(Forgive me if you’ve already received this post by email. It’s not published on my blog – for mysterious cyberspace reasons that I don’t understand – so I’m reposting).

I was going to rewrite and then post the entry below about the weather turning chilly but suddenly L.A. has gone from autumn to a heat wave. Maybe four days out of the year it gets up to ninety degrees at the beach, and that’s what it is today. Autumn has vanished. It’s sudden summer, but the beach is empty. Nelson and Margaret Thatcher are lazy in the heat. So am I, so I’ll just post the piece about autumn anyway. * Autumn is subtle in Southern California. It was cool this morning; at the beach the sand had a chilly crust. It’ll get hot in the sun this afternoon, summer hot, but this morning it felt like fall (I know, I know – roll your eyes if you’re back east or in the mid-west wearing your down parka.) If you’re writing fiction about L.A. you’ve got to put in the sun, the heat, not to mention the May gray/June gloom if your characters go near the beach in the spring, or the way door knobs can give you a little shock during a Santa Ana. If you’re in New York you put in the summer humidity and the way the light gets more mellow in the fall, the colors of Central Park, the hint of melancholy in the air. And not only fiction writers, non-fiction writers also deal with the weather. Your characters or you (if it’s memoir) are hot or cold, sweating or adding layers (it’s always good to keep your characters uncomfortable) –  smelling wood smoke in the air on cold evenings, or orange blossoms in the spring or sun block on a crowded beach in the summer or that steamy smell that comes up from the subway in August. Try a list of memories for your characters when they smell smoke or orange blossoms or see the leaves change. And if you’re writing memoir make a list of your own memories evoked by what your five senses pick up.