What's your season?

The choice of seasons can really set the tone for a book. For a romance book, I reckon summer is the perfect season. Heat is tense. It makes us a little crazy, and what's better for sexual tension than that? Also, fewer clothes means more bare skin. Shirtless men, swimsuits, sweat, suntan. If I'm writing a sexy scene, I'll take a hot summer night over frigid moonlight any day.

Or maybe that's just me. I come from a summer country. We don't really do cold in Australia. Our winters are mild and uninspiring. There's no chance of getting snowed into a deserted forest cabin with a hot bodyguard, for instance, or kissing under the mistletoe (what's mistletoe, anyway?) or romantic trysts by the fire on bearskin rugs.

Having just lived through an alleged English 'summer', I have a whole new appreciation for Australian seasons. Aussies measure sunshine in 'sunny days per year'. Here, they measure it in hours per year. I kid you not. Brits pray for sunshine, and when it comes, they bask in it with what I can only describe as desperation. They have to cram all their fun – festivals, vacations, parties, outdoor activities – into this tiny, bleak window between July and September. You can't organize anything without Plan B, entitled In Case It Rains… and honestly, who are they kidding? They should be making Plan B in case it doesn't rain. How the English ever invented cricket – a game where you stop playing when it's wet – is beyond me.

So yeah, maybe I've lived a charmed, summery life ☺ but all my books are set in summer, or at least in the heat. In my Shadowfae series, Melbourne is in the grip of a never-ending, scorching summer… because hey, that’s what you get when you let a demon prince run your town! My upcoming book REVELATION is set in New York during the biblical Apocalypse, which begins with a bay full of blood during one stinking-hot summer… and it only gets hotter from there!

For me, summer—real summer—is sexy. Winter is all drizzle and thermal underwear. Ugh.

So are you a winter person, or a summer person? Do you love the heat, or dread it?

P.S. A quick plug for my sexy new vampire short story for Kindle, HUNTER'S BLOOD. It's set during a steaming hot Halloween, when the barrier between hell and earth is at its thinnest… and a pair of vampire demon-hunters face their toughest foe yet: falling in love. You can check it out here. Thanks!

Seasoning my Writing

by Christy Carlyle

      Autumn is my favorite season. I think it must have something to do with the fact that I was born in the fall. So, as a child, I always came to associate the season with good things: my birthday, the return of cool weather, the beauty of leaves turning, and the start of a new school year. I still look forward to those aspects of the seasons. I love the scent of autumn and lately I can smell that change, that turning from summer to fall, in the air. You should see how excited I get when I spot a leaf that has gone from green to orange or red a little earlier than its mates!

        I like the season so much that I find I often use it as a backdrop for my writing. In considering this post, I realized that I set my stories’ action in autumn more often than any other season. This nudged me to start thinking about how seasons can play an important role as an element of setting. Have you ever read a story in which a snowstorm forced the hero and heroine together? Does a summer backdrop offer an opportunity for beach scenes, long days, and sultry nights?

          The traditional symbolism of the seasons also plays a role when I choose to set a story during a particular time of the year. One of my manuscripts in progress has a theme of redemption and forgiveness. I set the key resolution scenes of the story during the winter because I invariably associate the late days of winter and the holidays with these themes. Then again, it seems I don’t always follow convention as other authors, historically, have used winter to symbolize death or lack of hope. Likewise, autumn can symbolize either a waning or a time of satisfaction, when hard work finally leads to harvest.  

      As autumn is my favorite season, I know it will keep popping up as a backdrop in my writing. However, when plotting, I also try to be aware of how the seasons and their accompanying weather might play a role in the action of the story. Setting is secondary to the romance, of course, but occasionally I want my readers to feel the cool breezes of autumn or relate to the incessant drizzle of a spring day. 

     Do you use seasons to invest your writing with their symbolism or enhance your theme? Alternately, as a reader, have you seen authors use weather or seasons in this way?