If you’ve ever eaten a tomato still warm off the vine, you know why I kept trying. Grocery store tomatoes are usually sad, tasteless, mealy, styrofoam colored red. Garden tomatoes are special: tart, sweet, bursting with umami and juice. So even with Colorado in historic drought and half the state on fire, I was still going to grow tomatoes. I planned to keep it modest, just a couple of plants. Nothing ambitious. No huge water bill. Just enough for August sandwiches.
As I have done every year for the past five, I put my beautiful new seedlings on the porch to harden off for a few days before planting them in the garden.
Something ate them down to the dirt overnight.
Fine. I live near open space, these things happen. I bought two more and carefully set them on the outdoor table, out of harm’s way.
Eaten.
Two more, on top of the gas grill this time. It’s tall and has steep sides. Nothing small and fuzzy would be able to reach them.
Also eaten.
Six plants gone and I never saw the culprit.
Colorado is at the, to quote a story in The Aspen Times, “‘epicenter’ of worst drought conditions in the West, as heat records pile up.” March had statewide temperatures nearly 10 degrees above the 30-year average. 2026 is shaping up to be the warmest “water year” on record. It’s likely we’ll have the lowest snowpack accumulation season on record. (For readers outside the arid West: most of our yearly precipitation arrives as snow. It piles up in the high country all winter and melts all summer, feeding us and everyone downstream. No snowpack means no water for irrigation, recreation, wildlife, or tomatoes.)
As of July, Colorado Parks and Wildlife received more than 6,100 reports of bear sightings and conflicts, compared with 3,115 during the same period the previous year. Drought is depleting the wild foods bears rely on, pushing them toward human populated areas.
Speaking of, I fear for the survival of my local prairie dog town. Since the area I live in has grown, their town has became bounded on all sides by roads and highways. Lack of water has taken their normally abundant grazing down to dirt, aside from some kochia and bindweed and they’re cut off from other sources.
The drought’s made everything out here hungrier and therefore desperate and much bolder than usual, explaining the fate of my tomato seedlings.
Which is, more or less, the entire thesis of the Bad Magic books I write. Dry years make hungry things brave.
Except the books are fun, even with some darkly horrific elements. Historic drought is not. It feel like a slow motion apocalypse.
I’ve been buying tomatoes at the farmers market and the local farm stand my grandmother introduced me to 40 years ago. Sadly, commercial growers are struggling too. I’ve yet to find any of the decent Western Slope field tomatoes. (The Western Slope is the part of the state on the west side of the Continental Divide.)
Which brings me around to my current work in progress, Book 3 of Bad Magic.
Mick’s brother-in-law was supposed to be dead. Now he’s on her doorstep with news of an inheritance — her niece a potential heir to a fading Californio rancho deep in the Sonoma fog. One dead body and a washed-out road later, Mick is hunting a killer through a household of liars. And beneath the orchards, beneath the fog, beneath the accumulation of decades’ worth of the family’s secrets, something is done being patient.
It’s shaping into a frontier gothic, kinda Knives Out with magic, shades and shifters. And kinda like The Phantasm Prism the land is evolving into a character in its own right. The wraith in The Phantasm Prism was outside human morality; it was “other,” not evil. The land in the new book is growing out of the dread kicking around the inside of my head.
I don’t know what shape this book is ultimately going to take. I know it started a little lighter than it is now. Darkness has been seeping in around the edges, fueled by the drought and everything it represents. I can stand on my back porch and see the evidence of it in real time; wildfire haze, dead garden, failing prairie dog town.
My readers know I like grit shaken with a dash of horror. But never nihilism. I mean to keep it that way. It’s harder this year.