Like an ancient tree, a story has an inevitable internal logic that the writer must find and follow. Deep in the woods behind my friend PR’s farm is a tiny jewel of a place: Bijou Glabin. This “glamourous cabin” and its gem of an outhouse are sheltered in a shaded…

(An earlier version of this story was published in Heroic Care: 35 Writers & Artists Show What It Means to Care, A multi-genre anthology edited by Betsy Ellor, 2021.) When the Committee knocks at the door, I am clean, dressed, my hands folded in my lap as I sit, waiting. …

It’s been a long set-up here and here, but we’ve arrived at the punch line. Or at least, at my favourite part of this story: where we see, in images, what happens when a colony develops laying workers. It’s a royal mess, and yet, an engaging cacophony. Remember this: it…

Read Part One of this series here. We’re halfway through, folks, and I hope you’ll feel the investment of your reading time pays off, with drama and fascinating facts from the insect world. Beekeepers call a honey bee colony “queen-right” when it has a laying queen in residence, and “queen-less” when it doesn’t-which, as we’ll see, is…

A passion almost equal to writing, for me, is beekeeping. Honey bees are exceptional animals, fascinating to humans and heavily researched, yet with many behaviours we still don’t understand the mechanics of or know the reasons for. …

I’m inspired by stories that unfold from or into a post-apocalyptic perspective. But I still believe in a shiny future. Here is where I will weave those threads into a comfortable garment. A blog without content is like a car during lockdown: parked week after week in the garage, seeing…

As you’d see from the activity on my website’s sidebar, I’ve been living on Twitter for the past many months. For seven years I’ve been on that platform, but barely present until November of 2020. Until then, I didn’t see how it served me, I used it badly as a…