A quiet sort of day. Took Maddy to get her eyebrows waxed. ("I can do that," I told her. "We have candles." She properly ignored me.)
I went down to say hullo to the bees -- the Olga hive is busily growing two new queens, and it's nice seeing the Olga bees happily bustling around the two queen cells. With luck, one of them will leave her cell, go off on a successful mating flight and return to repopulate the hive and lead it on to glory.
See the two things that look like peanuts? Queen cells. The first one to hatch will despatch the unhatched with her stinger...
Right now, as I type this, Maddy and I are rewatching the Bad Wolf and Parting of the Ways episodes of Doctor Who, because Maddy wanted to be reminded of them, due to the end of Turn Left. (And saying more would be spoilers.)
Hey Neil,
I'm not only a big fan of yours, but also Jennifer DeGuzeman's of Slave Labor Graphics fame. She posted this:
And it was very nice meeting Jennifer, who came across as utterly self-assured and said lots of sensible things she has undoubtedly forgotten. And besides, it did smell like onion rings.
Hi Neil,
I was reading Amanda (Palmer)'s blog, and she said you were working with her on her solo record, Who Killed Amanda Palmer. I'm a huge fan of Amanda, and your writing, and I was wondering what your involvement was in it.
Thanks, Corey
So far I've written the words that will turn up on the back cover of the CD, Who Killed Amanda Palmer? And I'm going to write the words for a book of photographs of Amanda Palmer having been killed.
Hi, Neil! A bunch of my geek-girl friends and I have pulled together a calendar celebrating being both female and geeky. You seem like this might be something you'd want to support--if you want to plug it on your blog, we'd be very grateful! The website is http://www.calendargeeks.com.
~Julia
Consider it posted -- mostly because I liked the outside knitting picture.
No question, Neil -- just a link that will point you to what happens when the muses take hold of an English department, and focus their will upon the lowly subject of an errant red hand truck. Enjoy! http://flagpole.com/Arts/Features/ParkHallPoesy/2008-06-18
Fun! Reminds me of some of the classic Making Light posts.
Bil Stiteler just pointed me at http://1post1der.blogspot.com/, a blog that collects blog posts from blogs that only have one entry.
Hi Neil!
I am a long time fan of your work, and I know I'm a bit behind, but I just finished reading Anansi Boys. It is an awesome read, and I found myself in awe of the subtlety of your literary skills.
I'm curious about the writing process of the characters in Anansi Boys, you being a Caucasian man and the majority of the characters are not. I am an African American woman, and in the majority of books I've read, you naturally assume the characters are Caucasian, as whenever a non-Caucasian comes into play, it is plainly stated, i.e. "He was a black guy... She was a Japanese woman," etc. I so admire how you wrote Anansi boys, because it was the exact reverse - the reader is to assume that all the characters are black, and the non-black people are pointed out. Even the minority authors I've read make a point of focusing on race, but Anansi Boys was so smooth and subtle, I was halfway through the book before I caught it. I just wanted to say thank you for telling a wonderful story, without getting caught up in the semantics of color. It has to be the first book where the main characters are black people, of different cultures, that is not placed in the "African American Fiction" section of Borders.
Could you tell a bit about your writing process for Anansi Boys, or if you have already done so on your journal, could you direct me to the post?
Hello! I have a question I couldn't find the answer to on your site or hardly anywhere else online. I have completed the third draft of a novel and got a lot of feedback saying it was good. However, I am in need of editing. Do you know how I can find good editors for hire? The reason why I want an editor is because I am concerned about being turned down for needing too much editing. I make some plural, punctuation, and some structural mistakes. I have no idea what the publishing world is like--Will a publisher turn down a manuscript with a good story, good writing, and solid arc if it had too many little errors per page?
I suspect that "too many little errors per page" means that the work is not going to be seen as "good writing". Amazing storytelling will triumph over a lot -- there was one bestselling author who wrote all her manuscripts with the shift key down -- but you need amazing storytelling to get to that point.
And that was as far as I got last night because it was then that I discovered a fully-gorged deer tick on the side of my face, and got to investigate what happens next (your doctor appears and gives you 200mg of doxycycline, which works in 87% of cases to stop Lyme Disease from happening, is what).
