Often but not always, when it’s time for schools in the Seattle area to start up after Christmas vacation, Mother Nature lends a hand by delivering a storm that will add an extra snow day or two to their wintertime break. Having never met a snow day during my own school days in Bisbee, Arizona, I found this to be both interesting and inconvenient.

I’m someone who writes fiction, but I’m too lazy to make up everything. If I wanted to invent a separate universe, I’d be Frank Herbert and write something like Dune. Instead, I use real but fictionalized locations where I’m familiar with the landscape, the flora and fauna, the distances between one point and another, the traffic patterns, and … well … the weather.

For all the reasons listed above, the Beau books are set in Seattle. In the late eighties, when it was time to start Beaumont #9, Payment in Kind, the action commenced in an icy cold Pacific Northwest January, complete with widespread school closures. The writing process on any given book is generally finished a year to a year and a half before the actual publication date, so it’s likely I was doing the actual creation on the story during one of Seattle’s long hot summers when writing about winter weather was a welcome break from living in an AC-free environment.

The book’s pub date turned out to be sometime in January or February of 1991. While doing an event at a Target in Lynnwood, someone approached the signing table and said, “You’re real fast, aren’t you.” What? I wasn’t at all sure what she meant. I must have looked puzzled so she added, “That snowstorm just happened six weeks ago.” Sure enough, 1991 was one of those years that started off with local school kids having an extra couple of snow days at the end of their Christmas vacations. I tried to explain that I had written the book long before the snowstorm in question arrived in the area, but I’m not at all sure she believed me.

A year or so earlier, when writing Beaumont #7, Dismissed with Prejudice, part of the plot had to do with a Samurai sword that had been brought back to the States as a trophy in the aftermath of World War II. Within weeks of the pub date, some Japanese businessmen arrived at a hotel here in Bellevue and began buying up trophy Samurai swords in order to return them to Japan. That one gave me goosebumps.

Now we fast forward to 2025. (It’s still hard to remember we’re not in 2024 anymore!) It’s time to write the next Ali book. I haven’t written a single word of it, but the baby has a name. Ali # 20 is currently named Smoke and Mirrors. In order to write it, I’ve spent the last several days revisiting the beginning of the series by rereading Ali # 1, Edge of Evil. I wrote it long enough ago, that I remembered most of it, but not all.

One passage really struck me. In it, Ali receives a greeting card from Reenie Bernard, her best friend from high school, shortly after already learning that Reenie is deceased. This is the paragraph that took my breath away:

Eager to read Reenie’s message, Ali tore open the
envelope, leaving behind a jagged edge of paper and
a tiny paper cut on her index finger. Inside was one
of those black-and-white greeting cards, the ones
that feature little kids in old-fashioned clothes. This
one showed two cute little girls, a blond and a
brunette. Four or maybe five years old, the two girls
sat side by side, with their arms slung over one an-
other’s shoulders and with their smiling faces aimed
at the camera. Inside the card said, “Some friends
are forever.”

It’s as though my writing self had peered into a crystal ball and glimpsed the Christmas decoration my childhood friend, Pat Hall, would send me some twenty years later—the one I mentioned a blog or two ago. It’s the same two girls, one blonde and one brunette, sitting side by side. On the Christmas decoration, they’re looking at a Christmas tree. In the book, I didn’t say what they the girls were staring at, but, all things considered, I suspect they were looking into the future.

Now I need to go back reading to Ali # 2, Web of Evil, to find out what else I need to know before I start writing Smoke and Mirrors.

Wish me luck.