It’s All About Me, Even When it Isn’t

Another reader on Amazon.com complained that the characters in TDD have no morals.

I continue to be baffled by this criticism because, as I’ve said many times on this blog, the central theme of that novel is a question of morality. I suppose your average reader can’t relate to a heroine who has killed (or, depending on how culpable you believe Garnet was when she released Lilith, “allowed to die”) several people. For all intents and purposes, though, you could certainly consider Garnet a fairly active accomplice to murder.

I still believe she’s a moral person, however. She killed out of self-defense, a defense, I might add, which works for many juries in this country. She was also vastly out-numbered and out-gunned. Had it not been for her willingness to unleash Lilith, Garnet would have died that night. A point that I thought that I made abundantly clear throughout the novel.

She also is wracked by guilt. Yes, she can sleep at night and even joke about it, perhaps, (partly because she’s the queen of denial) but she’s also never been entirely convinced that what she did was the right thing, even though it saved her life. Garnet also unleashed something dark within herself and struggles throughout the novel to make peace with that. (Lilith is, in essence, a big, fat metaphor for the human capacity to do harm – and maybe even take pleasure from it. But my point is not to glorify that, but to expose it.)

Maybe people don’t like that darkness. Or maybe I failed on some level for these readers, and my intentions are not all there in the pages of the book, despite my best efforts.

It’s interesting to me that this particular reader also thinks that Garnet slept with Parrish, which she most certainly does NOT. They get close – partly because Garnet is feeling a pang for something familiar and Sebastian has just revealed his darker side, which she initially revolts against. Garnet kisses on Parrish, she wants him, they get naked, but then things stop.

The stopping is kind of the important bit.

Isn’t it?

Or am I to assume then that the readers who find Garnet and company immoral are the careless readers?

This may all boil down to the cover art. While I love it, and I think it helped sell books, there is a bit of a disconnect – my book isn’t nearly as light and airy as the cover suggests. (Ironically, I’d proposed an even lighter book, but the editor who bought it said he wanted it darker with more sex and violence.) So, anyway, maybe the readers who can’t connect to Garnet were expecting her to be something else despite the bloody, murderous image in the prologue (which perhaps a careless reader might skip?) and all the references to the Dark part in dark goddess Lilith.

I don’t know the answer, but, what I do know is that I should never read my Amazon.com reviews. They make me crazy and, like right now, stop me from writing. I know I can’t please everyone, but part of me tends to take this kind of criticism personally. I feel like the comments are directed at me, rather than at the reader’s experience of my book.

I suppose the reviewer in question would just say I was being self-important.

Beginning at the Beginning is a Stupid Thing To Do

I’m finally sitting down to start Bloody Charming, the third in the Garnet Lacey vampire chick-lit series, and I’m stymied. I can’t seem to figure out where this story starts.

The funny thing is that I have an outline that details the plot from beginning, middle, and end, so it’s not like I don’t have a handle on the story itself. I had, in point of fact, begun at the beginning, which is to say, sometime before the action starts. I’d had Garnet on a boring little bicycle ride home interrupted by the sudden appearance of a wolf. Cool though that image was, I realized that what followed was a lot of meandering as Garnet went though her day, essentially being happy.

Not cool.

So tonight, I restarted the novel at the first gathering of Garnet’s potential coven. I’m much happier with that because there’s action… though I realize the conflict is still not center stage. I’m going to have to rework that in revisions, because I’m also throwing a lot of new people at the reader all within the first ten pages. I think that I can make that onslaught of names work if there’s a core story for the reader to follow – which is going to be Garnet dealing with Blythe, the sexy comparative religions major, who is hitting on Sebastian.

It amazes me how bloody difficult writing is. I’ve been teaching writing for years now and I have any number of sort of “pat” phrases that I tell my students over and over. One of them is that they need to start their story at the moment of conflict. Start, I tell my students, with a problem statement, not unlike the thesis of a paper -- so that your reader knows what the hypothesis is going to be, what answers they should be looking for. State the novel’s core conflict in the first sentence (or thereabouts.)

Yet, when it comes time for ME to sit down and write, I flake. I get distracted by the pretty, by the fun.

Now I have to pay the price. I’m going to have to take my own advice.

How annoying is that?

Because It COULD Happen

(Cross posted to Fangs, Fur & Fey)

On of the questions asked of authors on the Fangs, Fur & Fey list was: "Why do you write urban fantasy?"