'Lo Neil, As a great fan of Doctor Who, I've been dancing around the room after hearing that Steven Moffat is taking over as Chief Writer and Executive Producer of the series in 2009. Russell T Davies has done a brilliant job bringing the series back to life, but now that he's decided to leave I can't think of anyone better to take over than Mr. Moffat.
Anyway- my real question is whether or not we'll finally see a Neil Gaiman DW episode? We're all quietly hoping the idea came up during your dinner back in March in Bar Shu... I know you're a very busy person, but it would be the perfect combination for so many fans! Rachel
I think it's great news -- what Russell Davies did over the last few years was remarkable: as a writer and as a show-runner he brought Doctor Who back, sure-footed and smart and with a heart. (And even the few mis-steps were easily forgiveable. Maddy and I agreed that there were bits of plot in "The Doctor's Daughter" that necessitated not just suspension of one's disbelief but the surgical extraction of said disbelief before dangling it over a vat of bubbling acid in the hopes that it would shut up. We loved "The Unicorn and the Wasp" though).
I'm really excited about Steven Moffat taking over -- always assuming that it's not just a publicity stunt on his part to try and get "Blink" a Hugo, as a countermeasure to Mr Cornell's car-crash-to-get-the-sympathy-vote.
And it was a terrific dinner: they do fantastic dry-fried green beans at Bar Shu (it doesn't sound like it would be fantastic from the menu, but it is).
Hi Neil!
I wanted to let you know about an experiment of mine and I think your fans might be interested in! You may have heard about 1000 Journals (www.1000journals.com), the traveling journal project where people around the world passed around journals and notebooks and drew/wrote about their thoughts about anything! Well they've continued the project at www.1001journals.com! I have started three notebooks that will (hopefully) eventually be filled by your fans around the world with drawings, poems, random thoughts, etc about your work. I was wondering if you could put a word out to people and let them know about this experiment so we can start sending them around to fans everywhere! They can create an account at www.1001journals.com and sign up for Journals #2932, 2933, 2934. It's currently capped at 10 people per journal but I can increase the signup capacity once the cap is reached! I think this would be super fun!
Thanks
Katherine
It's posted. Good luck.
Neil,
I was reading your blog about the Tasmanian tiger a bit ago and found it very interesting. Today, while perusing the BBC news site (I like seeing many sides of an issue) I found this: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7408840.stm
I thought you would find it interesting.
Thanks,
Lily
I'm fascinated by this one. I really want to see a Thylacine in the flesh...
Chapter 7, so far 102 pages long and not quite done yet (probably tonight), will, I think, be more than twice as long as any of the other chapters/stories in the book. It also has some bits (written in the very small hours of last night) that are scarier than anything since the first couple of pages, and it does some very odd things with viewpoint, too. But I know that it's almost done since I've started worrying about the eighth and final chapter, and you don't do that until the one you're on is nearly done.
My assistant Lorraine just came in and said "USA Today mentions that Bill Clinton, Jenna Bush and Stephen Colbert are all up for Audies. They don't mention that you are up for three of them." Nor would I expect them to. But I see that Joe Hill's also up for two, so Joe and I can sit out on the edge of the awards banquet, nibbling our chicken and watching the awards all go to other people. (My usual Audies experience -- I did get one in 2003 for Two Plays For Voices, though.)
One of the award nominations is for my collaboration with Michael Reaves, Interworld, which was reviewed, along with China's Un Lun Dun in the New York Times this week. It's an odd review -- I think that rule number one for book reviewers should probably be Don't Spend The First Paragraph Slagging Off The Genre. Just don't. Don't start a review of romance books by saying that all romance books are rubbish but these are good (or just as bad as the rest). Don't start a review of SF by saying that you hate all off-planet tales or things set in the future and you don't like way SF writers do characters. Don't start a review of a University Adultery novel by explaining that mostly books about English professors having panicky academic sex bore you to tears but. Just don't. Any more than a restaurant reviewer would spend a paragraph explaining that she didn't normally like or eat -- or understand why other people would like or eat -- Chinese food, or French, or barbeque. It just makes people think you're not a very good reviewer.
One can assume that if a reviewer is reviewing a book then it's interesting enough to be reviewed. If you as a reviewer, begin by explaining why you don't like a genre, then you put up the backs of everyone who does, and is interested, and probably would be reading your review in the first place. And you lay yourself open to the cardinal sin of dim reviewers, which is excusing something from being part of a genre because it's good. (Edit:See also my comments, and the poem quoted, at http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2005/07/storms-and-teacups.asp)
Just assume that horror, or YA, or whatever it is, deserves the attention you're giving it, and then review it as best you can.
