New Book: Dragoon's Journey

Update: I got the dates wrong! Information now correct:
Wings Publishing will release Dragoon's Journey for June pre-order for $2.99, with publishing scheduled for July. This story ends the story started in Home World ~ Aginfeld and continued in The Nanite Warrior. 

 Opening Line:

Fugitives do not readily enter any heavily policed community, especially ones with populations rabidly paranoid of strangers. Somewhere like the planet Aginfeld. Even if the planet currently held a magnetic draw to galactic tourists, the residents’ mistrust ran deep.

Dragoons, super-soldiers, won the battles but lost the war. Betrayed by their government and held in cryogenic storage for use in future wars, they seek their best-worst chance for finding a home -- Aginfeld, a planet in the last stages of bioformation. The Colonial Pact, a corporation even established governments' fear, wants it. To claim their home the Dragoons must tame the most dangerous, traitorous habitat on Aginfeld.

The Drama and Emotion of Weather

Weather: whatever is happening outside.

Weather is more than just an outdoors condition, it is the Earth telling us we live in it, and at its whim, no matter how we harm what it has developed over millions of millennia. Right now, Earth is our only home. Though we often try to disregard the weather, it affects us. Weather determines what type of shelter we need, how we dress, what we eat, often what we can or cannot do.

This is stating the obvious, everyone knows this, which is the reason it is so effective in stories. It is a storytelling device, often used in movies. I’m sure you can think of film scenes where the weather was used effectively to show danger or despair, triumph or joy.

It works because weather involves the reader’s memory and imagination, and helps to show rather than tell a situation. Weather adds drama by involving the reader’s familiarity with the weather so that he or she can connect it to the situation without a lot of telling. A bright bolt of lightning warns readers of incipient trouble. They know what a prediction of tornado or hurricane means to the characters. A snowstorm can indicate dangerous travel and the possibility of being stranded. An extended drought means the possibility of firestorms, too much rain, or melting snow, means the chance of floods; and if the weather is too perfect? Surely something bad is coming soon.

Because weather can also affect our mood, when days of dark gloomy overcast skies pass, it can bring on a character’s sadness or depression. A heatwave means characters might be irritable, and a drought indicates worry. It is amazing the number of ways weather can evolve a story.

I have used the weather with purpose in writing, and then not. In one of my stories, Home Word ~ Aginfeld, I deprived the characters of weather, put them on an inhospitable planet undergoing bioformation, the inhabitants living in closed habitats. After a thousand years, the inhabitants are afraid of anything outside the habitat, enough to even close off all views of outside. How strange would that be?

Visit the blogs listed below and read other author's opinions on weather in writing

Skye Taylor
Rachael Kosinski
Beverley Bateman
Anne Stenhouse 
Helena Fairfax 
Judith Copek
Victoria Chatham 
Kay Sisk
Dr. Bob Rich 

Hiaku 2

Searing rays slowly sink,

Piercing the evening sky;
a stunning goodbye.

 

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