The last couple of weeks have been brutal. Snow pounding down, temperatures plummeting, wind chills that make it dangerous to be outside for more than a few minutes. Schools closed. Roads impassable. Power lines are down. And even with our technology—our furnaces, our electric heaters, our insulated homes, our four-wheel-drive vehicles—winter feels menacing.
Now imagine all of that suddenly stops working.
No heat. No electricity. No cars to escape in. No weather apps warning you about the incoming storm. No emergency services are coming to rescue you. Just you, your family, and the relentless cold.
That’s exactly why I wrote “Apricity.”
When I was developing the sequel to “The Other Side of the Sun,” I knew I wanted to explore what happens when the crisis that started in summer extends into winter. Because here’s the uncomfortable truth that anyone living through these past few weeks understands viscerally: summer survival is a walk in the park compared to winter survival.
The False Comfort of Summer
In “The Other Side of the Sun,” technology fails in late spring / early summer. The weather is warm. Gardens are growing. Water is relatively abundant. Days are long, providing extended hours for work and gathering resources. Yes, there are challenges—food preservation, sanitation, security—but the environment itself isn’t trying to kill you every single night. Other things might be trying to, but the weather isn’t.
Summer gives you time to figure things out. You can make mistakes and recover. You can sleep outside if needed. You can travel during most of the day. The learning curve, while steep, doesn’t come with an immediate death sentence for errors.
Winter offers no such grace period.
When Cold Becomes the Enemy
These past weeks have reminded everyone in snow-affected areas of a fundamental truth: cold is indifferent, relentless, and deadly. And that’s with all our modern advantages.
When I look out my window right now and see the snow piling up, the ice forming, the temperatures dropping into single digits or below zero, I can’t help but run through the mental exercise: what if the power didn’t come back on? What if the furnace stopped working and couldn’t be fixed? What if this wasn’t a temporary inconvenience but the permanent new reality?
The clock starts immediately. Unlike summer, where you might have weeks or even months to adapt, winter cold gives you hours. Hypothermia can set in within a few hours in a cold house. Overnight, without heat, indoor temperatures can drop to dangerous levels. There is no gradual adjustment period—you must have solutions in place now.
Exposure is constant. In summer, you can spend most of your time outdoors comfortably. In winter, every moment outside drains your body’s heat reserves. Gathering firewood, finding water, checking security, maintaining shelter—every necessary task becomes a calculated risk of exposure.
Resources become scarce exactly when you need them most. Food doesn’t grow in winter. Water sources freeze. The wild game that might sustain you in warmer months either hibernates or moves to areas you can’t easily reach. The abundance of summer becomes the scarcity of winter at precisely the moment your body needs more calories to generate heat.
The Apricity Scenario: Winter Without Technology
The title “Apricity” refers to the warmth of the sun in winter—that precious, fleeting feeling of sunlight on your face during the coldest months. In the book, my characters discover just how literal that becomes. When you have no other source of heat, no electric lights to extend your productive hours, no weather forecasts to prepare for storms, every moment of winter sunlight becomes a gift you can’t afford to waste.
Let me walk you through what these past few weeks would look like without technology:
The First 24 Hours: Immediate Crisis
The temperature inside your home begins dropping immediately. Modern homes, built for efficiency with central heating, lose heat rapidly. Within a few hours, it’s noticeably cold. Within twelve hours, indoor temperatures match outdoor temperatures—well below freezing.
You have no warning about the approaching storm because weather satellites and forecasting systems don’t exist. You see the clouds, feel the wind, but don’t know if this is a passing squall or a multi-day blizzard. This uncertainty affects every decision about whether to venture out for resources or shelter in place.
Your immediate needs are:
- Creating a heat source (fireplace, wood stove, or improvised heating)
- Concentrating your living space to one small, insulated area
- Securing water before pipes freeze solid
- Ensuring you have enough fuel to last through the night
And you need to solve all of this while light still exists, because once darkness falls—and winter darkness comes early and stays late—every task becomes exponentially harder.
Week One: The Learning Curve
By the end of week one, you’ve learned painful lessons:
Fuel consumption is staggering. That woodpile you thought would last weeks? It’s half gone. Keeping even one room warm enough to survive requires constant feeding of the fire. You’re burning more wood in a single day than you imagined you’d need in a week.
