Lis Anna-Langston's Blog
June 25, 2021
Happy Pub Day!
In honor of Pub Day I am offering all of my Goodreads followers and friends an EXCLUSIVE. I created a wonderful origin story for you as a sneak peek into this title launching into bookstores TOMORROW!!
This is the only social media site where I am posting this extra. It is just for you.
Enjoy, it is an honor to share this true story with you!
The Assassin Bug
For a decade I lived in the mountains, a few miles from the Blue Ridge Parkway, and my yard was a zoo in the literal sense. On a regular basis, there were opossums, raccoons, chipmunks, squirrels, crows, hawks, robins, sparrows, finches, a lynx, foxes, a few bear families, coyotes, moles, groundhogs, and a bevy of insects large and small.
My dog dug up a strange bug in a pile of leaves one winter. It looked like a cross between a huge stick bug blended with an enormous stink bug, bigger than the palm of my hand. The bug didn’t seem to be alive, but was so unusual that I wanted to keep him.
I brought him inside and set him gently in a nice big habitat I’d made to hatch ladybugs. Dirt, sand, pebbles, and leaves filled the bottom of the clear house, with twigs to climb and a top slotted with air holes. I set the habitat on top of a table in my bedroom.
The next morning, I woke with the distinct feeling I was being watched. Looking around to find the source I was shocked and charmed to find the bug in the habitat standing upright on two legs, hands on the clear plastic, staring right at me.
“You’re alive,” I said, sitting up.
Seeing that I was awake, he tilted his head and tapped at the plastic. He watched me closely in anticipation, not worried, but definitely curious.
It honestly didn’t occur to me that he could
have been hibernating. Before doing anything, I needed to know what he was. It only took a few minutes on the internet to learn that he was an Assassin Bug, or some variation, and not poisonous or dangerous to humans.
I also learned that he wouldn't live long outside in the below freezing temperature. While not cramped in the habitat, he was much too big to stay there comfortably. Twelve paces would bring him to the end of the house. He needed something bigger if he was going to spend the winter with me, so I set about making a proper bug condo.
I love bugs and had earthworm hatcheries, ladybug nurseries, and a big butterfly house made out of netting. I turned the netting on its side and filled it with big, crunchy oak and maple leaves, fat twigs, and a little hut made from seagrass.
The butterfly house was big and so I delicately set the other house inside and he climbed out. The Assassin Bug explored the leaves and twigs, climbing over and under, up the side, then upside down, then down the other side. I diluted a little raw honey in spring water and watched him eat with his long proboscis. With water and food and warmth he clamored to the back of his house, under a pile of leaves, and went to sleep.
When the sun went down, he was waiting for me. I'd spent the time learning about Assassin Bugs, the many types, how long they live, what they eat. That’s when I found something called a “Killing Jar.” Never a fan of killing, that jar was ominous.
I never mentioned the Killing Jar to my friend, because we had our relationship figured out. Culture teaches people to be afraid of insects. It’s a bum deal. Having been raised by my Cherokee grandmother, I saw every skittling being as a message, a divine mystery. They had potential to change minds and circumstances.
So we spent that winter together, in the warm lamplight of the kitchen. Me, talking to the biggest bug I’d ever met. Him standing on fat twigs, watching me make dinner or sit at a table working on the seed of a story about a little girl afraid of the dark.
She wasn’t just afraid of the dark, she was afraid of entering the darkness. Of course, she had to. But where was the peril, the jeopardy? The stakes had to be high. What would make her enter that darkness?
The answer was to save a friend. But who?
One night, I decided, she would follow mysterious lights into a field and find the neighbor boy. I knew the story was more than just two humans. What would compel this girl I named Maya Loop to save a boy she barely knew?
I paused, pen in hand, and glanced over. My buddy stood contentedly on a twig, staring back. The Assassin Bug tilted his head. Chills ran through my entire body.
Maya Loop didn’t enter the dark to save a boy she barely knew. She went to save an Assassin Bug.
I knew I was onto something. Like the leading man of Assassin Bugs, he deserved to become a legend.
Winters in the mountains can be long and cold, which bodes well for writers. Every day the Assassin Bug and I sat together in the lamplight as the seed of my story cracked the shell into a dangerous world. Suddenly I knew Maya Loop had big stakes. A mythic quality rose from the outline of her character. A normal girl called to do extraordinary tasks.
Life is a test for all living things. The battle to survive and thrive is played on many fields. Some use wit, some intelligence, some sheer force. But the battle for survival is a kind of unity. A call for everything on this planet to ebb and flow. For the humans in my story to survive the Assassin Bug character had to survive.
I wrote the first lines of him into the book. His hands on the glass walls of the bug house as I’d first seen him when I woke up. How he watched me curiously as I walked across the room to kneel in front of him. I recreated it in perfect detail for the book and added peril, the dreaded Killing Jar.
It was the act of freeing him that set the story in motion. Maya Loop wasn’t just going to save the neighbor boy. She was going to save the Assassin Bug.
