Tornadoes, and sirens, and hail--Oh, my!

It's been a pretty crazy day here in Alabama, which I'm sure you're aware of if you've been watching the news. Major tornadoes in Tuscaloosa and Birmingham. At least 58 dead. One of my former students from back when I taught high school is currently missing after her apartment complex was hit, so please keep Loryn Brown in your thoughts. I'm terrible when it comes to keeping up with weather forecasts (I basically just look outside and dress according to the current conditions), so I've been depending on my Facebook friends all day to keep me posted. Some of them have suffered damage to their homes or spent hours hunkered down in a basement, bathtub, or, in a couple of cases, city hall, and the worst hasn't even hit where I live yet. The first rains began falling just a couple of hours ago, and we're expecting the worst part of the storm to hit here in the next few hours. The lights have flickered a few times, it's thundering right now, and the sirens went off once, but I know this is only just the beginning, so I'm not going to bed anytime soon. Luckily, classes ended yesterday and tomorrow is a dead day, so I don't have to get up especially early.

In ROW80-related news, I posted my weekly writing blog yesterday. It's on the importance of setting to fiction and includes a report and pictures from my recent trip to Forks, Washington. Check it out here if you're interested. My book-of-the-week is Brenna Yovanoff's The Replacement, and I'll post a review of it this weekend after I finish it. Because I encouraged everyone to do some setting-related exercises in yesterday's blog, I decided I better take my own advice, and I've been doing some fun world-building for The Novel. I'm terrible at any kind of drawing, but I always enjoy making floor plans, street grids, maps, stuff like that when I'm world-building, so I'm working on some of that kind of stuff right now. It helps to see how different places in the story relate to one another spatially. I'm thinking of doing a (much shorter) follow-up to the setting post soon and including some of the floor plans I've drawn.

Hope everyone else is having a good week. Stay safe, and happy writing!