Water is the hidden crisis. In summer, water is relatively simple—find it, purify it, drink it. In winter, water is locked in ice. Melting snow for water requires fuel (fire), which depletes your heating fuel. A gallon of snow makes about four cups of water. You need gallons per day. The math is terrifying.
Clothing becomes life support. Those layers you’re wearing aren’t just for comfort—they’re your survival system. But they get wet from sweat, from melting snow, from the moisture of living in a small space with fire and breathing people. Wet clothing in winter can kill you. Drying clothing requires heat you can barely spare.
Sleep becomes difficult and dangerous. You’re exhausted from constant physical labor and stress, but you can’t sleep deeply because someone needs to maintain the fire. Let it go out overnight, and hypothermia becomes a real risk. Your sleep is fragmented, light, and inadequate.
Month One: The New Reality
A month into winter without technology, the crisis hasn’t eased; it’s intensified:
Fuel sources are depleting. Obvious sources of burnable material in your immediate area are gone. You’re ranging farther from shelter to find wood, exposing yourself to greater danger and expending more calories that you can’t easily replace.
Malnutrition sets in. Your stored food is running low. You’re burning thousands of extra calories per day just staying warm. Wild food sources are nonexistent. You’re making impossible decisions about rationing that affect everyone’s energy levels and immune systems.
Health issues compound. That minor cold in summer? In winter, it becomes life-threatening. Respiratory infections thrive in poorly ventilated, crowded living conditions. Frostbite damage accumulates. Injuries heal slowly when your body is diverting resources to heat production.
Morale crumbles. In summer, you could see progress: gardens growing, structures improving, skills developing. In winter, you’re in pure survival mode. Every day is about not dying. There’s no visible progress, no hope of harvest, no light at the end of the tunnel because the tunnel is winter itself, and it lasts months.
The Skills That Matter in Winter
In “Apricity,” my characters quickly learn that their summer survival skills, while valuable, aren’t sufficient for winter. New skills become critical:
Fire Management
This isn’t just “build a fire.” This is:
- Starting fires in wet conditions
- Maintaining fires overnight with minimal fuel
- Creating efficient heating systems from available materials
- Managing smoke and carbon monoxide in enclosed spaces
- Processing wet or green wood into usable fuel
- Calculating fuel needs weeks in advance
Cold Weather Shelter
Your summer shelter becomes a death trap in winter if it’s not properly insulated and heated. You need to understand:
- Heat loss pathways and how to block them
- Small space efficiency (heating one room, not a whole house)
- Ventilation balance (you need fresh air, but every opening bleeds heat)
- Moisture management (condensation becomes ice)
- Snow as insulation (yes, snow can actually help)
Winter Foraging and Hunting
Finding calories in winter requires different knowledge:
- Ice fishing (if you can access unfrozen water)
- Tracking animals through snow
- Finding and processing winter plants (bark, certain roots, pine needles)
- Setting traps along game trails
- Preserving meat in natural cold storage
Psychological Resilience
This might be the most important skill of all. Winter without technology is psychologically brutal:
- Months of constant discomfort and fear
- Darkness that dominates each day
- Isolation (travel becomes nearly impossible)
- Watching resources dwindle with no clear renewal date
- Making life-and-death decisions about resource allocation
The Current Storm: A Glimpse of Reality
Look outside right now, at whatever winter weather you’re experiencing. The snow. The ice. The temperature. The wind.
Now imagine:
- No furnace running in your basement
- No electric heater plugging into the wall
- No car to drive to somewhere warmer
- No store to buy supplies from
- No power company is working to restore your heat
- No end date to plan for
This isn’t hypothetical for my characters in “Apricity.” This is their reality. And reading it while you’re warm and comfortable is one thing. Reading it while winter is actively hammering at your windows gives you a visceral understanding of just how thin the line is between comfort and crisis.
Why Winter Changes Everything
In “The Other Side of the Sun,” my characters had time to adapt, to learn, to build systems. They made mistakes, but they survived them because summer is forgiving.
Winter forgives nothing.
A mistake in fire management doesn’t just mean a cold night; it means hypothermia or death. Running out of fuel isn’t an inconvenience—it’s an emergency. Getting lost in a summer storm means you’re wet and uncomfortable. Getting lost in a winter storm means you don’t come home.
