Serendipity

Don't you love serendipity? I'm one of those people that believe it is a sign, especially when it relates to writing and creativity.

My bee geisha story originally did not have bees in it, but the story idea started taking off in my imagination when I connected bees to it.

First off, the germ of this idea came from watching Memoirs of a Geisha far too many times. I wanted to write a story involving the same level of details into a cultural subset as the movie/book goes into with geishas. Anyway, that lead to me reviving an old idea about magical living tattoos. Presto, chango. I have combined the two.

The first real bit of serendipity came from an encounter with bees and some later knowledge about them. For some reason we are seeing an increase in bees where I live. In fact, they frequently land on me while I am lounging outside to the point I get fed up and go inside. Next, I read in a book on myths that bees were considered psychopomps in the Greek world--and since my book has one culture as Greek-inspired, the lightbulb went on. My psychopomps in my world for my Greek-like culture are bees. They aren't like butterflies, which are pretty. These hold a bit of apprehension instead, just what I need for my story. That is serendipity #1.

Serendipity #2 came from the fact I got in the mail a catalogue for Daedalus Books for the first time. Inside was this book, A Keeper of Bees: Notes on Hive and Home. Bees play a big role in my story since Serendipity #1 occurred. This book find was fortuitous, because I need research material on bees and I heard good reviews of this book. So, now it is on order.

Let's see how well my serendipity holds--and let's see if I can't find me a nice geisha book to go with it ;-)