Within the elements

Janet Putney gives us a breezy puzzle to start the week off.

Long clues:
Greeting for Julius - 'hailcaesar'
Mel Torme's sobriquet - 'velvetfog'
Illict reserve - 'slushfund'
Title song of a Prince film - 'purplerain'
This puzzle's theme - 'weather'


This puzzle had the names of three authors, so let's do a
Writer Showcase:

Karel Capek - Czech writer who made the word Robot popular through his play R.H.R (Rossem's Universal Robots).
Edward Albee - American Pulitzer Prize winning playwright, with famous plays like the Zoo Story, the Sandbox, Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf, Tiny Alice, A Delicate Balance, Seascape, Three Tall Women, and The Goat, or Who is Sylvia.
Willa Cather - eminent Pulitzer Prize winning female American author, with works such as O Pioneer!, My Antonia, One of Ours, and Death comes for the Archbishop.

So some of you may know that I've started to try my hand at constructing crossword puzzles. Man, what a long and arduously painful process. Anyways, it paid off today because I keep learning things as I construct. For example, I toyed with using 'etoile' in a puzzle, which is French for a six-pointed star. Lo and behold, it was used today.