Where the brave blue haired girl from Baltimore showed up afraid of the dark fields, I sent her in search of answers.
I loved the tone of this story, the bravery. How each character showed up on the page with a dynamic personality. They were modeled on real beings in my own environment, the menagerie in my yard.
With the Assassin Bug perched on his twig watching me work I wondered about his future, which led me to wonder about my own. I’d always had a sense of the past. My family dragged the past around behind them like five-thousand-pound balls. But I’d never really had a sense of the future. It made me start thinking of time differently. It's such a slippery construct. I had a note taped to my wall. Time is not a circle.
But what if it was like the image of a snake biting its tail in an endless loop. What if someone could move through the loop? What if time is more than it seems? What if there is a world tree and a world clock? What if we are always battling beings from other timelines to survive our own?
I spent a lot of evenings making dinner thinking about those concepts. All the while, the Assassin Bug stood on his favorite branch and helped me think. I loved being near him for the same reason I loved ladybugs and granddaddy long legs and the Queen Ant. Because looking into their eyes allowed me to see them as individuals and not just the collective terms. Spiders. Ants. Bugs.
Looking at something and developing a relationship is a great harbinger of change. Just as bug diversity is a sign of a healthy ecosystem. I hoped I was a good example of a human.
When spring came, he was starting to slow down. I took his house outside, ready to let him spend his golden years (days? weeks?) in nature.
Now he could tell all the other Assassin Bugs about the winter he spent inside one of the enormous wooden boxes where it was warm and well lit, with the comforts of outside. How food and water in flat lids was given to him by a giant who sat next to him every day and hummed, and cooked, and wrote a story featuring him. But the Assassin Bug only wandered to the opening of the house and looked around. Then turned to walk back to the place he called home.
I wasn’t sad when he died. If anything, I wanted the world to experience some of our friendship. Our system of communication and trust. The Assassin Bug was small, but a big personality. I learned from the Assassin Bug that friends come in all shapes and sizes and humans aren’t the only ones who enjoy a safe warm place to ride out the winter.
His choice to stay with me added a depth to a novel that I could not have anticipated or outlined in advance. His/her appearance in my life brought me a unique friendship. A sort of fabulous, unlikely friendship that changed both of us. The trick to living deeply is to feel deeply. To choose where we put our focus. Because, in the warm lamplight of winter, a friend is a friend.
Grab your copy of the brave, blue haired girl from Baltimore who saves the world!
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/108...
Or find Maya Loop on Goodreads and purchase from your favorite retailer!
www.lisannalangston.com
© 2021 Lis Anna-Langston
All Rights Reserved
This is the only social media site where I am posting this extra. It is just for you.
Enjoy, it is an honor to share this true story with you!
The Assassin Bug
For a decade I lived in the mountains, a few miles from the Blue Ridge Parkway, and my yard was a zoo in the literal sense. On a regular basis, there were opossums, raccoons, chipmunks, squirrels, crows, hawks, robins, sparrows, finches, a lynx, foxes, a few bear families, coyotes, moles, groundhogs, and a bevy of insects large and small.
My dog dug up a strange bug in a pile of leaves one winter. It looked like a cross between a huge stick bug blended with an enormous stink bug, bigger than the palm of my hand. The bug didn’t seem to be alive, but was so unusual that I wanted to keep him.
I brought him inside and set him gently in a nice big habitat I’d made to hatch ladybugs. Dirt, sand, pebbles, and leaves filled the bottom of the clear house, with twigs to climb and a top slotted with air holes. I set the habitat on top of a table in my bedroom.
The next morning, I woke with the distinct feeling I was being watched. Looking around to find the source I was shocked and charmed to find the bug in the habitat standing upright on two legs, hands on the clear plastic, staring right at me.
“You’re alive,” I said, sitting up.
Seeing that I was awake, he tilted his head and tapped at the plastic. He watched me closely in anticipation, not worried, but definitely curious.
It honestly didn’t occur to me that he could
have been hibernating. Before doing anything, I needed to know what he was. It only took a few minutes on the internet to learn that he was an Assassin Bug, or some variation, and not poisonous or dangerous to humans.
I also learned that he wouldn't live long outside in the below freezing temperature. While not cramped in the habitat, he was much too big to stay there comfortably. Twelve paces would bring him to the end of the house. He needed something bigger if he was going to spend the winter with me, so I set about making a proper bug condo.
I love bugs and had earthworm hatcheries, ladybug nurseries, and a big butterfly house made out of netting. I turned the netting on its side and filled it with big, crunchy oak and maple leaves, fat twigs, and a little hut made from seagrass.
The butterfly house was big and so I delicately set the other house inside and he climbed out. The Assassin Bug explored the leaves and twigs, climbing over and under, up the side, then upside down, then down the other side. I diluted a little raw honey in spring water and watched him eat with his long proboscis. With water and food and warmth he clamored to the back of his house, under a pile of leaves, and went to sleep.
