Cold and Ice by Nancy L. Eady

If every television, computer, tablet, and cell phone in your house stopped working last week, you may have missed the giant winter storm that slid through a good portion of the United States Friday and Saturday. When I looked at the watches and warnings for the Deep South on Thursday and Friday, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Georgia were awash with colors showing the possibility of ice and snow. Yet Alabama, smack dab in the middle of those three states, stayed colorless. A low from the Gulf of Mexico centered itself in such a way that warm moisture from the Gulf staved off the worst of the storm for us, although it gifted us with a ton of rain both Saturday and Sunday. The downpour stopped about 3:30 Sunday afternoon.

Even the Gulf low, however, couldn't stave off the Arctic weather we are experiencing now.  By the time the downpour stopped on Sunday, the temperatures were already nose-diving from the earlier high of 53.  Sunday night's low was 18, and Monday night's is going to be even worse, at 12. In a state where a “normal” winter low is between 30 and 50 degrees, such low temperatures shock all of our systems. 

The cold is bad enough on its own, but none of the water left by the rain Sunday afternoon had a chance to run off the roadways into the ditches before the temperature dropped below freezing, so our roads are going to be nightmares today, Monday. Since the temperature today is only expected to reach 33, the ice may not start melting until Tuesday. In a state where a single reported snowflake triggers a wave of closings, ice on the road is deadly. People down here don’t know how to watch for it, how to drive on it, or how to avoid it.

The only upside to the way this storm came through is that we avoided ice accumulations on the trees and power lines. I plan to hunker down until tomorrow, when hopefully it warms up enough to clear the roads. 

There is, as always, at least one silver lining. Even if the roads ice over from the standing water, we have power.  I can use at least some of the time I spend huddling in my house working on my writing. I am looking forward to it. Now I have to settle the debate on whether to work on revising a finished draft or adding new words to the current WIP. I’ll probably just flip a coin to decide. 

Do you like to write when the weather has you cooped up indoors? If not, what is your favorite writing weather? 

It's Cold, Y'all! by Nancy L. Eady

I live in Alabama.  I can’t say I chose to live in Alabama, because I was a child of the Navy.  I still have not figured out how Dad ended up with orders to head up the recruiting district in the great Naval metropolis of Montgomery, Alabama.  But once I got here, I stayed, except for a three year sabbatical to North Carolina when my husband and I were first married.  So, it’s safe to say that even if I didn’t choose to live here initially, I have adopted Alabama as my home state.  

To live in Alabama means you accept certain things as a given.  You accept that from the middle of June through the middle of October you will be living in shorts and staying in air conditioning as much as possible.  You accept that come the Fourth of July, you will prefer to watch “A Capitol Fourth” on PBS rather than go to a live fireworks show due to the heat.  You accept that your Halloween trick-or-treating will be characterized by heat and humidity rather than the delightful nip of fall the rest of the nation experiences.  You accept that the mythical white Christmas will not be your lot in life, and that you will have a drab brown Christmas outside, but at least the kids can play a pick-up flag football game outside that day. 

You do not accept waking in the morning to the thermometer's pronouncement that it is a balmy nine degrees outside.  You do not accept that you must leave the pipes dripping for a week because the low temperatures increase the chances that your pipes will burst.  You do not accept that you have to put on a jacket whenever you leave the house.  (Wearing a jacket is my winter bête noire.)  And you definitely do not accept that the temperatures will not go above freezing at any time in a given twenty-four-hour period.   

I don’t know how those of you in more Northern climes do it.  I have never once woken up with the blinding realization that my life will be incomplete until I experience single digit temperatures for a week or more.  Nor do I regret the fact that (normally) I do not have to fight ice and snow during my daily commute.  

What I have been forced to accept is any forecast beginning with the words “This air mass originated in Siberia….” can’t be good.  Thanks to Siberia’s generous gift, we won’t edge north of pipe-dripping temperatures at night time until Saturday.  

What weather makes you most uncomfortable?  Have you used the weather in your writing effectively?

Writing About the Weather (and Keeping It Believable) by KM Rockwood

We all know Elmore Leonard’s first rule of writing is to never begin with the weather.

Sometimes, though, weather is an important aspect of a story. It can be as prominent as the leading characters. It can even be a character.

In my all-time favorite-to-reread book, “Rafe,” by Weldon Hill, a storm causes a major flood which becomes the catalyst for growth and redemption of the main character, not surprisingly named Rafe.

Theodore Taylor, in “The Cay,” presents a hurricane that washes over the entire island on which Phillip Enright is stranded during World War II. He survives, tied to a tree at the highest point on the tiny island.

