Is she a ghost? A visitor from another time and place? A siren? A temptress? Or just a meddling dream mistress?
Welcome to Weekend Writing Warriors and Snippet Sunday,
the weekly hops for everyone who loves to write – and read!
Click on the graphics to travel to the other snippets.
Last week’s Sunday Snippet from J. Arlene Culiner introduced me to a Nevada Native American archeological treasure I’d never heard of, in spite of spending a few years living in Nevada: The 10,000+ year-old petroglyphs at Winemucca Lake. On the other side of the country, just two weeks ago, UNESCO announced the designation of an Ohio Native American archaeological site as a World Heritage site. The Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks is a vast system of mounds and rectangles with a lunar alignment created some 1600 to 2000 years ago. The phenomenon is all the more impressive because the precise lunar cycle only repeats every 18 years.
The confluence of those events led me to select an excerpt from my recent release From Beyond The Curtain for this week’s Sunday Snippet. It features a native site close to home I’ve visited often, always learning something new. The three-story caliche Casa Grande structure and its surrounding villages are more recent than the Nevada or Ohio sites. The region in present-day Coolidge along Arizona’s Gila River was a population center from about 700 to 1450 AD, and the central feature pictured below was constructed between 1300 and 1350 (now with a modern roof).
You can read about the intricate and precisely sloped canal system created by the inhabitants that enabled them to thrive for several centuries. Though the reason they abandoned their settlement in the 1400s remains unknown, one theory is that there may have been a catastrophic flood, destroying the entire canal system all at once and making the arid desert once more uninhabitable.
EXCERPT
Eight sentences…
Gwen and Dante had taken a guided tour of the grounds and the large structure—the Casa Grande—early, before it got too hot, then spent over an hour in the air-conditioned museum, exploring the exhibits and taking in the interpretive movie. Now they sat under the shade of a pergola with a view of the incredible three-story building built nearly a millennium earlier by a people thought to be primitive. The structure itself was shaded by a large modern metal roof to help preserve it from the elements, but its western wall glowed warmly in the late afternoon sun. What must it have looked like in its heyday? What ceremonies had gathered in the very space where they now sat? Gwen wished she knew.
~ ~ ~
And a little more…
Still neither of them spoke. Was he contemplating the building, or her presence beside him? Gwen repressed a shudder. Her worlds were colliding. Indigenous Southwest spirituality called to her in such a familiar way, as if both it and her Celtic roots drew from a single ancient source. She’d known this even before the appearance of Seren, who had amplified and deepened her awareness. Would Dante understand any of that? Would he run the other way? Was it her place to convince him, or Seren’s?
BLURB
Seren has bided her time for centuries, waiting for the moment when two of her descendants fall in love and release her, finally, from the place between worlds. The many gifts Seren has inherited from her ancestors—time travel, entering dreams, telepathic communication—have been unsuccessful thus far. Will Gwen and Dante be the ones?
Gwen McFarland has always been in touch with her Celtic roots. When Seren—who looks to Gwen like a Celtic goddess—materializes and invites her to a love tryst in another time and place, she does not hesitate. That Seren sometimes brings along another woman is simply an added benefit.
Fast paced trial lawyer Dante Emmanuel has no time for sentimentality or relationships. A string of satisfying sexual encounters suits him just fine. He’s mystified when a recurring figure enters his dream life, but he won’t turn down Seren’s exotic sexual talents or the dreams that now seem more real than ever.
Who will make the first move in this three-part game of chess? Timing is everything.
BUY LINKS
Universal Link https://books2read.com/u/3k6RNK
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CBWM7LGB/
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/from-beyond-the-curtain
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1425302
More on the monument:
I’ve added these to photos to share a little more about the monument. The first, with people standing in front of it, is to give a sense of its size. From the top tower, in its day, a person could see the entire complex of villages and farmlands in a sixteen-mile radius, all the way to the Gila River where the canals began.
The second photo is to show one of the alignments between openings in two walls across from each other. Most of these openings correspond to either solar or lunar alignment at specific times of the year.
