Hurricane Patricia

It's going to have to be a short blog post this week, as I'm nearing the end of the first draft of Gray III and need to focus on that.

This week, a storm came out of nowhere and became a record-breaker in 48 hours. I look at the tropical storm page at Weather Underground every morning during the Northern Hemisphere season and often look back a second time each day. I play through the various satellite loops at NOAA and watch windmaps spin. I looked at this invest on Wednesday and it was three random blobs. I doubted it would start spinning and come together. Olaf looked much prettier.

We all know now--I was wrong!

It led to one of those afternoons disaster freaks like me so enjoy. On Friday, I sat in front of The Weather Channel (down the street--I don't have a TV) with my laptop and simultaneously watched live beach webcams, blog posts from storm chasers, and anything else I could find. I wasted four hours at it and had a fine time.

I didn't even have to suffer the guilt about deaths and serious injuries that comes after a disaster-watching binge, for there have been none reported so far. People who could little afford to lose anything lost everything, though, and I am sad for that.

There may be a stand-alone novel about a hurricane one day. I've drafted one on a tornado (a year ago! yikes!) and plan to have it out in the spring, but after that I'll turn to writing a new series and stand-alone disaster novels will have to take a back seat for a year.