(As a reviewer, you are probably allowed a couple of "I didn't think I liked these, but this [book/film/restaurant] changed my mind" reviews, but you had better know what you're talking about before embarking on them...)
...
Kendra Stout, who did the awesome Scary Trousers tee shirt over at Cat Mihos's Neverwear store informed me that David Tennant was actually a fennec fox. (She is a zookeeper by profession. She knows these things.) When I said that I didn't think he was, she made this, to prove it:
The trouble is, you can't talk about something like tonight without sounding either like a namedropping ass who is tremendously pleased with himself, or like someone with no soul, or both ("did Radio 3's The Verb, then junket at Claridges, then premiere, nipped over to Bafta screening for Q&A, then small afterparty. And so to bed").
So I'm going to tell you my favourite part of the evening, which was talking to Kate Magowan about Una (which is the part she plays in the film), and her calling over her husband to meet me, a husband who turned out to be John Simm, who interrupted my stumbling burbles of "ulp Life on Mars erk The Master" with his own starry-eyed "glunk The Sandman!" and pointed out that that meant he'd been a fan of mine for much longer than I'd been a fan of his so hahah and there you go.
I sort of floated out of there, after that. Holly said it was the alcohol, and she may have been right but honestly I do not think so.
I am feeling insufferably delighted, and know that I must use my powers of prophecy only for good. For lo, did I not write in http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2006/05/small-dr-who-thoughts.html in May 2006, having just watched it, "right now my money's on "Girl in the Fireplace" for a Hugo Award in 2007. Really lovely."?
And did I not reiterate that prediction here and here?
I did, actually, in case you were wondering and can't be bothered to check.
Congrats to Steven Moffat and all the Hugo Winners, and especial congratulations to Tim Pratt, who told me he was certain he wouldn't win because I would, and, probably because of this, I'm actually more pleased by him winning than I would have been if it had been me again.
(The photo above was a mural I liked in the CCTV studios.)
The dog training, since you asked, is going very well. Dog has figured out that if he sits next to me and persistently places his nose between my right hand and either the keyboard or the mouse, I will eventually stop attempting to type and take him for a walk, while I for my part can get him to sit, lie down, come, or shake paws three times out of five if I'm also holding something he likes to eat and if there's nothing interesting going on and if he feels like it. I think we're both making excellent progress.
I just took him for a walk down in the woods (he took off after a wild turkey. On every walk we've been on recently he's wound up flushing a turkey, who then flies off making lots of noise, so he'll chase her and ignore the chicks. This time she ran off until he was well away from them, and then took to the air, and he vanished off after her, coming back five minutes later soaking wet and with large bright grass-green patches all over him) and the woods are a strange mess of wildflowers and towering giant hemlocks, and every few feet a wild gooseberry bush flourishes, leaving me puzzled why tiny green caterpillars devour all the gooseberry plants I put in while the wild ones grow like nobody's business.
(Excuse me. The Birdchick and her husband, non-beekeeping Bill, have just arrived with a new Queen for the Kitty hive. I need to go and put white clothes on and walk in the woods once more.)
Dan Guy wrote to let me know that...
The word cloud hasn't been updated since the server migration two+ weeks ago. Now that you're on a host to which I have decent access I'm rewriting the word cloud's back end to be much more efficient. (The label cloud is still operating normally, though, and now is even automatic.)
Which is to say, the word count quoted was incorrect. Here are the right numbers:
1,000,951 words in the blog 4,082 words are by Maddy recently guestblogging 996,869 words by you 3,131 words to go until you reach the million word mark!
So it's closer than I thought. Tick. Tick.
There's a song on the new They Might Be Giants album called "Careful What You Pack." According to Flansburgh, it was written for a movie but wasn't used. There's been some speculation that the movie was Coraline. Can you confirm?
I can. Yes, it's a song they wrote for CORALINE. There were a few they did that didn't get used.
Did Maddy like the Doctor Who Season Finale?
