Last night we drove home from our Fourth of July celebration in torrential rain. I mean, when we drove out there at 6, no rain. When we drove back in at 8, the access roads in New Braunfels were closed. 8 inches, the news said. In 2 hours. The Guadalupe River, which has been sluggish because of the drought, is expected to reach flood stage this morning. Welcome to Texas.

I finished the book Saving Cascadia yesterday. I got it because it was about a pending earthquake in the Northwest region of the US. While I was reading it, I was thinking about how to write a natural disaster book. They're hard, and yet they fascinate me.

In Saving Cascadia, the hero was a seismologist, and he was recording these microquakes in a fault line. When he found the cause of the microquakes, he tried to shut down what was causing them to prevent The Big One.

Now, really, how many natural disasters is someone able to stop?

And as a reader, do you really expect the protagonist to be able to stop the disaster?

Does that make natural disaster books harder to write? You know they can't defeat the antagonist? Is saving everyone's life enough?

I have ideas for natural disaster books, but coming up with a good solid story around a tornado chaser or a hurricane hunter is not easy. I mean, tornados are over so quickly, and unless you do something like Twister, where it's a series of storms, that will be one short book.

Maybe I'll just stick to watching disaster movies....