I have to first start by saying that I’m a huge fan of urban fantasy. I read a lot of it as a teen/young adult (which was some time ago now), probably for me the most memorable of which was Emma Bull’s WAR FOR THE OAKS. I still read a lot of it, in fact.

This is going to sound extremely fannish/Mary Sue, but what I love about urban fantasy, is that, well, that it could happen... to me.

When I was a kid, I loved to play pretend. I had the kind of overactive imagination that sent me into Hixon Forest every day of summer vacation with a wooden sword and a couple of willing friends. I’d still be there, except at some point it became somewhat socially inappropriate for me to tell people to call me “Zurg, Amazon Queen of Venus.” (Except maybe in the bedroom, but that’s another story.)

Urban Fantasy is an invitation to play again. Because the settings are contemporary, I can imagine that that unwashed looking guy talking to himself two seats in front of me on the city bus is, in fact, a werewolf. That’s the sort of stuff I like to play with in my own novels (and in the enjoyment of other people’s)... the taking of real things and added a supernatural or paranormal spin on them. I mean, what if all the guys/gals who talk to themselves are, in point of fact, talking to something real? What if those plastic bags blown around by the wind are messengers to some kind of new breed of urban faerie? My friend Kelly McCullough based a whole universe in an as-yet-unsold fey book called THE URBANA on that idea.

It makes walking to work more interesting, you know?

As If You Needed One More Blog To Read...

I was just invited to join a new LiveJournal community that might be of interest of readers of Tall, Dark & Dead. It’s a collection of paranormal romance writers called fangs_fur_fey/

British Cover

Here's the British cover for Tall, Dark and Dead. (Yes, they realize they mispelled my name. It's being fixed.) Outside of that, I think it's awesome.

Astro Alert:Mercury Retrograde, Neptune Direct, Jupiter Square Saturn

Your up-to-date astrological information here!

This from Astrology.com

"Are you thinking of making some lifestyle changes? The Jupiter square Saturn on October 25 is the perfect excuse to cut back on any excesses and to assess the areas of life where you are overcommitted. And with Neptune ending its retrograde -- a phase that began last May -- when it turns direct on October 29, you are tuned into your hopes, wishes and dreams. Now is the time to incorporate these ideals more deeply into your life."
"But wait! That rascal Mercury turns retrograde on October 28, a period that will last until November 17, so it will be essential to do a thorough review of your plans before making any life-altering decisions. Start reviewing old contacts, ideas and plans. What have you accomplished? Are you stuck in a rut? Though communication snafus and misunderstandings abound during any Mercury retrograde period, it's also an ideal time to analyze, evaluate and effect real change."

Math Disproves the Vampire

World Science has an article that shows that vampires can't exist, mathematically speaking. Check it out: Math vs. Vampires: Vampires Lose".

Garnet and Sebastian Short Story News

As you know, a short story I wrote featuring our very own Garnet Lacey and Sebastian von Traumm will be coming out in an anthology edited by Charaline Harris. I just got new and improved information about its release date. See the note below:

I just wanted to catch you up on the status for MANY BLOODY RETURNS. Ginjer Buchanan at Ace has read the manuscript and loves it. (That is a quote!) And though I'd thought it would be a paperback release, the book will be a September 2007 HARDCOVER release.

Cool Yule!

Lizard Man of... My Hometown?

Now I’m reading Hunting the American Werewolf by Linda Godfrey and Mason has wanted to look at all the monster pictures. While flipping through the book, we came across a reference to my hometown. Apparently, in 1994, there was a sighting of a lizard creature sulking near the water front of the Black River near the Hardee’s of Clinton Avenue Bridge. What’s amazing to me is that this BLOCKS from the house I grew up in and where my parents still live.

According to Linda Godfrey the author of Hunting the American Werewolf, it all started when a man and his teenage son went walking with their dog and the dog slipped its leashed. They started hunting for the pooch, when “Suddenly, a movement near a tree caught their attention and they trained the flashlight in that direction, hoping to find the runaway hound. Instead, they were astonished to find themselves looking at a creature standing on two legs in front of a tree, something taller than a man and covered with mud-colored scales. Its eyes were yellow and slitted....”

