Sunday, September 7, 2025
Reading by Season by Eileen O'Finlan

Saturday, April 23, 2022
Seasons and Stories by Victoria Chatham
It is now officially Spring 2022. In my part of the world, it still doesn’t feel like it. I envy friends in England who have posted pictures of gardens full of colour, from gorgeous golden daffodils to blue grape hyacinths and multi-coloured primulas. I wonder how many authors use not just the weather the seasons in creating their settings.
April has a hopeful sense of the summer to come, but Charles Dickens writes: Spring is the time of year when it is summer in the sun and winter in the shade, which speaks to the duality in this more than any other season of the year.
Writers look for ways to enhance the drama in their plots and the nuances of their characters, either physically or metaphorically. Just as we sometimes use the weather to create a mood or direct the way a scene goes, we can use the seasons in both our settings and in our characters’ perspectives.
I have certainly used the seasons in my books. My character, Emmaline, is abducted on a perfect September afternoon in my first Regency romance. By the time she is rescued and returns home, it is a whole month later, and the trees in the estate park have already turned colour.
In the second Regency, a lot of the book takes place at sea and in Jamaica, but Juliana calculates that she left England in January, and it’s now September. The seasons are not plot lines in either book, but more indicate the timeline.
In One for the Money, Janet Evanovich uses the season to describe Stephanie Plum’s New Jersey ‘hood: During summer months, the air sat still and gauzy, leaden with humidity, saturated with hydrocarbons. It shimmered over hot cement and melted road tar.
In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling writes of fall: Autumn seemed to arrive early that year. The morning of the first of September was crisp and golden as an apple.
In the movie The Winter Guest, set in northern Scotland, the husband of Emma Thompson’s character Frances dies suddenly, leaving Frances distraught. Her mother (in real life and in the movie), played by Phyllida Law, comes to stay with her. The film opens with a shot of the mother walking across frozen fields and with the camera later panning across a frozen sea. Set in any other season but winter, I’m not sure that Frances’ grief would have seemed so soul-deep. The bleakness of the setting seemed to represent the bleakness in her soul and vice versa.
Just as light and shade, time of day, rain or sunshine
influence the moods we try to create for our characters, so can the season lead
our readers through the seasons of our stories.
Victoria Chatham
Friday, November 19, 2021
Fall Into Autumn by Helen Henderson
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Windmaster by Helen Henderson Click the cover for purchase information |
Normally at this time of year, posts tend to reflect the holidays. However, I already revealed holiday traditions, both mine and those of the world of Windmaster, in other posts. There are still a couple of months in the year so it is too early to do a year in review. I went another route. A line in last month's post inspired this one. There I mentioned that sometimes an author sets a story in a land where they want to go. This time, I'm writing about places I actually have been. This waterfall is a favorite place for pictures. And the next mountain over was a favorite place to spend many holidays and summer weekends.
Waterfall, Pocono Mountains, Pennsylvania |
While I have been across the Pacific Ocean, I'm not a world traveler. Vacations were camping a day or two or three day's drive from home. The settings were woods alongside scenic rivers, at the ocean, or with views of beautiful mountains. All seasons were experienced. My favorite is autumn with its glorious colors, warm days, and cool nights for sleeping. Cool is not always a given temperature. One night in the White Mountains of New Hampshire was so cold, the sleeping bags weren't enough and we pulled every blanket and cover out of the car to supplement it. We found out why the next morning when woke up to a layer of ice on the windshield.
When visiting California I crossed border for a day visit with the neighbor to the south. We took advantage during a trip to Niagra Falls, New York to cross over into Canada. My longest (or farthest adventure) was driving the northern route from California to New Jersey and going up Mount Washington by car. The car was at the summit so we declined the opportunity to walk down.
Beautiful colors of Arizona |
Overseas excursions were a few school class trips (with appropriate security) while living on the island of Luzon in the Philippines, and a harrowing taxi ride during a lay-over in Tachikawa, Japan. A more pleasurable (at least less frightening) Japanese experience was the traditional hotel we stayed in. Sleeping on the tatami floor and walking in my barefeet was quite comfortable. Shoes were left at the door. Tatami is a type of mat used as a flooring material in traditional Japanese-style rooms. The mats are made from rush and cloth where the rush is woven in, and cloth is used to cover the woven ends. A writing note. You might notice the title. That is because the rule in school that fall is not a season was repeated and repeated until we did not use "fall" for "autumn." Enjoy the season for winter is a'coming.
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Red leaves of autumn in the Pocono Mountains |
A backyard donning her autumn colors |
To purchase the Windmaster Novels: BWL
~Until next month, stay safe and read. Helen
Find out more about me and my novels at Journey to Worlds of Imagination. Follow me online at Facebook, Goodreads or Twitter.
Helen Henderson lives in western Tennessee with her husband. While she doesn’t have any pets in residence at the moment, she often visits a husky who have adopted her as one the pack.
Sunday, November 8, 2020
Full Moons have names by J. S. Marlo