In one of my novels, the already financially strapped Jesse finds his basement apartment inundated with flood water. To make matters worse, a body is floating in the exterior stairwell.

When creating disasters, weather or otherwise, for our writing, we tend to be careful to make them believable. We don’t want readers to close a book in disgust and say, “It couldn’t possibly have happened like that.”

But reality is not limited to the probable or even the believable, like our fiction usually has to be.

I grew up on New York’s Long Island, a place where hurricanes regularly cause huge problems. I can remember as a child seeing the remains of good-sized summer “cottages” standing in sea water after a hurricane had changed the shoreline. The high sand bluffs at a summer camp I attended have long since collapsed into the Long Island Sound.

I also remember talk of a South Cape May in New Jersey, which has been under water for decades now.

We are seeing devastating storms increasing in number and intensity, we should remember that this is not a recent phenomenon.

In 1900, the Texas island of Galveston was hit with a hurricane which washed completely over the island, destroying a booming population center that has never entirely recovered. All structures on the island were either destroyed or damaged. The death toll was estimated at around 8000.

The devastating hurricane of 1938 known as the Long Island Express reshaped the eastern “tail” of Long Island and swept hundreds of summer cottages in Rhode Island out to sea. Long Beach Island in New Jersey was completely flooded, with ocean water meeting back bay water over the island. Approximately 700 people died in that storm.

A few years later, the Great Atlantic Hurricane killed between 300 and 400 people.

In 1972, Hurricane Agnes stalled for several days over Pennsylvania, leaving 220,000 residents homeless and 50 dead in that state alone.

More recently, we have seen Hurricane Katrina, which ravaged New Orleans and surrounding areas in 2005. If we were under any illusions that we had learned to cope reasonably with storms of that type, Katrina was a reminder that we remain at the mercy of the weather. An estimated 1800 perished.

Hurricane Sandy blew through in 2012. Dramatic photographs, including one of a New Jersey seaside amusement park roller coaster now rising from the water, gave examples of the destruction. Some of my in-laws lost a house in the Breezy Point fire in New York City that had been in the family for over 120 years.

Record keeping of the weather and geography in this country is only a few hundred years old, so we don’t really know how the area has developed over the centuries. Perhaps it should be obvious that storms will continue to batter our relatively frail constructions, and that it is the very nature of barrier islands to shift and change over the years. Yet we seem to be blind to that. We keep rebuilding in vulnerable areas. Several of my siblings have purchased houses on barrier islands in recent years, even as they are increasingly threatened by unpredictable weather.

In “Condominium,” John D. MacDonald effectively addresses a hurricane disaster of immense proportions, so it can be done. But most of us keep our descriptions within the realm of believable, not necessarily realistic.

Can you think of other examples of weather as major components in stories?

 

Sources: Worst hurricanes in US history (nypost.com), Wikipedia; National Weather Service; PBS Great flood pbs.org

 

Weather and the Writer

by Kaye George

I don’t know about you, but I’m wilting. Melting. Being way too hot. It doesn’t help that the project I’m working on (third Vintage Sweets cozy mystery) takes place in hot weather, summer in Texas. Even if it were winter and snow and ice covered the ground outside, I would be peeling off layers of clothing writing that climate.

It’s amazing how susceptible we writers are. I remember being in Texas in the summertime and writing DEATH IN THE TIME OF ICE. As you can tell by the title, it takes place in cold weather. As the story opens the last great Ice Age is beginning and the sheets of glacier ice are approaching the Neanderthal tribe from the north. They crouch around the fire and clutch their animal skin wraps closer as the wind sweeps off the ice, across the tundra, and through their encampment. I remember one day, after getting into my story and writing non-stop for a couple of hours, I looked up and blinked, surprised. I was startled to find the sun shining into my office and to realize that the AC was on because it was blazing hot outside. I had been shivering, goosebumps on my arms, writing that frigid weather.

Here I am, writing about hot weather while it’s hot outside. Poor planning! I need to take a few days off to do a short story set in Minnesota during January, spending the entire month outside the house training a brand new puppy we just got for Christmas. Or maybe Montana during an April blizzard that dumped three feet of snow in the backyard. I’ve lived both of those scenarios. 

On the other hand, I can go for greater verisimilitude this way. I can make my characters feel that sweat tricking down their bodies, that sun pressing with a staggering weight when you walk any distance outside during the day, that still air with not a breath of a breeze to stir the hair stuck to your neck. There’s a lot of be said for that, too!

PS. DEATH IN THE TIME OF ICE is now out as an Audio book, in case you want to cool off.

https://www.amazon.com/Death-Time-Ice-People-Mystery/dp/B07XQCDCXR/