Yosemite is a Batholith

Did you know that Yosemite, and all of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, were once the innards of volcanoes?

I didn’t, until recently, when I was doing some research for my next book!

Yosemite (which is part of the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range) is known for its awesome rocks. Half Dome, and El Capitan even have names. They were magma—hot, liquid rock—about 100 million years ago. That magma cooled beneath the surface, but over the top of it was a goddamn volcano! Tons of volcanoes, all over the place, 100 million years ago. Spitting ash and lava, in California. We had dinosaurs, too, but there aren’t any reptilian dinos in my next book. There will definitely be volcanoes though.

Over time, the volcano’s outer rock eroded away—into sediment, into the rivers and on the wind, and the granite—those giant rocks like Half Dome, are what’s left. Cooled magma. Granite rock. Insane.

My next book is of the fantasy genre. It’s a sort of travelogue.

I call it a stone-age fantasy, and it’s set in ancient California, though it’s not completely accurate—that wouldn’t be nearly as fun. It’s a stone-age fantasy that explores the possibility of ancient hominids interacting with each other and the landscape.

It’s said that Homo sapiens bred with Neanderthals—Homo neanderthalensis—but also might have caused their extinction. The book explores (through a fun, fantastical narrative) the interesting and often dangerous dynamics of an ancient world with all kinds of magical, but actually very real, creatures, as well as some mostly made-up humanoids. Think elves and dwarves, along with people descended from birds, pigs, and other things.  

We like to put a number to “when modern humans have existed”, based on where we’ve found fossils, and other dating tools. But really, humans have been around forever. We are the tips of the evolutionary tree, but our roots are the same as everything else’s. We have had many forms, and we still take many many forms. The living things on Earth have all been exchanging pieces, growing, dying, changing and morphing since life first spawned. We have been here since that day. We’ve grown so large we house others. We’ve grown so large we literally house others—pets. But we’re all the same.

I don’t go that deep in my next book—it’s just a fun fantasy story. But writing about things like “how would past humanoids treat other, different, past humanoids” gets me thinking about how we treat each other, too, and I don’t just mean other humans. I mean everything.

The book inevitably has racial elements, of course—it deals a lot with the other, as there are many different biologically distinct races living amongst each other. We are all distinct, and we are all not distinct at all, depending on how you look at it.

I’m excited for everyone to read my next novel. I have a goal of selling 1000 copies next year.

Earth’s timescale is so, so, so massive, so much has happened, our lives are a wonderful flash in the pan with only one person that gets to really see it—you!