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If you look at the US weather map, there’s a big red blot over North Texas (headed for Oklahoma I think) with a “tail” that extends across Central Texas and angles across Mexico. The big red blot used to be on top of Central Texas. It’s full of thunder and lightning and rain and little lumps of hail. It thunder-bumped most of the night, and every time I relaxed into deep sleep because the noise was only rain (Yay rain!) another embedded lump of noise and flashing lights woke me up.
Not exactly the restful night’s sleep I was hoping for before driving to San Antonio today and having the meet-and-greet thing in late afternoon. However…though I’ve had weather in the recent books, maybe I haven’t had enough weather. Yes, snow and sleet. Yes, rain. But what about a meeting of weather fronts, such as we get here in Texas (and elsewhere in the Great Plains states)…where large air masses collide, play slip-and-slide above and under one another and light up the night sky with garish displays while dumping (in those record moments) 20+ inches of rain on someone within 24 hours? A nice dramatic flash flood.
Nothing quite so dramatic has gone on here this time. But we (using we broadly to mean the area of Central Texas where this happens) do hold national records for rainfall intensity. People get used to the dry gulches, the low-water crossings, and then…if they’re not careful…they’re peering out the windshield into dark-and-too-bright, in rain too heavy for windshield wipers to deal with, and they don’t see the rushing water until they’re being swept off the bridge and tumbled downstream. Why shouldn’t that happen to, say, someone’s supply train?
Writer looks at map, considers the configuration of land and air masses that creates our weather, and shakes her head. Nope. Drat. Did not think of designing Central Texas storm systems when designing the map. Can’t happen. Other storms can (and do, and will) but the particular combination of shapes, distances from sources of moist air masses, etc. etc. doesn’t exist here.
Too bad. For a moment there I had a very cinematic vision of someone’s entire invading army who had used a gulch to sneak along in being tumbled in amongst branches, rocks, stretches of barb-wire fence…no, wait, no barbed wire fencing in Paksworld. SIGH.
And it’s after 8:30 am, so I must away for the last bits of packing & stuff. The weather along the I-35 corridor is frightful, I know there’s construction and other delays going through Austin…so I’m not going through Austin. I’m going west, to take another road down, but have been informed that it has construction in progress where it meets San Antonio’s outer ring road, 1604. But it has higher ground, and is not covered in thunderstorms from here to there, as 35 is. And its bridges over rivers are higher.
R- reports we got over 2 inches and the new big tanks both have over 1000 gallons in them now, while all existing tanks at house and barn are full (had collected some from previous rains.) Last weekend’s work in putting up the second big new tank was definitely worth it.
So I’m off, and won’t be back until…um…Monday night, probably. Without the netbook, I can’t post from San Antonio.
Comment by joan Hardy — February 18, 2012 @ 12:23 pm
It seems to me that the elves could grow something just as nasty as barbed wire, if they wanted to. Or something similar to stinging nettle.
Comment by ellen — February 19, 2012 @ 2:18 am
There’s something a heck of a lot nastier on Paksworld, not used by the “good” elves, but by the bad ones, and other evil beings: Achrya’s webbing. I’d rather barbed wire or even electric fence than that!
Comment by ellen — February 19, 2012 @ 2:34 am
But for the good guys there’s stakes and nails and shards of glass and sharp rocks you can use, along with stinging nettles and thorns and briars and some poisonous nasties. Or covered pits with stakes and spears.
Comment by David — February 20, 2012 @ 12:33 pm
I spent a few memorable months in west Texas many years ago. I got up early one morning to drive back to California, and it was just starting to rain as I left San Angelo around 6am. By the time I was approaching El Paso, the newscasters were talking about record flooding, and there were people waterskiing in the drainage ditch next to interstate 10. It’s pretty scary to imagine the kind of rain that can start with a dry ditch, and 5 or so hours later it’s deep enough to run a boat and skiers in.
It would be interesting to have some scenes where a supply train or invasion force had to deal with that kind of flooding. A big enough fire can do strange things to weather patterns… Or maybe even someone is using magic to bring in rain to quench said magical fire?
Comment by tuppence — February 20, 2012 @ 1:19 pm
I saw the new book at Boskone this past weekend. And I have the book on order, and an e-copy on order so I couldn’t quite justify buying it to get a jump start. And didn’t dare to spend the rest of the day reading the dealers copy.
Sigh.
