Why Are All My Books Set in New Mexico?
Here's a thing you'll notice about my books: almost all have some connection to New Mexico.
My first book, On Second Thought, was set in a fictional town called Los Alamitos that is 100% just based off of Grants and I don't know why I didn't call it Grants.
Variant and Feedback, my first national books, were set somewhere in the Carson National Forest, up west of Taos and north of Espanola.
Blackout and Dead Zone have characters from New Mexico (the opening scene is also set at Glen Canyon Dam, which I'll come back to in a second).
Dark Energy's main character, Alice, had a grandma who lived on the Navajo reservation in scenic New Mexico.
And on and on until my current work-in-progress which takes place on a different planet, but the main character is from Albuquerque.
So why do I keep setting all my books in New Mexico?
Well, for starters, New Mexico is pretty great. There is so much to love about that state. It is incredibly beautiful, rivaling even "We're So Great We Have Five National Parks: Utah". New Mexico is truly gorgeous. Also, culturally it's incredible. There are (I believe) fourteen different tribes that call New Mexico home; the biggest on is Navajo and most of the rest are pueblos, and pueblos are really super awesome. Also, when it comes to culture, New Mexico was settled by the Spanish (New Mexico is the second oldest European city founded in what is now the United States, way back in 1610--that's a long time ago!) And so the culture is very Spanish and not as much Mexican as the name would suggest. Still very Mexican, but super Spanish.
Taos Pueblo
And the food reflects all of these cultures. The food is incredible. If you've ever had green chile? New Mexico invented that! The best green chile comes from a little place called Hatch, and if it ain't Hatch Green Chile, it ain't green chile. Sorry, Colorado--you think you're neat, but you're not. (Just kidding. I lived in Colorado, too, and it's great.)
Hatch Green Chile
And this is to say nothing about the history of New Mexico. Yes, the pueblos have been there a super long time--the Sky City Pueblo on the Acoma Reservation is, arguably, the oldest continuously inhabited place in the United States, dating back a thousand years! (Maybe! People argue about it!) And there's the ruins of magnificent civilizations that lived there longer ago. The Ancestral Puebloans (formerly known as the Anasazi) were based out of New Mexico--in Chaco Canyon and Aztec and a hundred other sites. And if you know anything about anthropology you have probably heard about the Clovis culture, or "Clovis points". That's New Mexico, too! And then the Spanish showed up, and there were wars and atrocities and treaties and broken treaties, and the United States showed up to make and break even more treaties. It's just a place where a whole lot of stuff happened, and that culture is reflected everywhere you look.
Pueblo Bonito at Chaco Canyon
So, Aside From the Fact That New Mexico is Objectively Awesome, Why Do You Put It In So Many Books?
Well, the fact is I lived there. But I lived there in an interesting way.
First of all, I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons), and I was a missionary. Missionaries don't choose where they go, it's assigned. My brother went to Chihuahua Mexico. My dad went to Kobe Japan. You just go where you're called, and I was called to the New Mexico Albuquerque Mission NNAM. At the time, the NMAM covered New Mexico north of Socorro (so, about halfway up), everything in Arizona that was on the Navajo and Hopi reservations, a corner of New Mexico that includes Cortez, Durango, and Pagosa Springs, and a little chunk of Utah that was mostly polygamist towns (there are little towns of fundamentalist LDS people, or FLDS, who live down there. The mainstream LDS church does not condone polygamy and hasn't for over a hundred years. Anyway).
So. That's where I went on my mission. You leave on your mission--or I did at the time--when you're 19 years old, and you're mostly an idiot, because all 19 year olds are idiots. Missionaries try hard not to be idiots, but we're not only 19 but we're boys, and we're 19 year old boys who mostly have never lived on our own. We do a lot of stupid things.
(There are young women who go on missions, too, but they are, in my experience, not nearly as dumb--and generally not as young--as the boys.)
So, I do some training in a place called the Missionary Training Center, for a couple of weeks, and then I got shipped down to Albuquerque where a kid, who has looked like he has seen hell and lived to tell about it, picks me up in a pickup truck and we drive to the absolute middle of nowhere. My first area was called Pueblo Pintado, which is 100 miles from everywhere: 100 miles from Albuquerque, 100 miles from Gallup, and 100 miles from Farmington. It was on the eastern edge of the Navajo Reservation, and the town, such as it was, consisted of our trailer, a chapter house (kind of a government center--all Navajo communities have a chapter house), two hogans (traditional Navajo homes that are round and built from logs and mud, and a school for about 60 kids. This place was not a large place. It was rugged. It was rough. It was isolated. The nearest store was five miles up the road, and even that was just a convenience store--the nearest gas station was 45 miles away in Crownpoint.
