Oops! Sorry! Absence not intended! If you have friends who decide to go sailing ahead of a hurricane, and then call you while they’re trying to find a sheltered place to dock, tell them to stay safe, and then later, give them a loving but scathing piece of your mind.
That’s a sundog in the photo. It was very late in the day, sunset time, and for some reason involving complicated atmospheric physics, conditions were just right for the appearance of this effect produced by the Sun. I never miss a chance to get a weird shot like this, so I got the camera, made a bunch of shots and then pulled this one up.
It’s really nothing more than water vapor that has crystallized at a high altitude and turned to ice. The ice acts as a prism, breaking the sun’s colors into this rainbow effect. It is unusual to see one like this, with ice crystals streaming eastward off the prism, away from the setting sun, but at that elevation there was a strong air current pushing anything like this cloud of frozen vapor eastward in front of it.
There are many aspects to the sundog. In some folklore, a sundog in the morning usually means three days of bad weather. Since they usually appear in the winter, if you are lucky enough to see one at sunrise, make a note to yourself to watch the weather forecasts and try keeping track of what happens. If you live in a city, the heat created by any city may or may not prevent a snowfall, but in winter – well, Ma Nature has her own way of doing things. Ask Boston how it felt to dig out of a 9-foot snowfall.
Some time back, I had to go visit my parents in the middle of winter so I started the trip at 5AM. Cold, clear sky in the morning at sunrise does not mean it will be like that forever, and I saw a perfect circular sundog around the rising sun as I headed south. I had been warned. Sure enough, when I returned to the north end of the state, I ran into a nasty snowstorm that was so bad, I pulled off the road at a truck stop to wait it out.
What’s this all about? When you set out to create a world independent of this planet, whether it is a fantasy world, a sci-fi world or just a small, local place where everybody knows everyone else and there is a mystery underway, awareness of your character’s surroundings is very pertinent to the story. Small details, like clouds in the sky ahead of or after a storm add color and substance to the narrative.
It isn’t just a sunny day. It’s a hot, sultry summer day, or a cold, wind-blasted winter sunrise after the blizzard sweeps the fields clean of snow, deposits it in your driveway, and brings down the local cell phone tower. No cell tower, no comm link. Or it’s the early summer sunrise with a wheat field that needs to be harvested, with small birds scattered here and there, sitting on the stems of the wheat, stealing the kernels right out of the seed heads. (Wheat kernels are seeds, as are corn kernels and dried whole peas.)
Those details are meant to draw your readers into the story and make them feel that they are part of it. It isn’t necessary to load up on details constantly, but as a means of putting your readers in touch with what your characters are doing and where they are, these things matter. Put yourself in that setting in your imagination, look around you and ask yourself if this tavern full of grumpy, large guys is one where you can seek food, warmth and refuge from the cold and will the owner let you sit by the fire overnight?
Wolf Moon Books and Images 