Comment by Jenn — February 20, 2012 @ 1:44 pm
Quite the change from last some huh?
So, do you often think up horrible and/or annoying thing to inflict upon your defenseless characters from real life experience?
Suddenly I am hit with at vision of you cackling at your computer screen. Lets see how they like this! Do you ever give the evil characters a bad day. Sore toe, spell back-firing, Half the castle tumbling down the cliff because no one thought about erosion? Of course they will most likely take it out on some poor prisoner in their midst so perhaps it is a mercy that you don’t.
Comment by Maureen — February 20, 2012 @ 7:38 pm
You’ve already had caltrops; I think that’s at least as bad as barbed wire.
Comment by elizabeth — February 20, 2012 @ 8:37 pm
ellen: Just tell me if you don’t want me to show up…you’re far too inventive at trapping paths!
Comment by elizabeth — February 20, 2012 @ 8:47 pm
When I was a kid, the road that crossed the Pecos River canyon used to dip down one side with switchbacks, cross a low-water bridge at the bottom (you could look downstream and see several previous bridges that had been ripped loose) and climb up the other with switchbacks. You couldn’t drive it fast (steep grade and the switchbacks) and you couldn’t see far upstream. The Pecos starts picking up water in New Mexico, hundreds of miles away, and once it’s in the gorge, it’s there until it comes out.
So friends of my mother’s, on a bright sunny day with no rain visible anywhere around, were crossing the canyon when a very big wall of water came roaring through. Three cars were on one wall or the other. The only people who survived instantly abandoned their car and climbed the rock as fast as they could.
Now there’s a bridge high above the whole canyon. That was the only river we crossed on a low bridge that my mother would never let me stop and play in (roads weren’t busy then.) She would check the weather reports for the whole length of the river, look carefully for any sign of rain (weather reports weren’t that good then either) and then go down and back up as quickly as possible, which was never quick enough for her.
I have seen flash floods in arroyos…we were about to cross a bridge and knew (from the rain in the hills some distance away) that there might be one–we’d crossed another ridge just after one–so we stopped. And there it came, the boiling brown front maybe 3 feet high, cactus and branches tumbling in it. (Family rule: If you’re camping, NEVER camp in that nice sandy-floored arroyo.)
Comment by Daniel Glover — February 20, 2012 @ 9:17 pm
My mom’s brother and his wife were pushed downstream during one in eastern Wisconsin back around the time you were just mentioning Elizabeth. The “river” is not far from the family farm which is on the high ground in the county–downhill every direction to the Green Bay or Lake Michigan–so it was raining real hard for the creek/river to fill up that fast, over the bridge by several feet. The both survived but another couple did not. We’ve had more flash flooding the past decade or so here with the draining of swamp and the use of field tile for draining.
Comment by ellen — February 21, 2012 @ 12:03 am
Yeah, I lie awake at night thinking this stuff up! Don’t worry though, I’ll disarm all the traps if you let me know beforehand. Although, there’s one thing I have no control over; the weather. It’s been a very wet, cool summer in eastern Australia, and our driveway is almost impassable (we live out of town), we want to get a bobcat in to fix it but it’s just been too wet. And we’re having way more than our fair share of flashfloods here in Oz! But at least the tank is full. Haven’t had to buy water for ages.
Comment by Richard — February 21, 2012 @ 4:43 am
“Shards of glass”, Ellen? We’ve seen the stained-glass windows in the Hall at Fin Panir. I’ve never spotted any ale sold in glass bottles. How much glass does Paksworld have, Elizabeth? How expensive is it?
Comment by Richard — February 21, 2012 @ 4:59 am
Why does Bengal have monsoons but Texas not? Why can Chile have an El Nino year but Cape Town or Perth not? How many other fantasy authors bother to ask such questions about their worlds?
Getting the bad guys caught in a flash flood is generally considered to be the lazy way out: unless, of course, you have Elrond and Gandalf working together to raise it.
Comment by GeekLady — February 21, 2012 @ 9:28 am
Hey, Texas has monsoons, as well as hurricanes and run of the mill rainstorms.
But this is one of the reasons I like the Paksworld so much. It’s the only fantasy series that applies as much thought into their world as Tolkien, who spend meticulous amounts of time synchronizing his moons. Maybe more.
There’s really not a lot of fantasy world creation like this, now that I think about it. A lot of authors lately just use kind of a cheat, creating a fantasy world hidden under our own world’s skin.
