watching the weather

[marycatelli]

Ah, the disadvantages of picking up a work after leaving it for a while.

The outline helps, of course, but what I find slips through the cracks is the weather.

I still remember the first time I read through a novel with an eye to seeing how the author did something.  It covered many years, and I wanted to see how it handled the changes in season.  At the end, I observed -- it didn't, after all, and I had just not noticed it didn't include them.

I tend to.  But at the moment, when the landscape is drab brown with crocuses and daffodils and some bright blue flowers I glimpsed out of the corner of my eye brightening up, that's what comes to mind when my hero and heroine are trudging down the road.  It takes a minute before I remember that it's late spring, or even summer, and the heroine had been able to gather wildflowers and make them both flower crowns before they go into a city adorned with floral decorations.  Daffodils and crocuses would not suffice.  (Dandelions would.  But having already seen the first dandelion of spring, I will not put the annoying yellow things in my story.)

Ah, well.  This story's going to be fun because I've already decided to give it a climate unlike the one I live.  Winter is the rainy season, and they don't get snow. . .gonna have to keep track of things like that.

Comments

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

Ahh, so you have a Mediterranean climate going there! If it's not as arid as here (or parts of Greece and Italy) then you might get some rain other times, and a steady water supply through the summer is not so vital. But if it's dry and warm for six months out of the year, the farmers and truck gardeners really start looking for ways to store up water and reliable sources to irrigate from. And man, the power struggles over rights to the snow-melt rivers from the mountains.

[marycatelli]

Water rights. There's something to get passionate over.

Not, I think, in this case. For one thing, the ending really needs a plentiful supply of rain. 0:)

[headnoises.livejournal.com]

Have you considered putting up pictures of their season?

[marycatelli]

It changes.

I've written novels that took days or weeks, but those I can generally keep track of. It's when it's six months, or over a year, or something. . . .

I can also hold forth on the Fun and Games of having your heroine get pregnant and deliver during the course of the novel, with certain other events happening at points during it.

[headnoises.livejournal.com]

So get an old calender with proper pictures-- or make a collection of ones that fit the "look" you have in mind for time/place-- to help get your head in the right place?

[marycatelli]

That's a possibility. . . .