Weather or Not

by Janis Susan May/Janis Patterson

A little over a year ago we had some terrible storms around here – tornadoes touched down all over the area, baseball sized hail, lots of destruction, and (worst of all) several people died. Fortunately my home and family were spared any real damage – a thorough drenching, small leak in the garage, some greenery down – but it was frightening for a while. Just listening to the area’s tornado sirens going consistently for over half an hour and hearing the trees slapping against the house was nerve-wracking enough. A couple of years ago we had a hailstorm - not unusual in itself, but almost singular in that it happened in June and poured so much golf-to-baseball sized hail down the ground was covered from two to six inches deep; it looked almost as if it had snowed. My husband's then-brand-new BMW was severely dented and my aged Buick was totaled. Yes, totaled. So was our roof, as was the roof of almost every house in our area. The roofing contractors simply moved in, going from house to house, and for six months it was almost like living in a popcorn popper.

Which brings me to my topic – weather. Do we ever really realize how much weather is a tool in our books? Yes, you can write a creepy mystery set in a nice suburban villa with brilliant sunshine, balmy breezes and the sound of children laughing in the yard next door. It’s been done, and done well, but to my mind it makes the story lose something. There are those who say the very normalcy of such a setting increases the tension, but I’m not one of them. My mind (no comments, now!) tends to discount danger inherent in bright, sunny days.

How much more disturbing is the low-hanging overcast sky, the shadowy house which no amount of light seems to illuminate completely, the wind scratching at the windows, a driving rain…

Perhaps less-than-perfect weather, night, darkness, shadows all ignite a feeling of unease in a primitive part of our brains. What we cannot see we cannot be prepared for. We are all hardwired to fear the unknown something that lurks in the dark. Did you have monsters under the bed in your childhood? I did. Did I ever see them? Nope, but I knew they were there just the same. Even now that I'm grown up sometimes if I’m working on a particularly intense book, or it’s a stormy night and I’m alone in the house, they might still be there. I’m not going to crawl under and look, either!

Hopefully the dust bunnies that live down there might choke them...

Sometimes having an active imagination can be a curse.

Conversely, it’s very difficult to have a lighthearted comedic story set in that same dank and drear house – or shadowy urban alleyway – under lowering, stormy skies.

There’s a cliché opening that Bulwer-Lytton used in the hyperverbal Victorian era – “It was a dark and stormy night…” Once I was beginning a new project (a Gothic mystery) and had the story pretty much pat, but could not get the beginning started until I really used “It was a dark and stormy night…” after which the story just rolled. When the book was finished I did go back and change it, not wanting to be an object of fun, but for my own personal uses it was invaluable. I do wish I could have used it, though…

Writers have a myriad of tools available to them, and the weather is one of the most effective. There’s nothing like it for setting mood and tone.

At least we can control the weather in our books. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could in real life.

An October to Remember

By Karen McCullough

If you follow this blog closely you might have noticed that I missed posting last month. (I don’t fool myself. You probably didn’t notice. But anyway…) I have an excuse and that’s what this post is all about.

I live in central North Carolina. Early fall is hurricane season here and this one was a doozy.

In September Florence was the headliner for weeks as its course, even while a long way out, showed it making landfall on the coast and then heading northwest to pass right over us. We got ready. We laid in candles, batteries for the lanterns and flashlights, and foods that didn’t need extensive cooking. Stuffed ice in the freezer. Laid in extra canned goods. Put away the patio furniture and planters.

The first part of the forecast for Florence was right. The eye did come ashore over the city of Wilmington on the N.C. coast. But then it stayed there for a couple of catastrophic days, pouring torrents of rain on the eastern part of the state and creating historic floods in many places before it jogged south and lost oomph quickly over South Carolina.

Here in the center of North Carolina, we had rain (lots of rain) and some light wind, but nothing drastic. Many people here welcomed family and friends from down east who had to evacuate flooded homes and towns. After a few days we put away the candles and batteries and ate the extra food.

Then Hurricane Michael zoomed up across the Gulf of Mexico in early October and crashed into Florida. Forecasters told us it would pass well to the east of us bringing us rain and light wind, but nothing to worry about. No one in this area got very concerned about it.

Our mistake. Michael wiped out parts of the Florida panhandle, then raced north and east, losing strength as it went. But it moved fast. And it veered a bit off the center of the projected path. For a day we had heavy rain and light breezes as it approached. But Michael, still a tropical storm, stayed on the west side of the cone rather than in the center, and in the early afternoon, it hit us full on.

It wasn’t as horrible as many in Florida experienced. But it was bad. Frightening For several hours we hid from fifty to sixty mile per hour winds with some higher gusts. Some of the heaviest rain I’ve ever seen accompanied it, blown sideways at times. The noise was incredible – wind howled and screeched, the trees rattled, rain smacked, smaller branches ratt-a-tatted on the roof constantly, and larger ones hit with the occasional thud. Everything not fastened down blew around and often hit other things.

