A Woman Hanging in the Waves

We shall begin this episode of Heat Advisory Theatre with a brief word from our sponsors, SunSpot Artists International. Please adjust your a/c at this time and remove sensitive plants, pets, and children from direct southern exposure...

I capsize in time, ego overblown.
I hang over the invisible,
Muddy obscure years beneath.
I would have been no captain
On those drowned low seas.
Wife, worshipper, or dead
Willing, wise, or dumb;
My longest upward stare
Scattered by the bright sun silt
That sifts in darkness below
A woman hanging in the waves.

Well now, I am slightly dizzy and seeing little dots right now! What a perfect evocation of too much heat from our sponsors. Shall we get on with the blogisode?

Yep, probably shouldn't have begun this post under the influence of too much sun and too much caffeine. Now that the summer is here in all its brazen glory, though, I'm finding that my writing has taken on a different cast. I don't want to linger in fairy lands, but I am willing to pull out and gut last year's NaNo novel. The novel takes place both planetside and in a space station--neither setting based on any familiar landscapes (at least not right here right now landscapes).

It seems that my fantasy stories are somehow tied more closely to where I live or at least how I experience where I live, to the extent that being at least partially comfortable outdoors is necessary to being able to write them. Part of that is that details of color and smell and feel are borrowed from personal experience. This heat crushes my senses against my own skin, pushing my eyelids down against glare and filling my nose with a hot blankness. I walk outside and I am stunned.

Couple the sensory deprivation of summer with the increasing number of times phrases will flash through my thoughts while I'm driving on the freeway, and you have a seasonal change in the way that I write. Never would have guessed that this would be the case, but I would be very interested to know if others experience a similar link between seasons or time of day and subject matter or type of story.

-- Chrissa