I love the desert; it is my home and I’m pretty sure, there’s a little bit of dirt in my veins. I know I’ve adapted to the hot, arid environment because I’m sure most of you don’t think 70F is cold. Sweater weather for me. So on our recent journey to Colorado for researching the 3rd Redaction book, I found the location for the third Syn-En book, Registration.

Don’t get me wrong, I always planned to set the cyborg/human book on a desert planet but this was even better than I thought. Here is the raw beauty of Earth, not hidden by vegetation.

Her curves are softened by wind but the rock is baked by the sun.

Here are millenia of ocean sediments. Each layers tells a story when the land was covered by water and life.

To the south was a lush wooded forest now turned to stone.

Hardy shrubs still dig their roots deep in the soil, but time had whittled the mountains to sand–sand that sweeps in waves over the surface and buries the tenacious plant life.

Imagine watching a storm roll in, a hundred miles in the distance until the whites, red and browns are covered by shadows. Imagine the lightning ripping across the sky, so close and yet so far away.

I want to stand in the center of it, turn my face up to the water and sink my feet into the soil so as never  to be torn away.

It is here, the Syn-En will come to demand humans be treated as a sentient species. The world they will visit will not  look like this because the planet is showing off her natural beauty, unadorned by the gaudy foliage of wetter regions. Here just like on that far away alien world, only those able to adapt will survive.