The blue moon suits my mood. I’m tired and sluggish, ready to crawl off into some quiet corner and lose myself in a half-edited manuscript, one burdened with rambling paragraphs and boring verbs. It needs dragonflies.

A couple of spiders wouldn’t hurt, either.

Because spiders matter. Even the ones that eat butterflies. (I believe this was a Cloudless Sulfur butterfly.)

I want my story to feel real, so it can’t be all flutter and gleam. It needs sticky strands of web, for tension. And rough surfaces, for texture.

Now, if only I could find a way to add cicadas. Maybe just one. A late summer cicada, laying its eggs under the bark of a pear tree…