Then she goes on to talk about all the mysterious drownings that happen near LaCrosse. Except, most of those drownings, while tragic, aren’t terribly mysterious. They tend to involve college kids who go bar-hopping – LaCrosse’s main bar street, Third Street, is as you might guess, a mere three blocks from the Mississippi – and wind up in the river. She makes a number of connections to the Mississippi and various Winnebago (Ho-Chunk) legends of monster snakes that drag unfortunate victims to watery graves, which would be a fine stretch, except the sighting of this lizard man was on the Black River. I know, because that’s the public beach I grew up swimming in every summer for nearly seventeen years.

Clearly, I have a lot of paranormal leanings, and I honestly believe that LaCrosse is a very magic town. A Menominee legends says that where three rivers cross there will never be a tornado. Despite the fact that the Midwest is plagued with tornados, LaCrosse (which is the junction of the LaCrosse, the Black, and the Mississippi rivers) has never been hit by one. There are gorgeous, wild Bluffs surrounding the town and undeveloped marsh land that cuts the city into the north and south sides. I could see how a magic creature could feel at home in LaCrosse and could, in fact, stay fairly undetected for a while.

But, I’m not buying this one.

I think the fact that Godfrey admits that she gets this story second hand and the fact that it happened in a place that I’m so intimately familiar with really stretches credibility for me. I will say that when I was growing up (70s and early 80s), the shoreline of the Black River was left undeveloped. I used to roam past the beach barriers and hike for miles through willow and weeds… and it was spooky. But, after I left, there was an attempt, I guess, to gentrify the area and the city clear-cut of all that wilderness. You’d think if there were a selkie or a lizard man living there, someone would have seen evidence of it, when the area was much more wild.

Wouldn’t you?

Marry Me, You Vamp!

From the Vampire Vixen’s chat list, J.C. Wilder (once again) had something interesting and provocative to say, “I heard Virginia Henley speak many years ago and she made the statement, ‘Women would love to sleep with my men but they'd be crazy to marry them.’ - I feel that way about the vamp. They're dark, deadly and ultimately sexy but one would have to be crazy to truly trifle with one.”

Yeah.

That’s part of what irks me when readers of TD&D complain that my vampire character is morally reprehensible. I want to say, “Well, Duh. He’s a vampire. He EATS people.”

I totally understand the appeal of the romantic, tragic vampire. I think, however, it’s easy for post-Buffy fans to forget that the traditional vampire is a killer. He can have remorse, but he still needs to kill to survive. Most vampires aren’t like Angel. They may not be soulless (depending, of course, on the author’s rules regarding such things) but neither are they without sin. (You may say Angel had his Angelus, but I’d counter that in many respects those were two completely different people – one entirely possessed by a demon and the other burdened with a soul. I liked both, though Angel was more interesting to me because he was more self-aware and introspective.)

Anyway, it’s in the sinner that I find interesting literary ground. This question of can a killer be a “good” person interests and excites me. When I sat down and conjured up Garnet, I wanted this question to be central to her personality, too.

I love romantic comedies, and I always knew that I wanted TD&D to have some light-hearted, if not downright humorous moments. However, I didn’t really want a silly, vacuous heroine. I wanted someone who would be equal in strength (ala Garnet’s magic and Lilith, who, if unleashed could eat the vampire for breakfast) AND in emotional depth (she has her secrets and her darker side, too.)

Would I really want to marry Sebastian? No, not particularly. He’s a decent enough sort, a day-walker, and filthy rich… but he still drinks blood and he’d need a source for that blood and it couldn’t be me – not forever, anyway. Plus, I’m not sure a vampire would ever be able to settle down and lead a truly normal life. There is, after all, no statute of limitations on murder...

Market Killer Strikes Again?

Ever since Other me wrote cyberpunk into the ground, I've been joking that now that I've transformed into Tate Hallaway I'll do the same for the whole vampire chick-lit craze.

Guess what's being reported on Vampire Vixens' yahoo group?

"In the publishing world trends come and go like the hems of dresses. According to a lot of publishers I'm hearing, 'We're not interested in vamps, we're all bought up' of the sales are 'slipping'. This is just my opinion but, if the sales are slipping its because of the NY 'rush' to fill the shelves with vampires. This has happened with every 'trend' and the quality begins to slip as they make that mad dash to catch the trend.
What do you think, are vampires dead?" (from J.C. Wilder)

Sounds like I may have done it again. Any requests for the genre or sub-genre I should wipe out next? Inspirational romances? Space opera?

Sigh.

The Black Dog of Père LaChaise

I’ve been reading The Beast of Bray Road, and there is a section in the book about supernatural black dogs, who guard certain graves.

