Weather-ing a book: A Round Robin post

At every writer’s conference, there’s bound to be a workshop on Setting as Character. Gothic house, Bahamian beach, big city, small town… each calls for a different cast of “human” characters and situations. But does the weather influence the book as well?

I think so. I quit reading a popular mystery author when I realized after 5 or 6 books that each of her stories was set in the dreary autumn with a too-hopeless-to-be-helped heroine. It made me consider more closely not only my type of heroine (I need women who can save themselves but aren’t too proud to accept help), but also the weather. And here I had to pull up short, because I was writing nothing but August.

August in Texas usually. Not only is it my birthday month, August in Texas has its own characteristics. With few exceptions, it’s wearyingly hot and dry. Not just a little hot, but over 100 degrees hot. Humid, but no rain. It creates a certain atmosphere of lassitude. Everyone is just waiting for that first gust of autumn air, usually mid-September and then snatched away until October. But the September peek at fall gives us hope. But we don’t have that hope in August.

I had already set a few books in August in Texas. It was time to try a different time of year if not a different place. Spring break in Florida. Autumn in Maine. Fall and spring in Texas. August—but in Hawaii!

To see how other authors handle the weather, please check out the following Round Robin members:

Skye Taylor
Rachael Kosinski
Beverley Bateman
Connie Vines
Anne Stenhouse
Helena Fairfax
Judith Copek
Dr. Bob Rich
Victoria Chatham
Rhobin Courtright

My Kind of Month!

It's my birthday month and time for all those businesses which I support and allow to have my email address to pay up! In other words, I have birthday coupons!

So far:

Chico's: $10 off. What can I say? It's spent already!

DSW: $5 off. No minimum purchase. Expires 8/31. I sense a shoe trip coming on.

Papa Murphy's pizza: free cookie dough with pizza purchase. Expires 8/31. Definitely doable.

Landry's restaurant empire: $25 has been added to my membership card. Expires: 9/15. Very generous, especially considering I have to drive a minimum of 40 miles to find a restaurant in the group.

Chamberlains's Restaurants in Dallas: This is an anniversary offer (August is a BIG month for me). Free creme brulee with dinner purchase. Alas, expires on the anniversary and I don't think we'll make it in.

Surely, there are more to come?

What is it with August?

I think it's the heat.

Although re-creation has been tried, no one has been successful: 1969: Woodstock. August 15-18, a farm in New York.

Since 1938, the first full week of August: Sturgis Bike Rally in the South Dakota Black Hills.

Sorta' since 1986, kinda' the last week of August, although it started, according to Wikipedia, as a Solstice event: Burning Man Festival, north of Reno NV in the desert.

The Bayreuth Festival, a 6-week celebration late July through most of August of Richard Wagner's operatic masterpieces. Bayreuth Germany.

I wonder if they draw the same crowds, if it's a decision each year: Sturgis or Wagner... Nevada desert or Germany?

Ah, August!

'Tis my favorite month: my birthday, my dad's (same day as mine), my sister's, my son's, my anniversary (and umpteen others I know). August is the only month without a major hurrah in it. No federal holiday, no religious holiday, just...

My birthday! This is the month where it pays off to have signed up for all those frequent dining and shopping clubs. I have clutches of coupons. Ten per cent off here, ten dollars off there. And all I have to do is go in. I think they're clever that way, 'cause I'm making my list and I'm going.

But August is sad too, at least sad for those of us who love early mornings. Even with daylight savings time, it's dark now when I get up, while for a glorious month or so in June and July, it wasn't. Perhaps it's to prepare us for the hibernation phase of late autumn and winter.

I'd rather have my daylight. I wonder if there's a coupon for that.

We're having a heat wave...

(It's really hard not to finish the line, isn't it? So, okay, all together: "...a tropical heat wave.")

And we really are. After a June with temps in the 80s for highs and enough rain to turn off the sprinkler system, July came a little closer to being normal, and now August is typical. Typical only in its 100+ days; atypical in that they've just now started.

Every time I listen to the weather, they report the normals, highs and lows. What has struck me is the number of highs set in the year I was born. In August.

With no a/c and pregnant-out-to-there with me, my mother must have been at her most miserable. That she repeated the feat two years later with my sister is a testament to her will to "family plan" rather than any suffering she would do with a toddler and in the heat.

I've rarely had sympathy for any of my mother's health problems (she died ten summers ago of kidney failure due to a heart that couldn't pump efficiently due to ignoring what was best for her health). I've felt she brought most of them on herself. She was loathe to exercise, ate what she pleased (all of it fried), and in later years, ignored the doctor's advice that she was on the verge of diabetes brought on by obesity. I think in her last months she had a few regrets or the fact of her mortality snuck up on her, one, because her attitude changed just the slightest bit.

But think of her pregnant with temperatures over one hundred--records still standing after more than half a century--and I do feel sorry for her.

Bless your heart, Mother, for all the complaining you ever did, you never mentioned it.