She really did. She even cried a little when the master died (I thought the death was great but was still a bit grumpy that my prediction that the master would be shot by his wife had come true). She liked it more than I did, really. I thought it was a bit of a curate's egg (in the erroneous sense of Good In Parts, not in the actual sense of All Rotten) but I would forgive a lot for John Simm's performance as the Master, which I loved, especially following Derek Jacobi's, which I loved in a very different way. And if it wasn't Blink or Human Nature, it still had lots of things I liked, and Utopia and The Sound of Drums were both enormous fun. Even if the Toclafane plot was the Cybermen plot of the season two end, and was also the Dalek plot of the Season one end. I hope that season four won't end with the discovery that somehow human brains are fuelling the New Mechanoids. And the least said about the mini-Doctor in the cage and the magic saying of the name that makes it all better, the better...... .
Hi Neil,
Your journal entry regarding your plans for Comic Con reminded me of the interview you recently had with Quint from Ain't It Cool News, in which you mentioned that on that Wednesday, July 25th, you would be hosting a showing of Beowulf footage, with Roger Avary, for a theater of about 400. My question is whether this is still going to happen, and if it is, what I can do to take part in it. (This is my first Comic Con, and would love to start it off right.) I apologize if this information is forthcoming, or if I just missed something. I'm so excited, I can't wait. Thanks for listening. (Sorry if I accidentally sent this twice.)
-Ben
I'm not sure. If I find out about how people can get in to that -- or the Stardust event on the Thursday evening, or the event on the Saturday that I can't talk about yet, I'll post the details here.
I do know that the Beowulf panel and screening will be filmed and repeated, so if you miss the original panel you will still be able to see the 3D footage (and a film of me and Roger burbling about it) at some point during the convention. But I don't know if I'm allowed to say that yet. If I'm not, deny everything.
So, I'm home and writing this in bed before the day starts and the phone begins to ring. Am expecting the jet lag this week to be pretty hellacious, as it was last time I did one of these "nip across the Atlantic for a few days" jaunts.
Let's see...
The screening for 50 People on Sunday night was nerve-wracking (these were not people chosen for their diplomatic abilities -- if they'd disliked it, I would have known) not least because this was the first time I'd seen something close to a finished cut.
Monday morning I had breakfast with Michael Chabon, who had also been to Hay and was staying in my hotel, and then it was interviews, from early in the morning -- mostly magazine pieces with long lead times, but also some TV and radio, most of which will come out in the UK in October when the film does. Lunch was on Rotten Tomatoes UK, and was recorded in a Japanese restaurant for a podcast which will mostly consist of chewing noises I expect.
The oddest moment of the day was being interviewed by the BBC for a BBC4 documentary on Fantasy. They did the interview in an old church in Paddington, in the crypt, and as the car pulled up I had one of those feelings of deja vu that you only get when you really have been somewhere before. And as I went down into the crypt, I knew. "We filmed Neverwhere here!" I told the interviewer. "This was the Black Friars' place." I was being interviewed where Richard Mayhew was given his nice cup of tea, before the ordeal.
Then back to Soho for food -- Ten Ten Tai in Brewer Street, which is my favourite unpretentious little Japanese restaurant in London, and is also the nearest eating establishment to Paramount London, so when I'd eaten I walked around the corner and went downstairs and was interviewed by The Man at the Crossroads, Paul Gravett, and answered questions for people who'd just seen Stardust.
Dear Neil,
I was lucky enough to be at the Stardust screening in London on Monday where you also talked about the process of writing the original story, and about your involvement in the film.
I wanted to ask you how it feels to see your original idea filtered through so many different people - going from you, through (in some regards at least) Charles Vess illustrating it, and then through Jane Goldman & Matthew Vaughn in production of the film's script. How does this process change your feelings about & connection to that original idea - if at all?
You see, I really did want to be intelligent and to ask this on Monday. But I was so excited at seeing the film that my brain went a little bit gloopy and wouldn't work properly. So instead I asked about your dog.....
Lou M
The expression on Paul Gravett's face when he realised that the first audience question was "How's your dog" was a wonderful one.
You always fall short of the original idea. Sometimes you make something else on the way. But I feel like Stardust, especially the illustrated one, is very similar to the thing I set out to make in the first place.
The film is a film (and a really good one) which squeezes and pushes and slides in order to tell the story as a movie, and, I think, succeeds beyond my dreams. I think I must like collaborating. ...
