By Marianna Jameson

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 Evans 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. We sat on the book for a little while before submitting, and Category 7 was ultimately published in 2008.

Fast forward to brainstorming sessions for Frozen Fire. During our search for another pending disaster, research brought a substance called methane hydrate to our attention.

Methane hydrate is crystallized gas that exists under the seafloor throughout the world, including in the Arctic and off coastal South Carolina. Billions of dollars are being spent developing ways to mine it because it’s considered the world’s next “clean” hydrocarbon fuel. Why “clean”? Because its combustion by-products are carbon dioxide and water.

Reading those two little words—carbon dioxide—was our ah-ha moment.

Methane hydrate is stable; it’s lightweight and looks like Styrofoam packing material. It’s cold—it is ice, after all—yet it can be burned while being held in a bare hand. But when it converts to a gaseous state without being burned, it becomes methane gas, which ranges from highly flammable to highly explosive, depending on the concentration.

Methane is also a greenhouse gas twenty times more destructive to the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. This was the real take-off point for our imaginations. Did I mention that methane remains in the atmosphere for eight years—as methane—before converting to carbon dioxide and lingering for another 150?

We created a megalomaniac who wants to be the first to successfully mine methane hydrate. But eco-terrorists interfere, triggering the worst imaginable outcome: a massive release of methane gas into the atmosphere.

It was the perfect plot. An atmospheric methane release is not an oil slick that can be cleaned up. It’s not a Chernobyl that gives a place a century-long glow. No, a massive atmospheric methane release is the evil gift that keeps on giving; an ecological catastrophe of biblical proportions that will not and can not be rectified in our lifetime, if ever. Perfect, right?

This is where the second weird moment of our writing partnership comes in.

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 read those articles during our research; news of the chimneys hadn’t been released then.

Then, this February, 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. We’re having too much fun figuring out how to almost destroy the world again, in our next book.

(from the Tor/Forge June 2009 newsletter)