The stakes in “Apricity” are exponentially higher than in the first book, not because the characters are facing new enemies or bigger disasters, but because they’re facing winter itself. And winter, as anyone in a snow-affected area knows right now, is a formidable adversary even when you have every advantage of modern technology.
The Comfort We Take for Granted
These past few weeks have been a reminder of just how dependent we are on systems that work invisibly in the background. You flip a switch, and heat flows through vents. You turn a tap, and water flows (unless the pipes have frozen, which has happened to many people recently, even with heated homes). You check your phone, and you know exactly when the storm will hit and when it will pass.
We’ve insulated ourselves so thoroughly from the natural dangers of winter that we’ve forgotten how recently in human history, and how tenuously even now, we conquered it. We didn’t conquer winter. We built elaborate systems to temporarily shield us from it. And those systems are fragile.
Learning From Winter Now
You don’t need to wait for a complete technology collapse to learn winter survival skills. These current storms are perfect opportunities to:
Test your systems. How long would your home stay warm without heat? What if you had to heat only one room? How much fuel would you actually need for a day? A week?
Practice alternative heating. If you have a fireplace or wood stove, use it. Learn its quirks now. Understand how much wood it consumes, how to manage the fire, and what the practical realities are.
Experience discomfort safely. Turn your heat down significantly for a day. Not off—that’s dangerous—but down to 50°F. Wear layers. Use blankets. Feel what being cold in your home actually means. It’s educational and humbling.
Calculate water needs. Try melting snow for water (outside, not in your heated home). Understand the fuel-to-water ratio. Realize just how much snow you need for basic daily water needs.
Walk in winter weather. Bundle up and spend time outside in these conditions. Not a quick dash to your car, but a real walk. Feel how quickly your fingers and toes get cold. Notice how much more difficult everything becomes. Experience the exhaustion of moving through snow.
Inventory your resources. How much food do you have that doesn’t require cooking? How would you cook if electricity was gone? Do you have enough blankets? Warm clothes? Layers that can be washed and dried without modern appliances?
The Apricity Truth
The title of my sequel has layers of meaning. On the surface, it’s about the warmth of winter sun—that physical sensation of sunlight on frozen skin. But deeper, it’s about finding warmth in the coldest moments, both literal and metaphorical. It’s about human resilience when facing the ultimate test: not just surviving, but maintaining humanity when everything is stripped away, and winter is trying its hardest to kill you.
My characters in “Apricity” face questions that anyone watching these current storms would understand:
How do you stay warm when fuel is running out? How do you feed your family when food is scarce? How do you maintain hope when spring is months away and every day is a struggle? How do you make impossible choices about who gets the warmth, who gets the food, who goes out into the cold to gather resources?
These aren’t abstract philosophical questions in winter. They’re immediate, practical, life-and-death decisions.
The Reality Check
I wrote “Apricity” because I wanted to explore the full reality of a prolonged technology collapse, not just the initial shock. Summer was the introduction. Winter is the main event. Because if you can survive winter without technology, you can survive anything.
But I also wrote it because I wanted readers to understand something crucial: we are not as removed from nature’s dangers as we think we are. These storms we’re experiencing right now are a reminder. We’re still vulnerable. We’re still dependent on systems that can fail. We’re still just one prolonged power outage away from discovering exactly how hard winter can be.
Look out your window. Feel the cold seeping in around the edges despite your modern insulation. Hear the wind. Watch the snow pile up. And be grateful, genuinely grateful, for the heat flowing through your home right now.
Because in “Apricity,” my characters don’t have that luxury. And if the world of my books became reality, neither would you.
The Story Continues
“Apricity” isn’t just a sequel; it’s a reality check. It asks: you survived summer, you thought you’d figured things out, you’d adapted to the new world. But can you survive winter?
And right now, watching the snow fall and feeling the temperature drop, that question feels less like fiction and more like a scenario worth considering.
Because summer is the tutorial level. Winter is the real game.
Want to experience winter survival without technology from the safety of your heated home? “Apricity” is now available. Follow the characters from “The Other Side of the Sun” as they face their ultimate test: not just surviving, but remaining human when winter is trying to erase them. Because when the warmth of the sun becomes your only source of heat, you understand just how precious—and how brief—apricity really is.And maybe, just maybe, while you’re reading it during these current storms, you’ll look up from the page and feel a little more grateful for that thermostat on your wall.