Anyway yesterday Holly and flew home. My dog was happy to see me. Maddy and Holly and Holly's friend Sarah and I watched the first part of the Dr Who two parter (how could I not like an episode which begins on my minus forty-seventh birthday? And has a little girl holding a red balloon?). I had a fight (well, a difference of opinion) with Holly and Sarah about them not watching the next episode without us, of the dammit this is a communal family TV watching experience variety, which I suspect in retrospect I only won because they didn't know where the second half DVD was, so we'll all watch that today. Lovely stuff, Paul Cornell should be justly proud. And an enormous relief after the last couple of episodes.
And then bed and, with my sleep schedule all mixed up, not much sleep at all. Oh well.
Hi Neil,
BBC Radio 3 is repeating the documentary on HP Lovecraft you contributed to -- Sunday 10th June at 20:00 BST.
Particularly good news as I missed it the first time.
Also, this coming Saturday the Times (the UK newspaper, which is just called the Times) will be publishing an article of me talking about H. G. Wells's short stories.
Which reminds me...
Why is your voice different when you're talking to some anonymous interviewer about Lovecraft from when you're talking to a con audience about Fragile Things? Your "I can't tell you why that is, other than that Lovecraft is Rock and Roll" voice is much lower than your "They're buying my books, just waiting to get sued" voice. Do you deliberately modulate the pitch of your voice to match the situation, or did you get your soul eaten along the way, rendering your voice higher for some unfathomable reason?
which just left me shaking my head in puzzlement. (Does your voice always sound the same, and not change with what you're talking about?)
I met Lynn Hacking from Final Draft at a trade show this weekend, and he told a very funny story about being caught between you and Roger Avery in an argument. So I have to ask: one space or two after the period?
You can actually tell from a script Roger and I have collaborated on who wrote what, because I always put one space after a full stop, and he puts two. The reason you can tell now is because he has finally sighed and stopped carefully going through anything I write and inserting that extra space, having given it up as a lost cause.
...
Friends of Amacker's (and those who worry) can follow her medical progress as they put her back together over at http://bullwinkle.org/amacker/, which is the blog her brother is keeping.
...
And I feel guilty I didn't mention this before, as some of the events have already happened, but go to http://www.wkrac.org/stardust/stardust.html to learn about the exhibition of Charles Vess Stardusty stuff at the William King Regional Arts Center "serving far Southwest Virginia and Northeast Tennessee". They have amazing Charles Vess original art, along with the books I handwrote the story in and lots of other cool things.
There are too many introductions to things on my hard drive, and I thought I'd pull a few of the uncollected ones out, mostly for books that are now out of print.
Anyway, a few introductions in the weeks to come. This is from an introduction to a Paul McCauley Dr Who novella that Telos published in 2003, "Eye of the Tyger", a few years before the current team revived Dr Who so very well.
The Nature of the Infection
The years pass, and the arguments go back and forth over whether watched fiction actually has an effect on the reader or the viewer. Does violent fiction make a reader violent? Does frightening fiction create a watcher who is frightened, or desensitised to fear?
It’s not a yes, or a no. It’s a yes but.
The complaint about Dr Who from adults was always, when I was small, that it was too frightening. This missed, I think, the much more dangerous effect of Dr Who: that it was viral.
Of course it was frightening. More or less. I watched the good bits from behind the sofa, and was always angry and cheated and creeped out by the cliffhanger in the final moments. But that had, as far as I can tell, no effect on me at all, as I grew, the fear. The real complaint, the thing that the adults should have been afraid of and complaining about was what it did to the inside of my head. How it painted my interior landscape.
When I was three, making Daleks out of the little school milk bottles, with the rest of the kids at Mrs Pepper’s Nursery School, I was in trouble and I didn’t know it. The virus was already at work.
Yes, I was scared of the Daleks and the Zarbi and the rest. But I was taking other, stranger, more important lessons away from my Saturday tea-time serial.
For a start, I had become infected by the idea that there are an infinite number of worlds, only a footstep away.
And another part of the meme was this: some things are bigger on the inside than they are on the outside. And, perhaps, some people are bigger on the inside than they are on the outside, as well.
And that was only the start of it. The books helped with the infection – the Dalek World one, and the various hardcovered Dr Who Annuals. They contained the first written SF stories I had encountered. They left me wondering if there was anything else like that out there...
But the greatest damage was still to come.
