Snowportmanteau!

So it looks like Seattle is done with Snowmaggedon, or Snowpocalypse or whatever you want to call it. My corner of the city didn’t get it badly, but of course that did me no good when anywhere I wanted to go was under a layer of ice…

It got me thinking about weather in my writing, though. I’ve changed the setting a little on book 2 in the latest revisions, so I was spending a lot of time staring at average temperature tables on Wikipedia to make sure I was correct for the time of year. Every so often, I’d get sick and tired of WEATHER and get a rebellious impulse and think “well, as long as I’m within the record temperatures for that time of year, couldn’t I make it whatever temperature I want?” Weather is always throwing curveballs at us, after all. A member of my writing group teased me, when I was deciding that I wanted to set that section in later spring to avoid the snow, by “helpfully” relating how she’d visited there once in May, and there had been a snowstorm. But I don’t want snow!!

In the end I did go with the average, though, on the principle that you shouldn’t have something that draws attention to itself unless it actually matters to the plot. If it’s raining in Seattle in the winter (though my annoyance at the overuse of that as shortcut for setting in Seattle without anything else is a whole rant for another time…) people let it slide by as part of the background, because it matches what they already know. If I have lightning in Seattle (it does happen! a whole…I’ve seen it twice in the five years I’ve lived here? something like that) people are going to notice it, and stop paying attention to the characters until I justify it. Why waste space on justification if you don’t need to? If you’re building Frankenstein’s monster, you need to, if your character is brooding staring out the window, you don’t.

Much as lightning is awesome, sadly…