The first day of Camp NaNo is history. I did my midnight writing, and my day writing . . . I did a lot of writing and modeling and reading yesterday. This last first day of July seemed like I did nothing but work.
But it was good work.
So one chapter, or scene, or whatever you want to call it, down and in the story. Twenty-seven hundred words were entered before it was all over, and it’s a good start. The first chapters saw a meeting between one of the instructors and the headmaster of the school; today I write about a couple of students, or three . . . or is it four? Anyway you’ll see these people, who will be young girls, who will be out standing in the–
Hey, good question. What’s the weather like?
I ran into this problem yesterday when I was writing up a scene. I was describing something that was dark, and how the exterior light could affect the shadows even more, and I began thinking, “I wonder what the weather was like?” Oh, sure, I could, you know, make it up, because that’s what writers do. There lay the rub, however: my school is rooted in a real place, and the story takes place at a certain moment in time. So what was the weather like then?
This is where Weather Underground comes into play.
I don’t remember when I first stumbled upon the Weather Underground site. I know I was looking up something about the history of weather for a particular area, and during my used of the Google (which more people should use, trust me), the site popped up. I figured out how to find the weather for a particular region, looked it up, and went away happy.
I can never just look up something once, however.
Mostly what I use the site for is history. I want to know what weather was like on a particular day somewhere in the world. Or I want to look up a hurricane. Or I want to see maps. But I have it in my bookmarks, because I love this sort of stuff.
That said, when I was writing my scene yesterday, I wanted to talk about how the light from outside affected a particular place in my Great Hall. I started to write about that very thing, and the stopped because I didn’t really know what the light from outside was like? Was it bright? Dim? Non-existent? I knew the time was around noon, but I didn’t know the outside conditions.
Of to Weather Underground to look up the weather on Cape Ann for a particular date in the year 2000. Went to history, plugged in the dates, and . . . there it was. Not only did I have an overview, but an hour-by-hour condition table. After that, all I had to do was look for my closest time, compare it to when my scene was taking place, and extrapolate.
I needed old weather just so I could write up a couple of paragraphs of story.
Yeah, I like to go there.