It’s this: the shape of reality – the way I perceive the world – exists only because of Dr Who. Specifically, from The War Games in 1969, the multipart series that was to be Patrick Troughton’s swan song.
This is what remains to me of The War Games as I look back on it, over three decades after I saw it: The Doctor and his assistants find themselves in a place where armies fight: an interminable World War One battlefield, in which armies from the whole of time have been stolen from their original spatio-temporal location and made to fight each other. Strange mists divide the armies and the time zones. Travel between the time zones is possible, using a white, boxlike structure approximately the same size and shape as a smallish lift, or, even more prosaically, a public toilet: you get in in 1970, you come out in Troy or Mons or Waterloo. Only you don’t come out in Waterloo, as you’re really on an eternal plane, and behind it all or beyond it all is an evil genius who has taken the armies, placed them here, and is using the white boxes to move guards and agents from place to place, through the mists of time.
The boxes were called SIDRATs. Even at the age of eight I figured that one out.
Finally, having no other option, and unable to resolve the story in any other way, the Doctor – who we learned now was a fugitive – summoned the Time Lords, his people, to sort the whole thing out. And was, himself, captured and punished.
It was a great ending for an eight-year old. There were ironies I relished. It would, I have no doubt at all, be a bad thing for me to try and go back and watch The War Games now. It’s too late anyway; the damage has been done. It redefined reality. The virus was now solidly in place.
These days, as a middle-aged and respectable author, I still feel a sense of indeterminate but infinite possibility on entering a lift, particularly a small one with white walls. That to date the doors that have opened have always done so in the same time, and world, and even the same building in which I started out seems merely fortuitous – evidence only of a lack of imagination on the part of the rest of the universe.
I do not confuse what has not happened with what cannot happen, and in my heart, Time and Space are endlessly malleable, permeable, frangible.
Let me make some more admissions.
In my head, William Hartnell was the Doctor, and so was Patrick Troughton. All the other Doctors were actors, although Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker were actors playing real Doctors. The rest of them, even Peter Cushing, were faking it.
In my head the Time Lords exist, and are unknowable - primal forces who cannot be named, only described: The Master, the Doctor, and so on. All depictions of the home of the Time Lords are, in my head, utterly non-canonical. The place in which they exist cannot be depicted because it is beyond imagining: a cold place that only exists in black and white.
It’s probably a good thing that I’ve never actually got my hands on the Doctor. I would have unhappened so much.
A final Dr Who connection – again, from the baggy-trousered Troughton era, when some things were more than true for me – showed itself, in retrospect, in my BBC TV series, Neverwhere.
Not in the obvious places – the BBC decision that Neverwhere had to be shot on video, in episodes half an hour long, for example. Not even in the character of the Marquis de Carabas, who I wrote – and Paterson Joseph performed – as if I were creating a Doctor from scratch, and wanted to make him someone as mysterious, as unreliable, and as quirky as the William Hartnell incarnation. But in the idea that there are worlds under this one, and that London itself is magical, and dangerous, and that the underground tunnels are every bit as remote and mysterious and likely to contain Yeti as the distant Himalayas was something, author and critic Kim Newman pointed out to me, while Neverwhere was screening, that I probably took from a Troughton-era story called “The Web of Death”.
And as he said it, I knew he was spot on, remembering people with torches exploring the underground, beams breaking the darkness. The knowledge that there were worlds underneath... yes, that was where I got it, all right.
Having caught the virus, I was now, I realised with horror, infecting others.
Which is, perhaps, one of the glories of Dr Who. It doesn’t die, no matter what. It’s still serious, and it’s still dangerous. The virus is out there, just hidden, and buried, like a plague pit.
You don’t have to believe me. Not now. But I’ll tell you this. The next time you get into a lift, in a shabby office building, and jerk up several floors, then, in that moment before the doors open, you’ll wonder, even if only for a moment, if they’re going to open on a Jurassic jungle, or the moons of Pluto, or a full service pleasure dome at the galactic core...
That’s when you’ll discover that you’re infected too.
And then the doors will open, with a grinding noise like a universe in pain, and you’ll squint at the light of distant suns, and understand...
See the two things that look like peanuts? Queen cells. The first one to hatch will despatch the unhatched with her stinger...
See the two things that look like peanuts? Queen cells. The first one to hatch will despatch the unhatched with her stinger...
