Up until 2015, North Texas was pretty arid, and was in fact in drought conditions for years. Then May 2015 rolled around and it rained for pretty much every day of the month. Ever since then, we get what I can only call monsoon season for May and part of June — we can expect rain every week, often for days at a time. While this is great for the land, it does drive the humidity up to sauna levels, and don’t get me started on the mosquitos.

That being said, it’s weird to read weather predictions for the summer and find out that most of Texas is supposed to be at average or slightly cooler temps than normal, while these massive heat domes squat over the West Coast and the Pacific Northwest and flash-steam everyone there. I’m not making fun of those folks, either — they’re not used to those kind of temps, their homes and businesses aren’t set up to handle heat, and suddenly getting slammed with 107°F temps when your A/C consists of opening windows to get a cross breeze is no bueno indeed. We ran into the very same problems with Winter Storm Uri, after all.

So right now we’re dealing with a shaky energy grid (thanks, Greg), but temps that seem to be staying in the high eighties to mid-nineties, with a fair amount of rain in next week’s forecast. When I first moved here, I probably would have complained about the heat. I know better, now.

When I started writing Degree of Resistance I posited a future where a wannabe totalitarian president, climate change, and Big Tech-backed political rights grabs had wreaked havoc on North America. I mean, it was supposed to be a theoretical dystopian background for my romance. I never thought that I would get it right.