The conditions in Good Queen Frida’s dungeon are strangely adequate. I sit on a tiny cot between clean stone walls by torchlight. The guards come by with wholesome day-old bread and pure water. They ask if I am comfortable. I do not know if all the Good Queen’s prisoners are treated so well. If she really is as kind and fair as she makes herself out to be. Or if it is because they have found out, through some means, what happened at the very end.
If you missed yesterday’s blue moon, don’t worry, it will still look full tonight too. And as I should also have mentioned, it’s a micromoon (the opposite of a supermoon). The moon is at apogee, or as far from us as it can get. Right now, that’s about 251,000 miles away.
Tomorrow night is the second full moon of May, which makes it a blue moon. They are rare but not very, as they happen every two or three years. The next one won’t happen until December 2028.
People who step outside at the end of the month to catch a glimpse of the rare lunar event should also be able to spot Venus and Jupiter in the western sky about an hour after sunset. Meanwhile, early risers should be able to see Mars and Saturn in the eastern sky about an hour before daybreak.
I wanted to let you know a day ahead of time in case you, like me, like to have these things on your calendar!
“I think it’s important to remember that something that’s happening to you is not the only thing happening in the world. There’s always another story.” — Arundhati Roy
“I don’t think fantasy really works except when Gandalf says, ‘You don’t get to choose your moment, you just have to live it… He was right—you don’t get to choose the moment—we’re here, we have to live it… by the time you are my age, a lot will have gone down. I want you to focus on the good and to try and make the good in a team effort.” — Kim Stanley Robinson, 2026 Middlebury College Commencement Address
Today I want to share a fun non-fiction essay by one of my favorite fiction writers, T. Kingfisher. It’s about history and gardening and passion, real-life inspiration for fiction, and heroes saving one small but important thing.
So what does all this mean, for a writer? Well, it may not be holding the bridge at Thermopylae, but I keep coming back to how many gardeners end up saving a small piece of the world. Whether it’s a food from a lost homeland or a cultivar that is about to vanish from the earth, so often it comes down to one person who kept something small but important from being lost forever.
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