Let's Talk About the Weather

I'm sitting here writing this (Wednesday night) and wondering if my husband will make it home. It's been mixed snow, rain, and every possible combination of the two all day, so the roads are... interesting, and conditions are deteriorating.

Where this gets interesting, and ties into writing, is that a little over five years ago this would have been utterly alien to me. I'd encountered snow maybe twice in my entire life up until then. Now, well... I got home from work this evening, and the first thing I did was get the snow shovel and clear the front path. Now, if you've never shoveled snow before, the stuff is fricking heavy. Shoveling it is hard work, no matter what those damn postcards say. And snow does come in multiple types. There's the soft fine white powdery crap that feels kind of like cold sand, the heavy wet crap which is kind of warmer and tends to happen more when the temperatures are hovering somewhere close to freezing as opposed to below freezing. There's re-snow, which happens on a windy day after heavy snowfalls. Whiteout, where the stuff is coming down so thick and fast you really can't see where the heck you're going. And it's all, every last bloody kind of it, miserable.

It's also unearthly quiet. It's silent coming down unless there's wind, and then what you hear is the wind, not the snow. You hear sleet and rain, but not snow. The wretched stuff also muffles everything else.

As for snow-blindness, well, I knew about that intellectually, but I didn't understand it until the day I saw snow-covered fields glistening silver in bright sunlight.

All of that, including struggling through hip deep snow, is writing experience. Without it, the long march to Constantinople in Impaler wouldn't have been anywhere near as vivid.

One day I'll get to write something that uses some of my tropical weather experiences too, like the warm rain (aka 'liquid sunshine' or 'pineapple juice'), or days where it's gotten so hot that when a storm comes through and the rain starts you get curlicues of mist rising off every surface, or humidity so thick you wiggle your little finger and break out in a sweat. Or the storms sweeping through and people going out into them to get wet and cool down.

In the meantime, of course, the inner writer keeps watching what's going on and taking lots of notes. It's all useful someday.

So what are some of the times where you thought you understood something and then experienced it - and really understood it?

Oh, and a bonus for the Brisbaneites - Before and After pictures of the floods: http://www.abc.net.au/news/infographics/qld-floods/beforeafter.htm

Weather and Writing

We knew it was coming. Last night's national weather report on both the BBC and ITN ended with the words "And it will be particularly bad in the Medway Towns".

To some degree, the Medway Towns is weather-girl code for London. National weather forecasters are not allowed to mention London. It just provokes letters in green ink from pedantic autists in the provinces along the lines of:

Dear Sir
You always focus on London in your weather forecasts and you never mention my own village of Lower Fumbling in the Wold. We have been an important centre for sheep dung distribution since the times of Ethelread the Unready.........

Well you get the idea but I digress.

They said it was coming and it has. The car is snowed in. A nasty east wind is giving us a wind chill of minus twenty five centigrade and I have had to put a blow heater in the rabbit's hutch.

No 2 daughter has set off on a trek through the snow to get her hair done, the risk of freezing to death in a snowdrift somewhere being infinately preferable to a bad hair day. I am supposed to run her back around the M25, London's Magic Roundabout, on Sunday so she can get back to Uny in time for her lecture on the depiction of nude women on Greek urns.

Mind you, it's not all bad. I am averaging 1,000 words a day on my novel.

My novelette (novela? long short story?) Storming Venus, the sequel to Storming Hell, is up on eArc at Baen's Universe.

You can read it for free here:

http://www.baens-universe.com/articles/Storming_Venus

If you like it please leave a donation.

John

PS the first person to ask how much a Greek urns will get attacked by flying monkeys.

White Hell of Kent

This has been a year of wierd weather in England. We have had floods, storms and now snow in southern England. The wind is blowing in off the Baltic and we have the unusual combination of precipitation and cold.

Six inches fell in a night and life has ground to a halt.

The Eurostar has been shut down after an interesting design feature revealed itself. The electrical systems fail when the trains plunge from the cold French countryside into the warm Channel Tunnel. Four trains jammed the tunnel, one after the other.

Above shows the view from my front door. Note that flowers grow outside pretty much all the year round.



The December sun peaks over the horizon.


But not for long.



The holly bush in my back garden.


View from my bedroom window over the Mierscourt Valley estate. Note the palm tree. They grow well here in Kent. We also have vinyards.



Wabbits don't like snow very much.