Shawn and I have long been cemetery aficionados – to the point of having photographs hanging in our house of striking or interesting headstones. For me, cemeteries have always been peaceful, contemplative places. When I was a teenager, I used to bicycle out to the pauper’s cemetery on Campbell Road and sit in the shade of the oak tree just to be alone with my own thoughts. When Shawn and I lived on Girard Avenue in Uptown in Minneapolis, we spent a lot of time strolling the grounds of Lakewood Cemetery. I almost never find cemeteries to be spooky or creepy –with two notable exceptions.

The first was our trip to London when we visited Kensel Green. The problem with Kensel Green, despite the fact that it was WAY OUT (we had to take not just the tube, but the train) and we arrived at dusk (generally a creepy time of day), but also that it is as old as the more famous Highgate, but unlike it, it has remained open. Highgate, which is much larger, is filled. Once filled, they closed. Not so Kensel Green. Along one wall, we stumbled across moved or removed headstones. Plus, Kensel Green is old enough that when above ground crypts are in disrepair, there is a certain… shall we say, smell, which was made stronger by the classic London drizzling rain.

Eeeeeeewwwww.

We searched for Charles Babbage, who is supposedly buried there, found Christopher Wren instead, and then left in a hurry.

The next year, in 1995, my parents, Shawn and I traveled to Paris. Shawn and I took with us a great guide book we found called Permanent Parisians: An Illustrated Guide to the Cemeteries of Paris. Despite our Kensel Green experience, we had a lot of fun roaming the cemeteries of the London area. Plus, Paris has one of the most famous cemeteries in the world, Pere LaChaise, where many, many famous people are buried: Heloise and Abelard, Moliere, Balzac, Oscar Wilde, Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stien, Proust, and, of course, Jim Morrison (of the “Doors” fame). The cemetery covers acres of land and has gravel roads (complete with street signs) intersecting it. It’s a gigantic necropolis. We were in heaven!

We got lost somewhere after finding Balzac and were paused on the road, consulting our map. That’s when I saw it. The black dog. It was running towards us, through the headstones, barking fiercely. Given how many cats run wild in the cemetery, the thought of a supernatural being never crossed my mind. Our only thought was: run, run away fast. We ran, keeping the dog in our peripheral vision. We crossed the next intersection and it was gone. I hesitate to use the word disappeared because, despite writing about the paranormal, I tend toward the rational. But, it was gone. “That was weird,” we said, and then we went on with our trek.

Only later did I hear about the legend of the black dog. Then, I started to wonder – had we seen one?

To this day, I don’t know.

Web update

I've updated my web page to include the art for DEAD sexy, the back cover blurb, and most importantly a link to an excerpt of the first chapter of the newest Garnet Lacey book!

Enjoy!

Owwwwwooh, Werewolves of Wisconsin!

My trip to Oshkosh was, as I predicted, not terribly profitable. However, it was _very_ entertaining. First of all, I got to meet my host family’s friends and I had that instant feeling of being among "my people." These are gaming, science fiction, fantasy, TV and movie fans – geeks, even. Ah....

Even though I sold exact zero copies of _Tall, Dark & Dead_ at Apple Blossom Books, despite all the promotion that Candy, the owner, did for me, I ended up buying several books about subjects that I think will make their way into the novel I’m currently working on (tentatively called) _Bloody Smashing_, book three of the Garnet Lacey series.

For instance, did you know that Wisconsin has its very own werewolf?? Well, according to Linda S. Godfrey who wrote _The Beast of Bray Road: Tailing Wisconsin’s Werewolf_, it might. The cool thing is that this is non-fiction. These are unexplainable sightings that actually happened to people in an area not terribly far from Madison -- the town where the Garnet Lacey books are set.

Plus, Candy pointed me to several other cool books, including _Weird Wisconsin_ which I plan on ordering from her soon.

What I love about this is that when I sat down to decide where I was going to set the Garnet Lacey books, I picked Madison both on purpose and somewhat randomly. Let me explain. I love Madison and I make a yearly pilgrimage to State Street and surrounding environs. It’s a very funky, cool place where I could quite easily imagine vampire and other paranormal things hanging out (and not being bothered much, since it’s such a eclectic, accepting town in many ways.) Plus, there really is an occult bookstore on State Street (Shakti Bookshop).

But, even though I grew up in Wisconsin, I’m not from Madison, so the decision was a tad random… so it’s wonderful when I discover that my home-state is, in fact, EXACTLY the kind of place where werewolves and such could live.

