There is a trail of dead male bees scattered in a loose line across the ground.

If you took a microscope and looked at their little faces, and you could somehow read their bee emotions, you’d see that each one of these little guys died in ecstasy while they lay in the blob of their own guts that exploded out of through their exoskeletal abdominal walls mid-flight.

Sarah was telling me this while we sat and enjoyed our brunch together on the back deck after school drop off this morning. She’s deep into a run of non-fiction books about bees and I get to learn all of this really cool second-hand-science.

She gets second hand King Arthur.

We spent an entire, very lovely, day heading to the greenhouse, picking up a few things for the garden, and then the grocery store to carry us through to the middle of next week.

After school, I realized that I still hadn’t written this week’s letter but I also didn’t want to waste the rare weather. I really didn’t want to cage myself into the office, but I am doing my best to stay diligent and write here every week.

I’m not writing this on my phone, not today.

No, today I am writing this from my laptop in our garden. The sky is that clear, saturated blue that is a bit of a rarity here in the midwest, and the sun and the breeze call for everyone to enjoy the day.

Unless you were swimming, you could not ask for better weather.

The bumble bees are out, robins and bluejays hop through the garden beds, and Sarah and Danielle are talking about the flow of colors from the blooming flowers and how they change from purple in the spring to pink in the summer and white toward the fall depending on what variety they’re looking at.

It’s a perfect May afternoon.

Danielle is asking me when I’m going to be finished writing with all of you so she can ride her bike next to me while I go on a run.

Earlier this week, we finished wrapping a TV series and I am currently (f)unemployed until further notice. While this would distress many, its a great relief. Sixty to seventy hours a week with minimum turn around most nights kicks my butt after nearly five months. I’ve got some time to recover, but there is even more work to be done now that the show is wrapped.

I’m setting up meetings to finish funding Esperanza, I’m tearing down and rebuilding my most recent feature script, I’m submitting short stories to big-name magazines, and I’m putting together Panopticon Volume 3 which already has a few great entries. And that’s not to mention regular life stuff and finances and fitness and maybe even seeing friends every once in a while.

So, even though the weather is perfect, and I’m unemployed, I think I’m going to be busier now and for the foreseeable future as I work to get these projects off the ground.

But the one thing that I wanted to write down here was a little connection that I had made earlier this week when Sarah and I were talking about her read through of Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian”.

There is a scene where a group of Native American (Apache?) warriors are trekking across the horizon toward the Glanton gang and their image is obscured by the heat and the atmosphere. When these strong, intimidating men got close enough for the gang to make out their details, they see that these warriors are wearing women’s dresses and carry frilled and lace covered umbrellas to shade them from the harsh desert sun. The puffy sleeves and long skirts are torn from the size of their muscular arms and rough riding. If I remember right, some of the dresses have splotches of blood on them. Animal skins and armor and military clothes and women’s dresses all worn at the same time.

But that image of these warriors wearing the cacophony of costume followed by the brutal battle that followed is one of the most striking images and scenes in the book for me.

We talked about the scene and it made me think of one of the core principles of Memory Palace.

The more outrageous an image, the more memorable it will be.

That synthesis got me thinking about my writing and opening sentences and the rewrites I have ahead of me.

I’m going to make a conscious effort to make my story openings and some of my bigger set pieces / action sequences carry at least one bizarre image to grab hold of the reader’s mind and dig its fingers into the wrinkles in their brains. I want these images and these stories to find purchase in their memory and refuse to let go no matter how they shake their heads.

I know I’m going to think about those little bees and their exploded guts and the ecstasy on their faces. That species mates mid-flight and the males blast their DNA into the female with such force that it rips themselves to shreds while the next male in line rushes over to brush his competitors DNA out of the way so he can complete his own finality.

Happy Friday!

PS – Panopticon Volume 3 submissions are due July 1st to Panopticon2032 at protonmail.com