last night i went to a discussion by ian rankin and gunnar staalesen. and, despite the countries of each author being separated by the north sea, their characters bear more than a passing resemblance to each other. the two writers seemed to be puzzling this as they spoke, then rankin, almost as a throw away suggested that maybe the dark nights and long winters common to both norway and scotland have something to do with it. i didn’t think much about this at the time, then after i went home, ate, drank, talked, watched the first snow fall, fell asleep far too late and woke, barely four hours later with a mind going crazy with story ideas and this thought of geography.

for a while now i’ve been trying to find a link between some of my favourite writers. and now i think i might have it. geographically there is no cluster at all, but now it seems to make sense. a high proportion of them come from the american midwest. then there’s germany, austria, poland, ireland, norway, scotland. and the connection seems obvious now, but the thing binding them all has to be the weather. all of these spots have relatively bad winters, with drawn out evenings. i guess if the weather were better then there’d be more choice. maybe this is where the tradition of storytelling comes from. at home, warm, with hours to fill, there is not much else to do save to create something new. 

it’s just a thought i had. my feet are cold now. i need to sleep some more. and hope this weather holds.