Susan and John Ruff, Fantasy Authors

Writing in the Rain.

It sounds like song lyrics: “I’m writing in the rain. Just writing in the rain. What a glorious feeling…”

In truth, I am not actually writing this blog post in the rain. Which is to say, I’m inside my house and my computer is not getting wet. However, for the last couple of days, a large storm has been dropping rain on San Diego County. For most places in the U.S., the amount of precipitation we’re receiving would probably not be a big deal. But where I live, people are not used to having water fall from the sky in large quantities.

Listening to all that rain come down reminded me of how often rain has influenced both my travels and my writing.

The influence on travel is easy to describe — no matter where John and I go on vacation, it tends to rain while we’re there. That probably happens to everyone when traveling, but because I am not used to the rain, the rainy vacation days tend to remain in my memory. John and I have even joked about being rain gods who cause precipitation wherever we go.

In a previous blog post, I described our adventure in the rain on Catalina Island, but we also had memorable rainy days on many other trips. I’ll never forget our first night in China, when our driver had to negotiate busy traffic during a thunderstorm that poured down water so thickly I could barely see out the car windows. Near the start of one of our trips to England, we sat in our hotel room in the rain, listening to a weather forecaster talk about how wonderful it was that the long drought had finally ended. When we were driving through Arizona one time, the storm was so bad that we had to pull over to the side of the road to wait for the worst of it to pass by.

Rain during vacations can often be beautiful. When we were in Istanbul, the drizzle gave the marble pavement a silver sheen, and the puddles reflected the magnificent architecture. During a trip to Baja California, several days of rain had made the grass grow and blanketed the normally dry landscape in a lovely emerald green.

Probably because rainy days are so memorable for me, they also tend to appear in our fantasy novels. In The Keyhole Wizard, two of the main characters first meet in the middle of a downpour. Then the rain washes out the road, leaving the heroes unable to travel any farther.

In 60th Hour, drizzle falls during much of the early part of the story, reflecting the gloomy uncertainty that the characters feel about the coming end of the Calendar.

Before I close today’s blog post, I ought to mention the one amusing turnabout to our travels in the rain. When John and I took a helicopter trip while visiting Kauai in the Hawaiian Islands, we got the rare treat of flying over the top of Mt. Waialeale (the rainest spot in the U.S.), because it was not raining that day.

-Susan 2/2/2024