The eponymous Pueblo Pintado
But I cannot tell you how much I loved living in Pueblo Pintado. It was absolute desert, but it was high desert--I think it was somewhere around 7000 feet--so an interesting climate. And it was full of sage and it smelled so good all the time. There were interesting rock formations all over, as we were very close to the Bisti Badlands, and I lived not only 15 miles from Chaco Canyon, which is amazing, but 3 minutes from the actual ruin called Pueblo Pintado. It was an Ancestral Puebloan great house, that was (if I remember right) at least three stories and had at least one great kiva and several smaller kiva. It was something like 30-40 rooms. And, at the end of the day, we'd just go and hang out there and watch the sunset, and it was amazing.
But I didn't always live on the reservation. I spent some time in Los Lunas, a city about 30 minutes south of Albuquerque. That was fun, but I wasn't there long enough to really get a sense of anything. (I should say that when you're on your mission you move around from area to area. I think it kinda keeps things fresh and doesn't let you get bored.)
I spent time in Page, Arizona, and was there during the winter. It's right at the edge of Lake Powell on the Arizona Utah border, and it's there where Glen Canyon Dam is situated--which features prominently in the beginning of Blackout. That was a gorgeous area--I mean, the Glen Canyon Dam is at the head of the Grand Canyon, so you know it's beautiful. But I wasn't there very long and I was quite sick while I was, so I didn't get out much.
Lake Powell viewed from Page, AZ
I went to Cortez, Colorado, which is in the very most southwestern corner of Colorado. That was a very cool place because--and I have no idea if this is accurate or if it was made up by someone local--but Montezuma County (that county) has more archaelogial sites per square mile than anywhere in North America. This is defining "archaeological sites" as anything from a scattering of potsherds to a cliff dwelling. But the stuff is really everywhere: the town has a lot of farming, and every farmer had a collection of things that they'd dug up while they were working their fields. (According to the Antiquities Act, it's legal to possess ancient artifacts if you found them on private land. I don't think that anyone except the private land owners are happy about that--they ought to be in museums--but the fact remains that this stuff was everywhere.)
And we went to Mesa Verde almost every week, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site as well as a National Park, that is awash with cliff dwellings. This place is spectacular, and if you ever get the chance you should absolutely go.
Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde National Park
But then I went to my favorite--and everyone else's most boring--place of all: Grants, New Mexico.
There is so much to love about Grants. First of all, it's weird. It had been the center of a major uranium mining boom and the town was huge and growing very rapidly. And then, sometime in the early 80s, the mines shut down, and this town that was getting so big lost half its population. So, there were boarded up buildings everywhere. Whole neighborhoods of shuttered apartment complexes. The town, at the time I lived there, was about 5000 people, and it could easily have handled twice that. All of which to say it was economically depressed.
But they were doing interesting things to make money. At least three prisons are in Grants (it might be four). And they were getting into big greenhouses when I was there. That's why, in my book On Second Thought, the main character, Walt, most to Los Alamitos to work at a big tomato greenhouse.
But getting aside from the weird economy, there is a lot to love in nature and history:
The town sits at the base of Mt. Taylor, which is one of the four sacred mountains for the Navajo. The sacred mountains, as I understand them, define the homeland of the Navajo and give protection to all who live inside their boundaries. So we were on the southeastern corner of those boundaries.
Mt Taylor
To the south was El Malpais, which is the Spanish word for Badland. It is a massive lava flow--Mt. Taylor is a volcano--and there is a lot of hiking and exploring to be done. At the time I lived there, you could go deep underground into the lava tubes and crawl around and do neat things, but I understand that it's closed to the public now.
El Malpais
To the southwest is the Zuni Mountains. And while I may have set Variant in the location of Carson National Forest, I imagined Variant in my head as the Zuni Mountains. So, whenever I'm describing the forests and hills surrounding Maxfield Academy in Variant and Feedback, I'm describing the Zuni Mountains.
There's El Morro about forty miles south, which is an oasis in the desert that people have been stopping at for millenia, and whenever they do they leave their mark on a massive butte. There's pictographs and petroglyphs, there's markings from the 1500s from early Spanish conquistadors. There's US Army from the 1800s. There's early Mormon pioneers. There's miners. There's everyone. It's really fascinating. That's a National Monument.
Inscriptions on El Morro
In Summary:
I write about New Mexico because New Mexico is a startlingly beautiful place. It has a magical culture (the motto is The Land of Enchantment, both because the land is enchantingly beautiful, and because the culture is based on magic). It has the best frigging food you'd find anywhere. It is just a remarkably wonderful place, and when I need to a character or a location, I just find so much to draw from there. It's like I'm a painter and I'm selecting colors--and all the best colors are from New Mexico. I am not nearly as inspired by anywhere else that I've traveled. I've set one book, Blackout, in Utah, but they leave Utah pretty quick and go somewhere more interesting.