Welcome to Love of Place. Most of my work celebrates our connection to the natural world.

Most recently, my Knocking on Heaven's Door is the winner in the category of science fiction in the 2016 New Mexico/Arizona Book Awards and in the category of fiction in the 2016 Arizona Authors Association Awards. A number of reviewers have been enthusiastic, including the website Geeks of Doom, which makes me smile. Not many people know me as a geek of doom! But I am happy to embrace the complexity of my personality.

I'm also so pleased that Diary of a Citizen Scientist: Chasing Tiger Beetles and Other New Ways of Engaging the World has been awarded the 2016 John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Nature Writing, as well as the 2014 WILLA Award for Creative Nonfiction from Women Writing the West.

My historical fantasy Teresa of the New World won the 2015 Arizona Authors Association Award for best Children's Literature and was a finalist for the New Mexico/Arizona Book Award for Children's Literature, the WILLA Award for Children's Literature, and the May Sarton Award for Children's Literature.

These are nice landmarks in a writer's life. I would be writing regardless--but, still, whew. It's good to have some encouragement.

Feel free to contact me at http://www.sharmanaptrussell.com or through my author Facebook page, Sharman Apt Russell.


Thursday, July 4, 2013

Monsoons




Traditional lore, pre climate change, is that the rains start by the Fourth of July, and this year, that seems to be true. The white clouds gather in the early afternoon, packets of warm air that rise from the heated ground, cool, and condense. The cloud’s flat base is the level where condensation begins while the rest of the air continues upward in stacks of puffy white. Now in the monsoon season, in less stable conditions, these packets of warm air move up through temperatures that are dropping rapidly, warm air meeting cold air, and the cloud developing higher and more vertically, with peaks and towering cliff walls. Inside the cloud, there is further rising and falling, condensation, coalescence, until water droplets become heavy enough to fall. In cloud language, the word nimbus means rain and a cumulus cloud has just become a cumulus-nimbus, perhaps seven miles in height and several miles wide. High altitude winds shear its top, the anvil from which trails of ice crystals or cirrus clouds spin out in thin fibrous wisps, also called mare’s tails. Electrical energy builds up as water and ice particles are repeatedly split and separated. Suddenly there is a flash, brightness, cracks, and rumbles--a late afternoon thunderstorm. The humans rush to turn off their computers. The dark gray clouds release their swollen bellies, water falls from the sky, and the humans dance. Or maybe they just go about their business, in and out of stores, cleaning house, sitting at their desk, watching children, fixing a car, but suddenly happier. Relieved. The rains have come.

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