollar or two, the sprinkling of coins struck me as such an extravagant, grand gesture

I was so moved by it that I came back every week to check on the totem. And despite wind and rain and countless people passing that way, the totem remained week-after-week.

Then this week, I discovered it gone. Someone just dismantled it, stacked the stones, and with a marker and a girlish hand, wrote on the rocks about who loved whom, and decorated them with hearts. And, yes, she took the change.

As a hiker who loved that totem, I grieved for its loss. But as a writer, I felt a need to explore the mentality of the one who had to dismantle it.

As desecrations go, it was minor. Those rocks have endured for eons, and will remain when we are just specks of dust floating on the wind. Even the early amateur archeologists who explored this area used to carve their names onto the rocks near their discoveries, and they stole the treasures early tribal peoples had left as offerings in those areas. So, maybe whatever impulse the heart-drawer felt wasn’t any more out of line than what countless others have done before her. Maybe she thought that money was wasted there, and she considered it only right to put it to use.

Even after thinking about it, I don't really understand. Given all the many rocks scattered around that area, I can't imagine why she simply didn't choose some of those loose rocks on which to draw her hearts. I can't fathom why she was willing to take all the time needed to dismantle that unique totem. Why she needed to see it dismantled.

Maybe I’m just too sentimental, but still, I don’t think I’ll be going back there anytime soon.

What would you go back to see?

If a time machine existed, what events would you go back in history to see? Lincoln’s delivery of the Gettysburg Address? John F. Kennedy’s “I am a Berliner” speech? Maybe if you’re particular bloodthirsty, you’d like to go back far enough to see Anne Boleyn beheaded. Or to storm the beach at Normandy for the D-Day invasion.

Except for the beheading, I’d enjoy witnessing all of those events and many more. But an event I have always wished I could have been present for would be to be in that field in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, when a particular aircraft crashed.

Was it really an aircraft? The government has maintained all these years that it was a failed weather balloon. Probably true, right? Still, witnesses at the time insisted it was a spacecraft and that alien bodies were taken from it. Mostly likely it was just a weather balloon — real life can be so dreary.

The great thing about writing is that it’s just like having a time machine. No, it’s even better. Through my new Magical Mystery, MAGICALALIENATION, I not got to visit that field, I was able create the truth about what really happened there.

And not just Roswell, either. I also got to decide what really goes on at the infamous Area 51 at Groom Lake, Nevada. And if you think you know what those places are all about, you’re in for a big surprise.

MAGICAL ALIENATION once again features fake psychic Samantha Brennan and genuine Celtic goddess/FBI agent Annabelle Haggerty. Cheerful Samantha figures she has finally hit the mother lode in this book, having signed on as the spiritual adviser of the aging bad boy of rock, Rand Riker. It’s all fun and games at first, and Samantha, deserves some fun after her breakup from her former beau, Angus, the ever-hot Celtic god of youth and love and laughter, who, after stealing her heart, broke it by having a fling with a mermaid.

If only Rand weren’t headed to the New Age town of Sedona, Arizona to host a benefit concert for the most hated man in America, militia guru Normal Frankly, accused of trying to kill Arizona’s charismatic senator, Kenny Campbell. Samantha tangles with goddess-in-hiding, Special Agent Annabelle Haggerty of the FBI. Though Samantha and Annabelle were once mismatched partners in crime, they’re now on opposite sides, since Annabelle has become responsible for Senator Campbell’s safety.

Tensions spike when Normal Frankly’s militia pals free him from captivity. In their raid, they not only abduct his judge and jury, but also a passing U.S. Army convoy, allowing them to take possession of prisoner who has been the government’s most closely guarded secret for over sixty years — the Roswell alien.

By writing MAGICAL ALIENATION, I not only had the chance to look into unexplained happenings of the past, I also was able to look into the future, to a time of unprecedented war of the gods that manifested on Earth as an unheard of worldwide storm.

MAGICAL ALIENATION picks up with HIGH CRIMES ON THE MAGICAL PLANE left off, introducing new gods and goddesses, including Fiona, Annabelle’s secretive goddess mother, and the trickster gods of Lugh and Taliesin, responsible for such real present-day phenomenon as bizarre weather patterns and crop circles. There is a reason why Allyson James, the national bestselling author of Stormwalker called Magical Alienation, “…a hilarious tangle of gods and goddesses.”

