How To Write About Backyards

I read some advice about writing once that said you should never start a story with a description of the weather. There was no justification for this rule, it just said you should never do it. Perhaps it was because of the most famously bad opening sentence of a novel, "It was a dark and stormy night," (which it is right now, by the way), from the novel Paul Clifford by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, although it is probably better known as the way Snoopy starts all of his novels when he writes on a typewriter on top of his doghouse in Peanuts cartoons. It was also the first line of A Wrinkle In Time by Madeline L'engle (and no, I didn't remember that on my own, I just read it somewhere when I looked up the line for what is coming next). People constantly revile that line as bad writing, although I quite like it, but what I think most people don't know is that that is not the entire line. It's not even close to the entire line, and when you know the entire line it makes a lot more sense that it is considered so awful that there is an annual bad writing contest for horrible opening lines to novels, called the Bulwer-Lytton prize. Here it is:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

 Yep, it's awful. It's awful layered upon awful. So why am I bringing this up? Because I was thinking today about that advice not to start a story with a description of the weather, when that is exactly how I start my blog a lot of the time. Now, I don't think the rule (and I am not a big follower of rules anyway, especially when there is no justification given for it) applies to something like a blog, it's supposed to apply to fiction. My blog is not fiction. What my blog is, though, is an account of what happens in my backyard, and the weather is something that happens in my backyard. It also happens to have a great effect on what else happens in my backyard, affecting not only the wildlife that might be seen there, but also whether or not I get to go out in the backyard looking for that wildlife on any given day.

Did I mention that it is a dark and stormy night? Well, the forecast for today was this: drizzly rain starting in the afternoon, real rain later in the afternoon, and heavy rain tonight. It wasn't raining when I read the forecast in the newspaper, but it was very dark and gloomy (and warmish - we flirted with 60ºF today! We only got to 58ºF, but still...), so even though I don't believe in forecasts, I do believe my own observations, so I decided to move Bug Walk to the head of the line for things I needed to do today. What often happens on days like today is that it starts raining the moment I am about to go outside. This is not fiction; this happens to me a lot. But today it didn't. It didn't start to rain until I was already outside, at the point in the yard that is farthest from the house. And it wasn't drizzle, either, it was real rain. My camera is 'weatherproof,' but that doesn't mean I want it to get soaked, so I stuck it under my shirt and sped through the rest of my bug walk and went inside. And it stopped raining. I didn't bother going back out, though. There weren't any bugs to go back out for.

Okay, there were two bugs.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 I know I have posted these recently, but today, it's Backyard Bug of the Day. I still don't know what it is, but I am guessing an aphid or a psyllid.

And, a March fly.

Yep, that's it. I saw one other bug, a gnat, and that's all the bugs in the backyard today - that I could see. I didn't even hear any crickets when I was out this afternoon, although they were singing enthusiastically later in the evening (the temperature, by the way, dropped into the high 40s in the late afternoon, and rebounded to 58ºF in the evening, and now, it's even warmer, 59.7ºF, albeit it is now tomorrow, and I am just pretending that it is still today. That doesn't make any sense, but just go along with it. So there. I am ending the blog with talk about the weather, too).