Last year, I discovered the fantastic resources available for writers at The Bookshelf Muse blog. Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi have created valuable references for writers with their thesaurus collections.
The Emotion Thesaurus gives lists of all the different ways to show an emotion (including non-cliché ones!). The Setting Thesaurus includes unique details to bring various settings to life. Together with the entries for Character Traits, Symbolism, and Colors, Shapes, and Textures, The Bookshelf Muse is a great go-to blog for inspiration, revision help, and adding details.
I’m thrilled to be guest posting at their blog today with an entry for their newest thesaurus—Weather & Earthy Phenomena. Writers usually guest post with them when they have a book release. No, I have no such happy news to report yet. However, my guest post shares details about a weather event we recently experienced here in the Phoenix area—a dust storm. (See the picture above.)
Last week, a dust storm swallowed the entire Phoenix, Arizona valley. To give this some perspective, Phoenix is one of the largest cities in the United States, both by population and by land area. This storm was so large people have called it “historic.”
The winds were about 69 miles per hour (111 kph), and the dust cloud was almost 1 mile tall and 60 miles wide. Luckily, other than trashed pools and some power outages, the Phoenix area escaped relatively unscathed. But the unique event inspired me to write up a description for The Bookshelf Muse.
Check out some videos about last week’s storms below. (These aren’t from YouTube, so the embedding is a bit wonky depending on your browser. I’ve included direct links below each video in case the embedding doesn’t work for you.) Then visit my guest post at The Bookshelf Muse to get the inside scoop on being in the path of a dust storm.
Arizona Channel 12 Weather Story
Time Lapse Video of Dust Storm (via azcentral.com)
Have you used The Bookshelf Muse thesaurus collections before? Which ones are your favorite and why? What’s the biggest weather event you’ve ever experienced? How much do you mention weather conditions in your stories? Do you have any large weather events in your stories? How does it affect your characters?
Photo Credit: Lucy Peterson (via azcentral.com)
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