As I’ve mentioned in another post, I’m finding it a challenge in my climate fiction work to keep pace with climate change, and my work on Dear Josephine, the second book of The Steep Climes Quartet, is no exception. This book takes place a half-dozen years from now, more or less, and has a major hurricane destroying and damaging the Gold Coast, otherwise known as the Miami area. The storm, the title’s “Josephine,” is one of the big events of the book.

This week, there was Idalia, the hurricane that threatened the Florida Panhandle and, even as I write this, is dumping rain on South Carolina and beyond. Idalia wasn’t the feared mega-storm, but the lessons about how climate change can build mega-storms is becoming part of most people’s curriculum.

Keep in mind that the series revolves around the Berkshires over the time span of 24 years, with the third book taking place about a dozen years from now and the fourth and final book another dozen years after the third book. While the geographic focus for these books is the Berkshires, that doesn’t mean the reader won’t learn about the rest of the world. The Berkshire characters in the books don’t live in a bubble, and there’ll be as much reporting on climate disasters around the country and the world in the years ahead as there is now, and probably more so. In Dear Josephine, the hurricane is a national- and international-scaled story, as is its enduring consequences.

There are also plenty of other characters among the different books acting in other geographical areas, and one such—and not of the Berkshires—is a man travelling about the country killing people drawn from the ranks of the super-wealthy and making claims of the murders in the name of a made-up terrorist group called Kill the Rich, except, of course, copycat incidents in effect make the group real. A therapist might have an explanation why I find writing those scenes fun, but I don’t need anyone to explain to me why writing about specific climate crises makes my hands sweat. The simple truth of it is that while I’m making an effort not to exaggerate climate effects in the four books, the climate crisis itself can too easily outpace my efforts at restraint.