With gods wielding unimaginable powers, and the shape shifting rock people twisting the very surface of the earth, as Sedona heads into the darkest night the planet has ever seen, Samantha rightfully concludes the fun and games have truly ended, and she wonders which, if any of them, will survive it.

But when Celtic gods are involved, nothing is ever as it appears.

Mostly, I love that they allowed me to travel to a space that was so fun. I hope you’ll find it so, too.

What would you travel back in time to see?

A Magical Time!

Magical Alienation, the second title in my Magical Mystery series has just debuted, and I couldn’t be happier!

The publication of a new book is always an exciting and rewarding time, the culmination of loads of work and the realization of a vision that has sustained the writer for some time.

But every book in a series is special for different reasons. In the first book in a series, a writer breathes life into characters that have existed as mere sketches in her mind, and they often grow in ways that even the author hadn’t anticipated. Relationships are forged. A voice the writer only heard in her own mind, booms out into the world.

For the most part, the voice booming from the first book in my series, High Crime on the Magical Plane, belonged to Samantha Brennan, a funny, boisterous fake psychic with a highly eccentric wardrobe. In the relentless pursuit of her goal of being a popular celebrity spiritual advisor, Samantha dealt herself in on an FBI case, the kidnapping of a movie star, apparently by a set of stalkers. Samantha never expected that during the course that case her entire world would be turned upside-down. Never would she have expected to discover that the agent assigned to the case, Special Agent Annabelle Haggerty, was also a modern Celtic goddess, descended from the gods and goddesses depicted in the mythology books. And never did Annabelle expect to be paired with precisely the kind of flaky, fun mortal that she deplored. Samantha and Annabelle sure made a mismatched pair.

But there were compensations. Samantha did succeed in turning the ancient, but immortal and ever-hot, god of youth and love and laughter, Angus, into her own personal love-slave. The stakes couldn’t have been higher, though. As the case took one bizarre twist after another, Samantha thought that if Annabelle and her family of deities couldn’t stop Armageddon from coming down on them, what chance did a poor little fake have of surviving.

The first novel in a series is in essence a setup, a launch pad for the entire series. A second book is different. Second books sometimes bring surprising new themes.

In Magical Alienation that means exposing the U.S. Government’s most closely-guarded secret of the last sixty years: the truth about what seems to have been an alien invasion that occurred in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, and what exactly has been going on at the mysterious Area 51.

Second books in a series allow the writer to test the relationships forged in the first. Initially, in Magical Alienation, Samantha and Annabelle find themselves on opposite sides this time around. Annabelle is assigned to the security detail of Arizona’s junior senator, Kenny Campbell, the target of a militia terrorist assault. While Samantha, through her employer, rocker Rand Riker, actually works on behalf of the most reviled man in the country, militia guru Normal Frankly, who to most observers isn’t quite normal, accused of mounting a terrorist campaign against Senator Campbell.

We get to meet new characters, including Senator Campbell, with his fuzzy definition of Family Values, and his oh-so correct political wife, Kelly. And Rand Riker, Samantha’s new boss, the Aussie, aging bad boy of rock ’n’ roll, who will do anything to achieve eternal youth.

We meet new gods and goddesses, including Fiona, Annabelle’s beautiful mother, who’s not quite as adept at hiding her secrets as a goddess should be. Was she the woman Samantha heard canoodling in Rand Riker’s luxury suite, or did Fiona harbor another secret? As well as Lugh and Taliesin, trickster gods involved in crop circles and who once beached an iceberg in the tropics, who just can’t get enough fun, as long as it’s at the expense of mortal Earthlings. And Gwydion, god of enchantment and illusion, whose trick stuns the world.

Second books allow us to visit new places. Magical Alienation takes Samantha and Annabelle to Sedona, Arizona, the Vatican City of the New Age, at a time when a monstrous harmonic convergence brings extraordinary power to Sedona’s famed energy centers.

Mostly, with second books, authors get to introduce shocking, unheard of action. While the mysterious rock people twist the very surface of the earth and Sedona heads into the darkest night the planet has ever seen, Samantha wonders which, if any of them, will survive it.

But when Celtic gods are involved, she should know, nothing is ever as it appears.

The best part of a second book? It’s that it invariably leads to the third book in the series. I can’t wait to discover what that will hold.