Cool Reading by Andy Scheer

The novel's title caught my attention, captured my imagination, and convinced me to take a look. Not bad for two words: Shivering World.

For several weeks I've been considering what books to take this month as I serve as my father-in-law's co-driver, piloting his 1930 Ford Model A from Colorado to a car show in Michigan.

This past week, when author Kathy Tyers mentioned

her 1991 science fiction novel, something clicked.

Model A's were built long before air-conditioning, and if the states on our route are running true to form, I could use a book that makes me want to put on a parka.

In her recent book, The Dance of Character and Plot, novelist DiAnn Mills encourages writers to incorporate their story's setting as an antagonistic character. Several novels set in a freezing climate came to mind.

In the end, I settled on re-reading Polar Star by Martin Cruz Smith — one of his series featuring a Soviet-era criminal investigator, this one set on a trawler in the middle of the Bering Sea. If I can tolerate the stink of fish that permeates the vessel, I'll appreciate how the book's sense of place leaves me chilled to the bone.

Still, I'll plan to check the week's forecast before we go. In case the meteorologists are predicting heavy rain, I'll be ready with a copy of Clive Cussler's Sahara.

Sensory Writing by Andy Scheer

I woke up the past two mornings smelling smoke.

The trouble is, I'm not at my sister and brother-in-law's camp in the middle of Michigan's Upper Peninsula—a place where that scent evokes memories of campfires, marshmallows, and watching the first stars emerge.

Instead I'm living in northeast Colorado Springs, a few miles from where thousands of acres and hundreds of homes have burned in our second summer of wildfires.

The past two nights as the winds shifted, a cloud of smoke descended over the city with the scent of raw destruction. A scent I once enjoyed now sets my nerves on edge.

In the past few weeks in other communities, people I know have encountered days of flooding and killer tornadoes—events with a signature of scents, sounds, and textures that will always remind them of the events they've just endured.

No wonder, then, that the most powerful writing uses sensory imagery beyond the visual.

I reflect on a novel I just trudged through—largely because new examples of British naval fiction in the age of sail are so scarce. The author was careful to get the nautical details right. Each time a ship changed course, the crew reset the sails. He gave me the statistics of the ships and their crews. But he failed to convey a true sense of place.

Through hundreds of pages I never smelled salt air, or gunpowder, or an infected wound in the overcrowded sickbay. I never tasted salt pork, weevil-filled ship's biscuit, or a glistening, gelatinous pudding. I never felt a freshly holystoned deck or listened to a battered fiddle screech out a shanty.

And I never really connected with the story.

Maybe I'm just unusually attentive to sensory details. But I don't think so. When I read your story I hope I can hear it, smell it, taste it, and feel it.