Wednesday, January 2, 2019
Settings - Attention to details by J. S. Marlo
There are oceans, beaches, lakes, forests, prairies, mountains, snowy mountains, tundra...but no volcanoes. I like to create fictive small towns within two, or five, or eight hours from an existing real city. That way I can pretend there is an hospital (or no hospital) in my little town, or I can set a charming café next to a library. I can imagine whatever fits the needs of my story instead of relying on an existing town where many of the facilities are set in stone. The Calgary airport is located in the northeast of the city. I can't just pretend it's in the southwest because it's more convenient for my characters. I would get email from my Calgary readers saying "Hey, I live in Calgary. You got the airport wrong". But I can write that my character is driving three hours to catch a flight from the Calgary airport.

Once I chose out the Where?, I need to figure out the When? I can play with four seasons, from scorching heat to biting cold. Now depending where or when I set the story, I can add either thunderstorms, snowstorms, northern lights, gentle rain, blizzard, fog, tornadoes, earthquake, mud slides, sinkholes, glaciers, icebergs... Again, I can brew any storms I want, but it should also be realistic. In my little corner of the world, I can't possibly see northern lights at 11pm at the end of June because the sun hasn't set yet, but I could see them around suppertime in December assuming the sky is clear. I'll grant you it's a detail, but it's the kind of details a reader from a northern community will catch.
If you set a story in a real town or a country you've never visited, make sure you get the details (language, customs, time zones, weather, money, distance, etc...) right. Canadian dollars, Australian dollars, and American dollars aren't the same. Canada and Australia have one-dollar and two-dollar coins, but unlike Australians, we called them loonies and toonies. If in a story, a homeless person stops the hero on the sidewalk and asks if he has a toonie to spare for a coffee, the story doesn't take place Down Under. It takes place in Canada!
Over the summer, I was editing my romantic suspense taking place in a nursing home in Northern Ontario. At one point, my editor (who's not Canadian) commented that I needed to be consistent in my units of measurement, that I couldn't switch back and forth between inches, feet, and kilometres. A long conversation followed during which I explained that even though we converted to the metric system in the mid-1970s, we still use both systems in different circumstances. We measure long distances in kilometers but short distances in inches and feet. My son lives 800 kms away but my guestroom is 10'2" x 12'8". We weigh our food in kilograms but people and pets in lbs. My Chrismas turkey was 5.6kg but my granddaughter is 33lbs and my granddoggie is 14lbs 5oz. The indoor and outdoor temperatures are in Celsius but I set my oven in Fahrenheit. It was -33C on Christmas morning (that was cold!) but I cooked my turkey at 325F. Milk comes 1-litre, 2-litre, and 4-litre cartons but when I make a recipe I measure in cups, tablespoons, or teaspoons. It may not make sense, it may not be consistent (actually it is not consistent), but this is an authentic Canadian setting...and this is so much fun to write, so in the end, the inches, the feet, and the kilometres...they all stayed in the final version of my story.
Be creative and have fun writing, but don't forget to pay attention to details.
Happy 2019!
JS
Correction: A dear reader pointed out that we do have volcanoes in Canada, and the last eruption took place about 150 years ago at Lava Fork in northwestern British Columbia. I should have written we do not have any "active" volcanoes. So I stand corrected. My apology!

Wednesday, August 5, 2015
I am SO over this summer...by Jamie Hill
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Click cover to read more or buy at Amazon |
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