A beehive developed in the pile of limbs I acculmulated last fall. It was my fault. I left them there in the patio, way too long, figuring I’d get to them this summer. By the time I started to clean up what I started, I could see them buzzing around: a helicopter squadron of bees hovering close to the house, darting in and out of the various foxholes to service their almighty queen, who was hidden away beneath it all.
Now I had to clean it up without getting stung to death. Which meant I had to kill a LOT of bees. Writing was the last thing on my mind. And yet being a crime writer, the irony of serial killing a hive of innocent bees didn’t escape me.
Getting rid of them bothered my wife more than it did me. She’s an animal, bird and insect lover. And bees are definitely a good thing for our planet. Bees pollinate plants, many of which would die without these stinging insects. They’re good for the environment. They make healthy and tasty foods, and provide us wax so we can cisit Madame Tussauds museum and see Elvis and Marylyn immortalized. Without bees we’d not have baclava, mead and Honey Cheerios. And one catches more flies with honey and not vinegar. So the prospect of eliminating the hive slightly concerned me.
But it had to be done. Like Muhammad Ali once said, I’d have to “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. You can’t hit what your eyes don’t see.”
So my wife and I set about ridding the hive from our patio. It took a lot of time and patience (the details I’ll skip for the sake of brevity). Bees swirled all around us. We got stung often, although my honey seemed to bear the brunt of their painful stingers. I swept up the remaining pile of dirt, debris, bee corpses and honeycomb, satisfied that I’d cleaned it all up. God Save The Queen, The Sex Pistols sang. More like God have mercy on her bee soul.
After I swept up the patio, I sat down tiredly on of the plastic chair and happily studied my handiwork, a cold beer in hand. But then I noticed that there were bees still buzzing around. They landed on the patio and seemed to be studying their lost kingdom for posterity. I sat fascinated while watching them. It was both sad and mesmerizing to observe them checking out the aftermath of destruction, and I began to wonder what these bees were thinking. Was I a mass murderer of bees? Bees who’ve only helped sustain mankind throughout history? It depressed me as I sat there, and I felt like a character out of a John Cheever novel.
it’s a scene that stayed with me and I vowed to use in one of my novels. So I wrote it down. I wrote down the discussions I had with my wife. What I was thinking. The unique pain of a bee sting on my stomach and ankle. A man alone on his patio, thinking about life and death, his family scattered in one place or another, thinking about his life in relation to these poor bees doing reconnaissance of their bygone civilization, forever separated from their revered queen. Now these surviving bees had nothing. No leader. No home or hive. No where to go except to study the remains of their once vibrant, honeycombed community.
And all because of me. Or maybe because of my laziness in not cleaning that wood pile in the first place. It made me reflect on nature, life and, especially, death.
i thought of Muhammad Ali’s quote again. How fitting the bee sting is for fiction. A writer leaves his stinger in every story before dying a slow death. Good writing requires subtly and an even hand, and yet at the same time the writer needs to strike bodly when the scene calls for it. Thus when penning a novel, the writer must know when to “float like a butterfly” and then “sting like a bee” to jar the reader.
The bee colony must live on.
it will in my fiction. Maybe in my next novel so if you see a bee flying out of one of my books you’ll know the full story.
neighborhood’s monthly pot luck. The host provides the entrée and everyone else brings a side dish. Usually I feel morally obliged to put my best foot forward with a salad (Julian always votes for Waldorf), vegie casserole, or fancy dessert. But this time I was spending the day with my granddaughter, Hope – a few hours of cleaning the house followed by an outing to Dairy Queen, and so decided to half-inch that foot forward. A few moments of reflection brought to mind a recipe, if you can elevate it that high, given to me at another potluck several years ago. Its virtue is that even given my hopscotch memory I didn’t have to write it down.
