A Season For Plotting – Open Book Blog Hop #181

♦Welcome to another edition of the Open Book Blog Hop!♦

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Topic #181

Despite the recent snow in the Rocky Mountains, it’s summer in the Northern Hemisphere. Do your stories and worlds reference seasons and do they play into the plots of your books?

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Welcome back to another edition of the Open Book Blog Hop! If you’re new to the series, the authors included are grateful for your reads and appreciate, even more so, when you share our writings with your friends. If you’re new to the series, welcome aboard. The authors engage and impress weekly. Be prepared to become a regular reader.

Setting is often referred to as one of the characters. The interaction speaking characters have with the exteriors and interiors of their setting forms another level of meaning the reader subconsciously deciphers, and of which they are sometimes consciously aware. Setting is an important part of the story due to this power. Before you panic, let me reassure you, setting is where you can get sneaky creative. 

So how have I used the aspect of seasonal setting to tell part of my stories?

One of the obvious ways is to reflect a character’s mood, or stand in contrast to it. This is to highlight the emotion for clarity, and to immerse the reader. Sometimes it reaches toward the reader to help them relate. Have you ever had a terrible day, and the weather was absolutely perfect, and you just sat there feeling either robbed or mocked by powers beyond your reach? When you read something like that happening to a character, you better relate to them, and that helps your buy in to the story. 

For Blue Honor, I utilized this tool. Being a historical drama with romantic tones, this use of setting made a lot of sense. It raises the stakes for the readers, constantly. The seasons, weather, and other aspects of the setting all follow the ebb and flow of the action. 

Seasons mattered in OP-DEC: Operation Deceit because it mattered what the weather was for bombing missions to take place. In fact, any flight could be hampered by the weather, and seasons have their unique weather. My favorite easter egg about this book is that it followed actual submarine rules on moonlight, and the window of time allotted between mid-May and early June. I had a lot of fun researching moon phases right beside submarine details. 

The Trailokya Trilogy is more subtle in its use of the seasons and weather. Instead of being a silent character, settings are more like Easter eggs, referring back on things within the story. For instance, water flowing, as it would in the warmer seasons, is an indication that a character is about to appear. Similarly, winter symbolizes Odin and Fenrir. Zion is not a planet in our universe, but a universe of its own, and the seasons do not manifest there under the rules we have. 

Let’s check out how the other authors use seasons in their worlds. Click on the links below to read… 

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