The Thrill of Storms: Nature’s Drama Unleashed

I rarely watch TV during the summer nights. I prefer to sit on my porch, crack a beer, turn the lights off, and watch the light show unfold before me.

Each season, phenomenal storms form in the west and then crawl eastwards to where I live. They rumble and flash, tormenting everything along the way. Their drama is way better than anything I can see on television.

Something exciting about those storms draws me in. It’s visceral and primitive. My body awakens and activates. I feel more alive when the sky swells and ignites with fire. When the lightning finally breaks through that wild Beast, my heart races. A flush of heat rises in my skin. Goosebumps form. One localised lightning strike fills me with extreme excitement. The air thumps throughout my body after it finishes me off.

I know thunderstorms well because I used to photograph them. I wrote about them. When it came time to write about the superstorm, I drew from my deep, personal experiences. The sensations I got from watching tropical thunderstorms develop, move and deliver their wrath were placed directly onto the shoulders of my book’s protagonist. What I saw with my eyes, he sees with his. What I felt, he feels. Readers will enjoy his innermost thoughts and sensations when he encounters the storm to end all storms.

And now we must say something about sex. After all, some may have missed the point when reaching this paragraph. Connect the dots. Yes, let’s confirm that right now. The storm is sexual. All of it.

Storms and sex are intrinsically linked — at least, they are for me and Mitchell. My part was to bring those two worlds together in my book, so a reader could come along for the ride and get tormented and teased by the storm in the same way.

Yes, I revealed a large part of myself. I rarely do that.

Sex and storms. There, I said it again. Twice, I’ve made the connection known.

There is the highly charged electricity, the anticipation, noise, frantic activity, the explosive climax, and then the wetness. These are the bones of my sexually-driven storm story, but it took eight years and thirteen rewrites to give it some proper flesh. Yes, it’s important to mention that, too. SEETHINGS wasn’t a quick write. It was a thorough one.

There is the lover and the serial killer I wove into the narrative — just to make things extra interesting. Now you’ll want to see where this goes, right?

–Michael (Author of SEETHINGS, downloadable and free for a limited time)