Take one jar of salsa, combine with one can drained and rinsed black beans, add chopped herbs – basil, cilantro, parsley, chives, or whatever strikes your fancy in whatever amounts appeal. Chill if you have time. Serve in a dish surrounded by corn chips and pat yourself on the back. At potlucks few people know what you brought anyway, but this turned out to be a hit as it had been when I first tasted it.
salsa; from the hesitancy of his manner I think he risked being slapped on the hand for extravagance. I was however, moved to give the nod of approval. For those who have not read Peg Bracken’s I Hate to Cook Book and its Appendix you have missed a treat. Her premise is that whatever you cook or prepare should look and taste as though you have tried harder than you really have. That more expensive Salsa gave me a virtuous feeling that set me up for the whole evening, as if spending four hours on a seventeen-layer French torte from one of the footstool-sized cook books would have done.
The good news is that next week I’m renting a friend’s camp on a very quiet lake in a very quiet place and I’m going to do nothing but work on my book. Some people may crave a Disneyworld vacation, or a whirlwind trip to Cancun. Maybe shopping and shows in New York. Not me, I can’t think of any thing I’d rather do.
Kate Flora here, with a blog about marketing. Hang on, though, because I’m not really trying to sell you something. I’m just babbling a bit today about the trials of being graphically challenged. It began long ago. I couldn’t color within the lines or cut on a straight line. Still can’t. Being able to stray outside the lines in probably a good attribute for a writer, yes? But we live in those times when much of marketing, and the production of promotional materials, falls on the writer.
done little promotion for, and another co-written project coming next month, and I’d signed up for a number of book-related events this fall, I decided to try my hand at designing.
So off to the internet I went. Some hours later, I emerged from my first battle with Canva with a simple design to put on lovely reusable shopping bags that fold into a pouch and store in your purse. (Man purses included, of course. Also backpacks, totes, coat pockets, or wherever YOU might want to store a reusable tote.) This is the result. In the fullness of time, perhaps the UPS man will bring a large box of these, and if you are the lucky person who leaves a comment admiring them, coveting them, or being kind and encouraging about my feeble attempts at graphics, you will be the first person to own one.
The internet was not done with me. Then it was on to bookmarks. Being a thrifty Yankee, I wanted a bookmark that would do double duty, so I put one book on one side, and the second book on the other. When I bravely sent them off to MirPrint, my printer of choice, they told me that a) I needed a bleed on the darn thing (and no, they did not mean, since I am a crime writer and generally anxious persons, that I should drip blood on the sample); and b) that the color was wrong and needed to by different. (They used a term not in my writerly vocabulary.) I pleaded ignorance, and general Luddite-hood, resent with the bleed, and they kindly fixed the color. Of course, I have no idea what I’m getting.
Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson here, pondering just why it is that the only television show I’m looking forward to in the new season is Dancing with the Stars, which premieres its twenty-fifth series tonight at eight. It certainly can’t be an interest in any of the “stars” because none of the names that have been announced mean a thing to me. Star is, of course, a relative term. Fellow cozy writer Ella Barrick (aka Laura DiSilverio) got it right in her three book series featuring a ballroom dance instructor when she named her fictional TV competition “Ballroom with the B-List.”
But that aside, just what is the root of this fascination? In general I don’t care for reality TV or game shows or competitions. This program should strike out on all three counts. Instead, I set aside time on a dozen or so Monday nights twice a year to watch a team of professional dancers try to turn amateurs into champions. Some of the celebs are so bad that you wonder if they were chosen for that reason. Every season seems to have “the old guy” (or girl, or sometimes both), the person whose movements are so stiff that they look like a puppet with the strings cut, the wacko (also most likely to get ticked off when being critiqued), and the one who can’t dance but is so popular with viewers at home (who get a vote) that they stay on weeks longer than anyone expects. The athletes, especially if the sport is football, gymnastics, or ice skating, are odds on favorites to win, but there are always surprises.
I’ve never done ballroom dancing, unless you count the lessons I took for a brief time in about seventh grade—those versions of the fox trot and cha cha have little in common with the dances as performed in competition. The closest I got was “modern” dance lessons, which led to doing some choreography for amateur theatrical productions in high school and college. I took ballet lessons until I was sixteen, and somewhere along the line learned to tap dance.
