There’s an old rhyme that my mother (who grew up in a fishing town by the Atlantic Ocean) and my father (who simply found it amusing) taught me:
Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning. Red sky at night, sailors delight. My dad tended to add “Red sky at noon, sailors play the bassoon,” but I’m pretty sure that wasn’t originally part of the rhyme.
In my next book, Ebb and Flow, red sun and red sky play a role. Quinn Boucher, the younger recently-changed werewolf, sees “colors,” as he calls them: auras around people, and sometimes just colors overlying everything. When someone is about to die, in Quinn’s view, the “sun goes red.”
Meanwhile, Quinn’s mate Malachi Powers, who is over a century old and not pleased to have a mate who’s so much younger, watches the sunrise and recites the rhyme to himself to honor the memory of his two human lovers, Roger and Jonathan, who died decades ago.
This morning, due to smoke over my area from wildfires in the western United States and Canada, the sun actually did go red. I took this picture from my front steps. The sky wasn’t actually this dark; somehow, zooming in on the sun darkened the rest of the picture. Other than zooming in (with my phone camera), I made zero alterations to this.
Ebb and Flow is available now for Kindle preorder, and will release October 10 for Kindle, including Kindle Unlimited, and in paperback.