Last week Patrick Nielsen Hayden came into town. (I love it when that happens.) Friday he and I sat in my kitchen, going over his notes for my SF disaster novel, Feral Sapiens. (It’s scheduled for release in March, 2009, btw, under my byline, M. J. Locke. Go now, order many early copies. w00t!) He’s an astute reader, and caught numerous potentially embarrassing flubs.

Saturday we played. In the morning we hiked through the petroglyphs. These markings on volcanic rocks are scattered through out the Three Sisters lava flows west of Albuquerque. Petroglyph literally means “rock picture” in Greek. They’re believed to have been carved by ancestors of the Pueblo peoples settled in the Southwest. Here was our favorite, hands down.

Compare and contrast.

Coincidence? I think not! Clearly, the Mooniknights are time travelers. (Here’s a link to a different shot at Making Light. Yes, it’s for real. Also check out these shots of petroglyphs all over the world.) Then we ate green chile cheeseburgers at the Route 66 Diner on Central near the university.

That afternoon we attended a humongoid signing at Page One, the city’s biggest independent bookstore, along with about a kajillion others, wherein the Wild Cards authors signed, oh, maybe a googleplex of copies of Inside Straight. Verdict: big success. I bought Way Too Many Books. (Somebody stop me before I shop again.)

I learned that Melinda Snodgrass’s next book, The Edge of Reason, is due out in May. I can hardly wait! It’s been too long since we’ve seen a new Snodgrass novel.

(I particularly love the idea of a god with Multiple Personality Disorder.)

Then I came home. I felt like I’d been hit in the psyche by a baseball bat. I fell over, and slept. And slept. And slept. What does it all mean?

“On my mom’s side we’re all mountain-ash. How about yew?”