Writing thrillers has its fun moments - you get to blow things up, save the day, kill the bad guys, and make sure the good guy gets the girl. But writing has its weird moments, too, and Bill and I have had our share.

Our proposal for Category 7 included a synopsis, a few chapters, tons of research about massive hurricanes that had hit the Northeast, and some great predictions of what might happen when the next one hits. It was ready to go to editors the day Katrina decimated the Gulf Coast.

Suddenly, much of our storyline was making headlines. With all the devastation happening for real, we just couldn't send out the proposal.  We sat on the book for a little while before submitting, and Category 7 was ultimately published in July 2007.

When Bill and I started brainstorming our second book, we wanted to step slightly away from weather manipulation, which we had written about in our first book, Category 7, and get into the really big stuff: climate manipulation. After all, climate change is sort of the new black, right?

Well, the global climate is a rather large mechanism composed of literally billions of moving, continuously changing parts. Manipulating it would be quite a feat for anyone -- and an irresistible challenge for a megalomaniac like the anti-hero, Dennis Cavendish, we had already begun to create.

The possibilities were endless, which is both a good thing and a bad thing for writers. It means there are a lot of directions we could go in, but it also means that there is a lot of research that would have to be done before we came up with the right plot device. We needed to find a truly huge, sudden trigger for irreversible climate change. Carbon dioxide wasn't enough. We needed something deadly but that everyone would instantly recognize. So I started reading. And reading. And reading. I read about mud volcanoes, underwater volcanoes, and the regular kind we hear about all the time. I read about oil spills, nuclear accidents, and chemical releases; Prince William Sound, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Bhopal. And I flirted with a lot of conspiracy theory websites that discussed events and phenomena ranging from the plausible -- for instance, the Bermuda Triangle mysteries -- to the truly off the wall.

In all that reading, I came across an off-hand mention of something called methane hydrate and was fascinated. Methane hydrate is a crystalline form of methane -- methane ice, if you will. It looks like those foam packing peanuts and burns cold; there are pictures and videos of it being held in a human hand while on fire.

Methane hydrate is present under the sea floor all over the world and there are billions of dollars being spent by energy companies and governments, including our own, to find a way to safely and economically mine it. Proponents call it the world's only "clean" fossil fuel because when it combusts, its only by-products are carbon dioxide and water. That means no smoke, no disastrous spills. Environmentalists are up in arms about it for the same reason: carbon dioxide is one of the greenhouse gasses causing the planet's climate to change.

I had an inkling there was something there and started thinking about what would happen if the methane hydrate was mined, but not burned. It is "ice" buried at very high pressures and very low temperatures; what would happen if it would melt instead of combust? The answer to that was that there would be a massive methane gas release-and methane is a much more dangerous greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Twenty times more dangerous, in fact, as it sits in the atmosphere for about eight years before converting to carbon dioxide.

Hello Betty! We had our plot.

My brain went into overdrive. I had to start researching in earnest. Dinosaur extinctions. Atmospheric chemical changes and anaerobic microbial mutations. Underwater drilling and demolition. Caribbean seafloor topography. Small manned and unmanned submersibles. Underwater habitats. Eco-terrorism. Pressure differentials. Air currents. Aircraft explosions. Even what kind of weaponry is carried by Navy SEALs when they're on the water. I even pulled in bits of chaos theory, which has fascinated me since I was in college and took some courses on meteorology and planetary atmospheres. (I had the distinct good fortune, though I didn't know it at the time, to have a professor who was one of the leading researchers in the field of applying chaos theory to climate and weather systems.)

Our story came together in a big rush of creativity and the result is now in print (and hopefully on your bookshelf!). I hope you enjoy Frozen Fire. We certainly enjoyed creating it.

One additional, interesting note: After Frozen Fire was written, edited, and in production, our editor sent us news articles about scientists who had discovered undersea methane "chimneys" off Siberia; the chimneys were releasing methane into the atmosphere just as we described it in Frozen Fire. But we hadn't come across those articles during our research -- we thought we were making it all up! Then, this February (2009), The Los Angeles Times ran an article about Katey Walter, a University of Alaska researcher who discovered methane plumes rising from the surface of Arctic lakes. Videos show methane bubbling through water and Walter lighting the plumes on fire, similar to a scene in Frozen Fire.

So Bill and I have once again written a book that we thought - frankly, hoped - would be frightening fiction and seen it become reality.  Given this track record, if writing didn’t hold the lure and promise of many more odd moments, we might both give it up and become bookies. But we won’t. And you will just have to wait and see what we have planned for you - and the world - next year.

Please feel free to contact me with questions or comments. In the meantime, here are some articles and websites that you might find interesting:

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