Anyway, if you’re interested I found out that Weird Wisconsin has a web site. And, I found Haunted Wisconsin too!

Another sale!

It's been a crazy year for Other Me. I just heard from Yoon Ha Lee at the The Internet Review of Science Fiction that my interview with Karin Lowachee will run in their forthcoming issue.

It's a good interview, in my HUMBLE opinion. It was an interview I did because her book CageBird, which I read as part of the Philip K. Dick award committee work, got under my skin. I thought it was an excellent, but difficult book, and I really wanted to know authorial intent. Karin's answers surprised me, and hopefully, they will you too.

Horray!

Frak You, BSG….

I finally finished watching all of the BSG 2.5 episodes, and I’m never going to watch the show again; I’m that mad.

I think the writers of the show completely misunderstand why I’ve been tuning in. I don’t care about the toasters, their plan, or whether or not the lost colonies ever find Earth. I care about the people. I want to see them interact, every day, with each other – on the ship or on the ground, under stress or in peace. I don’t care about the wham-bam action (yes, it makes my heart pound… but why does it make my heart pound? The pretty explosions? Oh, ORANGE! Wow, THAT’s why I’ve been tuning in, because I love the orange explosions so much… oooh, you added yellow, wow-whee.) No, you fraking idiots. Explosions themselves don’t make good drama. For me it’s the characters, and now...

S

P

O

I

L

E

R

S

...“one year later” I don’t know these people any more.

I understand that the writers wanted to skip what they perceived as the boring parts (peace) and get back to the Cylon action.

Whatever. That's for crap storytelling, people. Who do you think you are, George Lucas? (Oh, and guess what? I hate HIM, too.)

I think they miscalculated my attachment to these people. For instance, I would have hung on for an entire season of peace, because with 50,000 people struggling for survive on a planet “ruled” by a corrupt president, a degrading military, there isn’t such a thing as “peace.” No, in fact, that’s drama. Human drama.

I want to have seen the military decommissioning – the decisions to do that, the arguments Adoma may or may not have given for continuing it. I want to see what happened the day Starbuck decided to get married (what the frak, btw? Does she really seem like the nagging, yet devoted tent-wife we see in the snippet of the “now”? How did THAT transformation happen?) I want to see Callie and the Chief work through his violence issues (is it just me or has that guy gotten away with murder and assault with almost no consequences?) I want to see Apollo so give up on life that he lets himself get fat (oh, and if there was no longer any reason to tune in, a fat Apollo pretty much clinches it for me; I like my pretty boys, pretty, thank you.) How did the XO become the sole, sober voice of reason, “You and I both know the Cylons could show up any day?” (And his wife stayed on the ship? Five minutes earlier in the episode, he said she could go cat around without him.) Giaus as completely corrupt? (Yeah, he had his moments, but when the nuke blew, he seemed striken… what makes his character interesting is that conflict between being human and being a completely misguided, manipulated cylon-fraker. He HAD been one of my favorite characters. Not no more.)

And now I hear from my friend Rick that they’re going to skip ahead another year or more? I’m supposed to go the BSG site and download a few minutes of condensed storytelling to satisfy my need for ACTUAL CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT.

No, not interested, thanks.

I’m too mad. And, frankly, I don’t care any more. You rip out the stories of these people and you rip out the heart of the story. That’s a quick bleed-out. I’m done.

Oh, but thanks for the black fighter pilot... too little, too late, especially since he doesn’t get a story. Apparently no one does any more.

This Just In...

An Amazon.com search just showed that Dead Sexy is now available for Pre-Order! Hurrah!

The Hard, Cold Reality of “Book Tours”

I leave for Oshkosh, Wisconsin on Friday afternoon. I’m headed off to stay with a friend of a friend and stop into OshCON and do a signing at Apple Blossom books in Appleton.

Before I was published, I had this crazy idea that publishers arranged and paid for authors to go on book tour. They don’t. At least, they don’t pay for mine. No doubt there are some authors who get the royal treatment of fifty states in fifty days, the tab picked up by Houghton Mifflin or Penguin USA or whoever, but that’s a select few… and, more to the point, no one *I* know.

How did I end up doing the signing in Appleton, you ask?

