I can never remember when flowers bloom in Florida. It feels as if they’re blooming all year round, but they’re really not. Late April, though, is magnolia season. A few weeks from now, the white petals will turn brown and drop, littering people’s yards with debris that looks like dirty tissues. Not the best look. But a good reminder to appreciate them while they’re beautiful.

I think my weirdest personality trait might be how much I enjoy giving presentations. If I could somehow synthesize the chemicals that flow through me when I’m in front of an audience, I bet I could create a nice addictive drug that would make millions of dollars. (From curing depression and anxiety, not just getting people high, if that matters.)

I spoke to a class at Full Sail today. So much fun. Great audience, too — interested and attentive and willing to be interactive. The presentation was a revised version of the one I gave a couple months ago. It’s getting better, but it’s not entirely right yet. There’s a process in creating a presentation that is about figuring out what you want to say and then figuring out how to say it and then how to show it. I still need to do a little work on the first part in order to smooth out the second and third.

One of the things that I talked about, though, was how good storytelling is basically good lying. Once you’ve learned how to lie well, you’re halfway to knowing how to tell a story well. And what better place to learn how to lie then from the people who try to determine whether you’re lying or not?

The FBI has lots of interesting information about interrogations and signs of truth or falsity. A condensed version (highly condensed) of one technique called Criteria-Based Content Analysis (CBCA) says that true stories (and therefore good lies) contain the following types of details:

Context — details that place the story in a time and setting
Sensory — sight, sound, smell, details that evoke physical sensation
Emotional — people telling the truth about their own experience share how they felt, people reporting on an experience or making it up skip that
Unusual, unexpected, superfluous — real events have details that surprise people and when someone is telling the truth, they share that detail

I tied that concept to Kurt Vonnegut’s line about every sentence in a story needs to move the action forward or reveal character, but I added a bit, making it “move the action forward or reveal character or relationships.” Those two ideas — about details and about sentence-level goals — might just add up to my ideas about how to write. Some people write books about the subject, but I think I might be two-thirds of the way to figuring out my own philosophy: Tell good lies in a way that Kurt Vonnegut would approve of. Funnily enough, I’m not actually a huge Vonnegut fan. He’s a great writer, of course, but I don’t want to live in his worlds. So maybe for me there’s another element about writing a world in which I want to live?

Speaking of which, one of the students asked how I picked the locations I wanted to write about. I don’t think I answered her question very well, because I went into an immediate digression about Florida. I’ve lived in a lot of places. Omitting Florida and in order of time spent: California, New York, Connecticut, Wisconsin, Illinois, London, British Columbia, the Virgin Islands, Washington. I’ve vacationed or visited even more, but I’m not going to bother with a list because it would take too long. There are plenty of countries I’ve never visited (all of Asia and Africa, for example!) but I’ve checked out most of the states one way or another.

That gives me the authority to say that Florida is magical, so what better place to set a magical story? I saw immediate skepticism, so I said, “No, no, really, Florida is magic. You walk outside of your house and there are these giant birds, like huge, and they’re just there, in your front yard.” Tom, the teacher, said, “For me, it was the lizards.” I nodded immediately. Florida is rife with lizards. They’re everywhere. And did you know that geckos chuckle? The noise a gecko makes is exactly like a smug little laugh. But I digress again — there were still dubious smirks on student faces, so I said, “I will prove it. I will prove that Florida is magic. I will find a photograph.”

Technology being what it is, it took me a minute, but I finally managed to pull up the following photo, which I showed each and every student on my phone.

That bug is a scarlet-bodied moth wasp. It was flying around my bedroom the other day and when I finally got it outside, I took a picture.

Apart from being the prettiest bug you will ever see in your life, with its red body and lacy wings, the scarlet-bodied moth wasp has the amazing attribute of being the only bug that shares a chemical defense. “The adult male moth extracts toxins known as “pyrrolizidine alkaloids” from Dogfennel Eupatorium (Eupatorium capillifolium) and showers these toxins over the female prior to mating. This is the only insect known to transfer a chemical defense in this way. “ Is that not cool?

And definite proof, IMO, that Florida is magic. Tassamara is small potatoes compared to scarlet bugs that pretend to be wasps and have heroic males defending their mates via sprinkled pixie dust (um, pollen.)

Look closely. That speck on top of the chimney is a hawk.

Walking the dogs this morning and a hawk breezed over my head. Of course there was no possible way I was going to catch a picture of it in flight. Between juggling two dogs’ leashes and the two dogs tugging in different directions, I can barely manage a still picture. But it was kind enough to sit for a moment on a roof — just long enough for me to snap this picture — before zooming away again. You probably can’t even really see it — it’s the speck on the top of the roof.

This afternoon, though, I was on my home from the grocery store when I saw it again.* I took a quick picture, thinking it would move, then started walking toward it. Took another, and another, and another, and… you get the idea. This is the very last. I stood under its light-pole and it twisted its head what seemed like a full 180 degrees to stare down at me, then decided that I meant nothing and went back to relaxing.

Hawks in flight are elegant, but this one, sitting still, looks plump and satisfied, like a country squire character in a Jane Austen novel.

*I say “it” as if there’s only one — I’d like to believe that it’s Joan the Hawk, the bird that R sees when he’s at school, just because I like the name they’ve given that hawk so much, but R says no, too small. Still, he thinks the neighborhood probably only has one hawk. It needs a name!