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A Long-Neglected Task, and Some Research

I've been meaning to add a page to my website with links to published nonfiction clips, and I finally did this last night. It's a pretty simple page, but hey, I'm pretty simplistic in my web-design skills.

This morning, I sent a query to a publication I haven't written for before, and we'll see how that goes. But if you never send a query, nothing new ever happens. I haven't sent a query in ages. The gig with EDGE fell into my lap via a craigslist ad; I didn't have to query--I only had to answer the ad.

I'm looking at different ideas for writing about bees and conceptualizing these ideas as article-sized pieces, so I'm also trying to think of possible markets for these articles. A weird thing about nonfiction contrasted with poetry is that with nonfiction you can actually conceive of a market for your work whereas with poetry it's more that you write the poem and see if maybe later it seems like it might be a fit for a certain magazine where maybe a couple other poets and maybe a couple of friends of yours might read it.

I did more research regarding Jonathon Keats and his Honeybee Ballet, and I also found an item on a choreographer who created a dance piece inspired by the dance of bees. And did you know there was a Nobel lecture in the 1970s on decoding the bees' movements?

It's interesting to me that we use the word "dance" in describing the movements that bees use to communicate; it kind of seems anthropomorphic of us, but at the same time, what other words are there to label communication through movement? I thought about sign language, but does "language" fit what the bees are doing when they move their bodies to indicate to other bees where, for example, to find a nice cache of pollen? The Nobel lecturer does use the word "language," so maybe both this word and "dance" are useful.

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