Well, sometime after my book first came out in May this friend of a friend in Oshkosh read Tall, Dark & Dead and loved it. He’s also involved with OshCON and he emailed me to see if I was interested in attending the con in October. I said I was, but it’s a bit of a drive for me (several hours by car) and I have a young family at home who will have to make arrangement to survive the weekend on their own. Sensing my hesitation, Phil (my friend of a friend) sweetened the deal: how about I see if I can help you arrange a signing at one of my local bookstores? Or maybe two? “Oh,” I typed, my eyes twinkling, “That’s starting to sound worth it. Especially if you’re willing to make initial contact.”

Because while I love to do signings – what could be cooler than people coming up to YOU and asking for your signature on a book they loved? – I HATE arranging them, especially in places where I’m not local.

I’m not a shy person, but there’s still something in me that inwardly cringes when I have to dial a bookstore’s number and try to convince them that I’m a good bet for a signing. The thing that you may not know about book signings is that they rarely sell a lot of books. I’ve been told by booksellers that if you sell a half a dozen (that’s SIX) you’ve done really well. Many times a bookstore will only order several copies knowing that even those might not “move,” which backfired once… I had a signing in my hometown. It was my first published book. I got some media attention – the Sunday paper ran a huge article the day of the signing, plus my parents told everyone who had ever known me – fifty people showed up. Great for me, except the book store had ordered fifteen copies. Luckily, I’d thought ahead and brought book plates to sign. After that, I started carrying extra copies in my car, though I’ve only had cause to use them once since then.

Normally, it’s crickets. The resounding sound of emptiness.

The class I took in publicity said that the point of book signings is not to sell books, it’s to talk to booksellers and get them excited about “hand selling” (talking up your book to customers who ask, “What’s good?”). Even though I know that’s what I’m supposed to expect, it’s still disappointing to drive (eight minutes or eight hours) to sit in a mostly empty bookstore with that wistful, yet doomed expression of someone whose date is never going to show….

When book signings are local, I can do something to mitigate that depressing experience. I can print up and send out postcards announcing the signing a week or a month in advance to my friends, acquaintances, people to whom I’ve taught classes, etc. Then, usually, some people show up. When the signings are out of town, like this one will be, I’m at a loss as to what I can do. Now that I’m writing romances, there’s the possibility of contacting the local RWA chapter and seeing if they will, at least, run a notice in their newsletter to members… but, this brings me right back to that slimy feeling of asking people to do something for me that doesn’t net them much in return.

A more robust self-promoter than myself would send off press-kits to the area newspapers in hopes that somehow I will have written a press release that makes an Oshkosh reporter psyched that an out-of-towner that has no connection what-so-ever to their city has come to sign one of a million paranormal romance. It’s a tough sell. What usually happens is I work like a dog to come up with a clever hook about my work, write up and print out the press releases, gather up reviews and articles about me for a press kit, go to the effort to make them pretty, yet accessible, spend the money to ship them off…

…And get zero response.

So, I'm off to Oshkosh to listen to their crickets. Wish me luck?

Copyedited Manuscript Delivered

Yesterday evening I FedExed the copy-edited manuscript of Dead Sexy back to New York. I have to say this was the cleanest copy I've ever had to approve... which, frankly, unnerved me. I'm used to having to do all sorts of crazy last minute changes. This time I only had to answer a couple of questions, fix one herb, and that was it.

Weird.

Still, the book is that much closer to being ready to hit the shelves!

Now, I need to start working on Bloody Smashing... just one more episode of Battlestar Galactica, then I can start...

Respect for arthropods (and other ick!)

When I asked Mason what I should blog about this is what he suggested:

“Dear dot-com.,
Nothing else. Now let’s look at ‘deep sea’ + ‘ocean creatures.’”

He’s just discovered the wonderful powers of google, and that there is a world of images of his favorite things: hammerhead sharks, Brazilian wandering spiders, Madagascar hissing cockroaches, black widow spiders, harvestmen (the arachnid family that daddylonglegs belongs to [pictured]), giant squid, etc. Whenever he sees me sitting at the computer, he always comes up to me and tells me what search words he wants me to use (even when I’m not online.)

I have to say that I have learned to enjoy things -- and by "things" I mostly mean arthropods, a.k.a "bugs" -- thanks to being a parent to a curious boy like Mason. Even though it means sometimes picking up millipeds in my backyard and inwardly thinking "eew".... I tell myself that by not cringing and shrieking like the Nelly Queen I truly am, I am hopefully fostering exploration, etc., etc. for my budding entomologist.