Our city has a lot of huge old oak and fir trees and many of them went down during the storm. Thousands of trees.  Several hundred houses were damaged. We were lucky ourselves. Though our trees lost a few limbs, they all remained standing and we had no real damage to the house. Probably thousands of cars were smashed.

The next day I went out for a walk with my husband. We counted more than two dozen trees down in just the six-block area we covered. Many of them were across roads and some had entangled power lines in their limbs. The pictures that accompany this were tall taken on the walk and are only a few of the downed trees we saw.

Our power was out for five days. It took almost a week and a half to get cable and internet service back.

Most of the city was without power for a few days. On the second day of the power outage we went for a hot dinner to the home of friends whose power had already been restored. Of the twenty or so traffic-light-controlled intersections we had to pass through to get there, only one had working lights. Some had police officers directing traffic, but they didn’t have enough personnel to cover all the dark intersections.

Our daughter lives in an area of underground power lines and hers was on, so after three days we packed all the meats and other things we wanted to save from the freezer and took them to her, where she made room in her freezer. While there we had the first hot showers in several days and got some time on the internet.

Nonetheless we were counting our blessings even as we sat in the dark in the evenings. My husband and I were both safe. Our house was secure and suffered no real damage. The weather was mild so the loss of heat and air conditioning meant only minor discomfort. We have city water and they have backup generators to make sure the pumping stations keep running. We ate what was in the refrigerator for as long as it remained cool and we had plenty of non-perishable food as well. We have an old-fashioned crock pot that uses sterno (and we keep a supply of sterno around) for heating water for coffee and tea and soups for lunch. We even blessed our backlit Kindles that made reading much easier than trying to do it by the light of battery-run lanterns.

A couple of points I’d like to make to finish up. Even a tropical storm is a terrifying experience. If you’re in a hurricane zone and the authorities suggest you evacuate, do it! Even if the storm goes somewhere else this time, it may not the next. Don’t be complacent.

Not a great picture. It's hard to see that there are actually two

trees down across the road. The second one is about 20 feet 

behind the first.

Second, be prepared. Before each storm, we took in all the patio furniture, filled the car’s gas tank, and charged all our devices, including making sure that the backup batteries for recharging phones and Kindles were completely juiced up. We took the ice the ice maker had already made, bagged it, and stuffed it into open areas of the freezer. When it made another batch, we bagged more until the freezer was just about full. We got out flashlights and lanterns, put batteries in them, and checked all were working. We made sure they were all in a handy place where we wouldn’t have to fumble around in the dark to find them.

Supplies I like to keep on hand for emergencies include spare replaceable batteries for everything, which have to be checked and rotated periodically, and a good variety of non-perishable foods. We always keep extra cans of tuna, beans, chicken, fruit, vegetables and other tins with a long shelf life. As with the batteries, we rotate the stock periodically. We try to keep a five-day supply of sterno in storage. We have enough wood to keep the fireplace going for several days. (In truth, though, if the weather was really cold or really hot, we’d probably go somewhere else after a day or two.) We have a battery-operated radio, but we found we relied more on our smartphones for news and connection with others. They were slow at times because not all the cell towers were working, but enough were that we were usually able to connect. I have two portable battery chargers for the phones, a small one for my purse that will charge my phone twice and a bigger one that will provide up to five charges. We recharged the bigger one every chance we got and it kept our phones going throughout.

One other thing people don’t always think about is money. My sister the banker recommends keeping up to $1000 cash in small bills (nothing larger than $20) in a safe but accessible place. We found out why this time. Our local grocery store was open, running on a generator, but like everyone else in the city, they had no internet connection. They couldn’t process credit or debit cards. Transactions were cash only.

Weather As Character

by Janis Susan May/Janis Patterson

Picture a bright blue sky glowing with golden sunshine and dotted with friendly, fluffy clouds. Now picture dark grey looming clouds hanging so low you can almost grab a handful of them, while an icy wind scours the land with frigid teeth.

Which would you think of as setting for a lighthearted romantic comedy and which for an angst-filled mystery where terrible things lurk just under the next breeze?

Admittedly, those are two extreme examples, but weather does affect our perception of genre and tone. Now before you jump all over me crying that so-and-so did a terribly horrifying story set on a sunny beach or a rom-com in a storm-lashed castle, I will agree with you. There are always those writers who can take a trope and turn it on its head with great effectiveness. A truly skilled writer can do almost anything – as all of you skilled writers know – but the stormy rom-con and the sun-drenched murder have been done so often that they are almost tropes in themselves.