When the sun went down, he was waiting for me. I'd spent the time learning about Assassin Bugs, the many types, how long they live, what they eat. That’s when I found something called a “Killing Jar.” Never a fan of killing, that jar was ominous.
I never mentioned the Killing Jar to my friend, because we had our relationship figured out. Culture teaches people to be afraid of insects. It’s a bum deal. Having been raised by my Cherokee grandmother, I saw every skittling being as a message, a divine mystery. They had potential to change minds and circumstances.
So we spent that winter together, in the warm lamplight of the kitchen. Me, talking to the biggest bug I’d ever met. Him standing on fat twigs, watching me make dinner or sit at a table working on the seed of a story about a little girl afraid of the dark.
She wasn’t just afraid of the dark, she was afraid of entering the darkness. Of course, she had to. But where was the peril, the jeopardy? The stakes had to be high. What would make her enter that darkness?
The answer was to save a friend. But who?
One night, I decided, she would follow mysterious lights into a field and find the neighbor boy. I knew the story was more than just two humans. What would compel this girl I named Maya Loop to save a boy she barely knew?
I paused, pen in hand, and glanced over. My buddy stood contentedly on a twig, staring back. The Assassin Bug tilted his head. Chills ran through my entire body.
Maya Loop didn’t enter the dark to save a boy she barely knew. She went to save an Assassin Bug.
I knew I was onto something. Like the leading man of Assassin Bugs, he deserved to become a legend.
Winters in the mountains can be long and cold, which bodes well for writers. Every day the Assassin Bug and I sat together in the lamplight as the seed of my story cracked the shell into a dangerous world. Suddenly I knew Maya Loop had big stakes. A mythic quality rose from the outline of her character. A normal girl called to do extraordinary tasks.
Life is a test for all living things. The battle to survive and thrive is played on many fields. Some use wit, some intelligence, some sheer force. But the battle for survival is a kind of unity. A call for everything on this planet to ebb and flow. For the humans in my story to survive the Assassin Bug character had to survive.
I wrote the first lines of him into the book. His hands on the glass walls of the bug house as I’d first seen him when I woke up. How he watched me curiously as I walked across the room to kneel in front of him. I recreated it in perfect detail for the book and added peril, the dreaded Killing Jar.
It was the act of freeing him that set the story in motion. Maya Loop wasn’t just going to save the neighbor boy. She was going to save the Assassin Bug.
Where the brave blue haired girl from Baltimore showed up afraid of the dark fields, I sent her in search of answers.
I loved the tone of this story, the bravery. How each character showed up on the page with a dynamic personality. They were modeled on real beings in my own environment, the menagerie in my yard.
With the Assassin Bug perched on his twig watching me work I wondered about his future, which led me to wonder about my own. I’d always had a sense of the past. My family dragged the past around behind them like five-thousand-pound balls. But I’d never really had a sense of the future. It made me start thinking of time differently. It's such a slippery construct. I had a note taped to my wall. Time is not a circle.
But what if it was like the image of a snake biting its tail in an endless loop. What if someone could move through the loop? What if time is more than it seems? What if there is a world tree and a world clock? What if we are always battling beings from other timelines to survive our own?
I spent a lot of evenings making dinner thinking about those concepts. All the while, the Assassin Bug stood on his favorite branch and helped me think. I loved being near him for the same reason I loved ladybugs and granddaddy long legs and the Queen Ant. Because looking into their eyes allowed me to see them as individuals and not just the collective terms. Spiders. Ants. Bugs.
Looking at something and developing a relationship is a great harbinger of change. Just as bug diversity is a sign of a healthy ecosystem. I hoped I was a good example of a human.
When spring came, he was starting to slow down. I took his house outside, ready to let him spend his golden years (days? weeks?) in nature.
Now he could tell all the other Assassin Bugs about the winter he spent inside one of the enormous wooden boxes where it was warm and well lit, with the comforts of outside. How food and water in flat lids was given to him by a giant who sat next to him every day and hummed, and cooked, and wrote a story featuring him. But the Assassin Bug only wandered to the opening of the house and looked around. Then turned to walk back to the place he called home.
I wasn’t sad when he died. If anything, I wanted the world to experience some of our friendship. Our system of communication and trust. The Assassin Bug was small, but a big personality. I learned from the Assassin Bug that friends come in all shapes and sizes and humans aren’t the only ones who enjoy a safe warm place to ride out the winter.
His choice to stay with me added a depth to a novel that I could not have anticipated or outlined in advance. His/her appearance in my life brought me a unique friendship. A sort of fabulous, unlikely friendship that changed both of us. The trick to living deeply is to feel deeply. To choose where we put our focus. Because, in the warm lamplight of winter, a friend is a friend.
Grab your copy of the brave, blue haired girl from Baltimore who saves the world!
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/108...
Or find Maya Loop on Goodreads and purchase from your favorite retailer!
www.lisannalangston.com
© 2021 Lis Anna-Langston
All Rights Reserved