Comment by Daniel Glover — February 22, 2012 @ 7:24 am
Had to do some checking of facts.
Mercades Lackey used an elven induced storm as a final event to break down the tension she’d built up between her protagonists in Bardic Voices–used lightning strikes to get them in to the dryish creek bed then the quick rain to wash them downstream. Good series that one started.
Comment by elizabeth — February 22, 2012 @ 10:09 am
The use of weather in fiction seems appropriate to me (perhaps because I live almost-in-the-country and regularly see weather events as external incidents to which humans react with changes of behavior. It’s a way of reinforcing the lack of control that characters have. In the original Paks books, to make the weather variations realistic, I looked out the window every day…and if it was a season we don’t really have, as that season approached I picked a city reported on in the daily weather reports (didn’t have internet then; now I use internet weather) for the weather. (If anyone’s wondering how I handled weather in the SF series, that was a bit more complex. Not all planets could be on the same seasonal cycle or have all the same balance of land mass to open water. By ’97 I had internet, which gave me access to southern hemisphere daily weather reports and for some cities information on their average weather in other seasons, month by month. Hence, “realistic” weather for multiple planets offset from one another in different seasonal cycles with varying degrees of inclination and thus weather variation by hemisphere. I rarely needed more than two or three planets to show their seasons at one time–characters didn’t always spend time on a planet and then travel directly to another.)
In Paksworld weather has always been a factor (as it is anywhere people don’t live in HVAC-serviced boxes, and sometimes even then.) The characters spend a lot of time outdoors; weather affects all their activities. It’s not realistic to avoid all adverse weather events. It is necessary to set things up so that the reader is aware of weather, of the specific kinds of weather characters expect in that location for that season (north Tsaians are never amazed at a spring snowstorm; citizens of Cortes Vonja might well already be complaining of a hot spring day at the same time.) If there are specific weather threats the average reader might not be aware of from personal experience, those need a bit more “pointing” so they’re perceived as natural within the setting. In Remnant Population, it’s clear that the settlement is near the ocean in tropical to subtropical latitudes, and there have been storms in the past that destroyed some resources–so the hurricane in which Ofelia meets the indigenes is not a deus ex machina. It’s something semi-familiar to the protagonist.
There are areas where flash floods occur, as they do here, but not a precise equivalency, which will determine how rainfall intensity/frequency. I drove through a small area of extreme intensity this past weekend, on the way to San Antonio: well over 2 inches/hour, reducing road visibility to barely enough to keep moving, and road conditions ditto. (Water landing on the road could not run off fast enough, so contact with the road was…tenuous. Roadside ditches were brimful and moving fast…no place to stop where you coudln’t be rear-ended by some idiot who didn’t slow down. So the person ahead of me crept along and I crept along behind ’em. It lasted just a few minutes, as we drove through it, and then we were back to normal rain.
Comment by Fred Zebruk — March 21, 2012 @ 7:54 pm
Weather is a very realistic and necessary plot element. I just checked tDoP to see if Pak’s world has a moon. It seems you haven’t mentioned one. That means that tidal ranges where they exist will be relatively small.
You frequently have had the Lady of the Ladyforest accompanied by good weather (even with a change of season). This convinced me that the bad weather occuring after Orlith’s murder was the work of the iynisin.
You have had weapons, especially swords shatter at a bad moment and even rain inconvenience bowman but I do not remember any use of a sling or bolo when a bow won’t work.
Looking forward to book four.
Comment by Fred Zebruk — March 21, 2012 @ 7:57 pm
Sorry about needing a second comment. You talked about deprevation after war in your books, but you haven’t used famine as a means to an end or a driving necessity.
Comment by elizabeth — March 21, 2012 @ 11:13 pm
Fred Zebruk: There isn’t a moon. Which meant I had to beware of words like “month,” avoid having moonlit nights and plants or animals whose reproduction is linked to the full moon, and double-check myself on what a solar tide would be like. (Hence–either late in Sheepfarmer’s Daughter or early in Divided Allegiance, when the Company is in one of the Immer ports, no decription of a nice big tide. I had to rewrite that part, all those years ago, because I’m used to ports that have lunar tides.)
All because I didn’t want to bother with calculating a lunar orbit that wasn’t exactly like ours. It’s not a science fiction world, but even so–if I’d hung a moon in that sky, I’d be obliged to make it work.