It’s a lot harder to take a pleasant, sunny location and make it a place of crime, apprehension and horror. I say let your setting work for you – sometimes. Never do anything exactly the same way every time. Keep your reader on her mental toes. And let’s face it, it’s easier to ratchet up the tension in a dark and shadowy place where who knows what is lurking in that lightless corner we must traverse, just as it’s delightful to see the hero’s eyes crinkle in appreciation on a sunny beach. Proper use of the weather can almost turn it into a character in and of itself, and give both depth and foreshadowing to your story.

People have certain expectations and reactions to the weather. I say use them, or, if you use them in reverse, do it whole-heartedly. One of the most romantic scenes I’ve ever watched was the end of the old movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s, where George Peppard (a singularly interesting bit of casting) and Audrey Hepburn find the cat and declare their love in an ugly NYC alley in a pouring rain. Switch upon switch upon switch.

On the other hand, most readers have certain expectations; I’m a firm believer that as writers, especially genre writers, we don’t have to re-invent the wheel. At least, not every time.

Simple Pleasures

by Janis Susan May/Janis Patterson

 It’s been a brutal winter so far, and for some of us it’s far from over. The news has been saturated with shots of gigantic snowdrifts and ice-choked lakes. It’s a dangerous time, when just the simple act of going to work can be life-threatening – if you can get there at all. Even here in the southern part of the country we are coated in ice and a huge number of schools and businesses are simply closed as we struggle to keep warm.

But, once all are well and safe at home, there are compensations. The work of spring – cleaning up and planting the garden, for example – is still safely locked in the future. There is only so much that can be done in the house and, in this season of hunker-down-and-keep-warm there is a disinclination to do housework. (For some of us there is always a disinclination to do housework whatever the season, but that’s the subject for another blog!) The power supply can be iffy, but there are the alternatives of fireplaces and candles and lots of quilts, all in a perhaps unwilling imitation of our pioneer forefathers’ lives.

Don’t get me wrong – I would have made a lousy pioneer. I like my modern conveniences, but still on occasion I can handle the primitive life, if for no other reason than to foster an appreciation of my current electrically powered and well-insulated lifestyle.

When the failure of electricity takes away the TV and radio and computer, we are forced back onto the old methods of amusement – reading, or charades, or board games, or (gasp!) just talking to each other. Of course, you can do these things with the power on, too, but when the power is on families unfortunately tend to fragment into their own spheres.

Whether you have power or not, when you are left to your own devices there is always reading. Even when the weather outside isn't frightful, there is an atavistic comfort in bundling up in quilts, perhaps in front of a cheery blaze if you are fortunate enough to have a fireplace, and reading a book. It doesn’t make any difference if it is a paper or an electronic book, though electronic readers will have to be recharged sometimes, which is a vote on the side of paper books… Anyway, add a cup of hot chocolate and a plate of cookies or, should you be so inclined, a nice hot toddy, and the scene takes on a positively desirable quality.

I realize that it might be considered simplistic or deliberately naïve to even think of taking pleasure from what to so many is close to a national tragedy. On the other hand, my grandmother always said the weather is inevitable, so if it’s going to happen anyway I believe we should go ahead and take what joy we can from it, even as we dream of spring. Happy reading!

TRANSITIONS

by Sandy Cody

I love this time of year. Actually, I love all the seasons and am grateful that I live in an area where they are all different.

In Pennsylvania, each time of year has its own seductive charm, from the spare elegance of a bare-limbed tree in winter to the extravagant bounty of a summer garden. But my favorite seasons are spring and fall. They are less intense than the periods that precede and follow them, but to me, they are more interesting. Lacking extremes of heat and cold, the transition seasons are more gentle. They are also less predictable. Each day begins with a decision: T-shirt and shorts? A sweater and jeans? True, that’s a trivial decision, but if you don’t get it right, you’ll have an uncomfortable day. Even if you do get it right, there’s a good chance it’s just temporarily so. By mid-day, something as capricious and beyond your control as the weather may force you to regret your choice, maybe even change a decision you've made.

Transitions in novels are like that too, both in that they are more gentle (they are not the scenes of intense action, but those moments of introspection that follow the action) and less predictable (when readers wonder how characters will react to events beyond their control). These are the scenes in which the characters have an opportunity to change and grow. They have to make choices, some of which may be trivial in themselves, but they can produce unexpected results that lead to other, more difficult choices, which in turn, lead to more changes and, thus, keep the plot rolling along.

Transitions show the characters in their more reflective moments. It  is here, in the periods of less intense action, that we get to know the characters, to understand why the choices they have to make are difficult for them, maybe even identify with them. I think of these scenes as bridges - where the writer guides the story from beginning to middle to end and, if they’re good at it, they make it look easy, as natural and inevitable as the changing of the seasons.