The Buzz
Catch up on all the latest News and Happenings at Bees’ Knees Creatives!
Color Choices That Communicate Your Brand
Every client conversation about branding eventually turns into a conversation about color, usually starting with someone saying they want their logo to be blue because blue means trust. I understand the instinct. Color psychology gets talked about like a formula: blue for trust, red for urgency, green for growth, purple for luxury, plug in the meaning you want and out comes the right hex code. In practice, it's a lot messier and a lot more interesting than that.
How to Tell a Story With One Photograph
Sharp focus gets you a nice photo. It doesn't automatically get you a memorable photo. I got reminded of that recently by a photographer I respect, who looked at a shot of mine that missed focus on the one spot you're "supposed" to nail, the eyes, and told me it still worked. That comment stuck with me enough that I went looking through my own library for more proof he was right.
The Poem That Came Two Weeks Late
Some things can't be written in the moment. This is one of them.
I wrote The Day the Skies Fell Silent about two weeks after September 11th, not in those first days when the same footage was looping on every channel, twenty-four/seven. Grief that raw doesn't leave much room for language, much less creative language. It took that long before any words organized enough to call a poem actually showed up.
Where an Idea Came From
Ideas come from interesting places. One came from the christian myth about The Rapture. It is one of those ideas that comes back around every few years, whether it's from a sermon or a headline. The Left Behind series alone is still sitting on half the shelves in Christian fiction almost twenty years after the last book came out.
I began wondering what would happen if it worked the other way. What if it wasn't the righteous who disappeared, but the genuinely evil? (Full disclosure: I wonder… a lot!)
My Fall Projects Article Just Hit Newsstands
A couple of weeks ago, an envelope of author copies showed up, and it took me a second to place them. Turns out I had good reason: the piece originally ran in Issue 13 of Backwoods Survival Guide back in 2021, and they reran it for Issue 39. I'd genuinely forgotten it existed until it landed on my doorstep five years later.
A Few Things That Inspired Me This Month
Some months, every source of inspiration points the same direction. This one didn't. Here's what's been rattling around in my head lately, in no particular order.
Jellyfish. The golden jellies at OdySea Aquarium got me more than anything else in the building: that orange-gold color drifting against deep blue water, moving with no urgency at all. I can't point to exactly what it is I'm comparing that to in my own life. I just know I stood at that tank far longer than I meant to, completely mesmerized.
UV feather photography. I found out birds can see UV light that's invisible to us, which means the birds I handle at Liberty Wildlife are almost certainly showing off patterns I've never seen. I already have a blacklight, though I'm still working out whether I'll need a filter or a modified camera, and I'm guessing a longer exposure to compensate for how dark the room will need to be. My own parrots are the test subjects: I've got feathers from Bishi, Little Sunny, and Big Sunny to start with, plus a tail feather from Lily and a couple more from Azul. If that works, I want to bring the setup to Liberty and try it on the feathers at the Non-Eagle Feather Repository as well.
Are Business Cards Becoming Obsolete?
I secured a donation for Liberty Wildlife at 30,000 feet, somewhere between Detroit and Denver, using an app on my phone.
Somehow, I'd gotten bumped up to first class (Never want to fly any other way again), and ended up sitting next to a surgeon on his way to Colorado to ski. We got to talking, as one does on a long flight, and at some point, I pulled out my phone to show him pictures of the birds I work with at Liberty: a peregrine falcon, my favorite great-horned owl, and a red-tailed hawk mid-flight. He thought it was incredible. He asked how he could donate. I opened HiHello, pulled up my Liberty card, and handed him my phone so he could scan the QR code himself. Web page, contact info, donation link, all of it right there. No paper changed hands. No pen. No fumbling through a bag for a card I probably didn't have on me anyway. He said it was the easiest business card exchange he'd ever had, and I don't disagree.
Nine Years, Many Fears Conquered
Liberty Wildlife just ran a Volunteer Spotlight on me, and re-reading it made me laugh at how far I’ve come! Nine years ago I started volunteering there, hoping to conquer a lifelong fear of birds, an irrational fear for which I squarely place the blame on Alfred Hitchcock.
Photographing Through Glass: Lessons from the Aquarium
Aquarium photography sounds simple until you try it: you're shooting through glass, in low light, at subjects that don't hold still and don't take direction. I spent an afternoon at OdySea in Scottsdale finding out exactly how many of my usual instincts don't apply once there's a tank wall between me and the fish.
The jellyfish were the easiest win of the day, by a wide margin. Whatever lighting the tank was using threw the water a deep, saturated blue, which meant the orange and rust-colored jellyfish practically glowed against it, pure complementary colors doing half the composition work for me. They also barely move with any speed, drifting rather than swimming, which meant I actually had time to focus and frame instead of firing blind and hoping.
The Hawk, the Lizard, and the Heron I Almost Missed
These four photos came out of three completely different outings: a park visit that turned into a hawk-rescue misunderstanding, a hike at Pinnacle Peak, and an afternoon at the pond that started with one bird and ended with two. None of them were the shot I actually planned on getting.
The Idea, the Place, and the Title (In That Order)
The story didn't start with Phoenix, or even with rain. It started with an idea I woke up with one morning: a person finding photos of themselves, ones they have no memory of taking, at places they’ve never actually been. I searched around to see if anyone else had already written something built on that premise and came up empty, which was enough to convince me it was a subject worth chasing. The title, A Rainy Day, didn't arrive until I was about halfway through writing it, once I understood who Roz actually was: someone who saves things back, who's been waiting on a change she's not sure is even coming.
What I've Been Working On This Month
This month split pretty evenly between finishing something old and starting something new, which is about as normal as my desk ever gets.
A Ghost Like Me went back to my editor, Ryan, after I'd let it sit untouched for about six months. That distance turned out to be the best editing tool I didn't know I had. I'd read a paragraph and think, wow, I wrote that 🥰, and two paragraphs later, wow, I wrote THAT? 🤢🤮. The big structural task was shifting the entire manuscript's tense, which forced me to read every single sentence instead of skimming past the ones I already knew by heart. In the process I found a pet word I'd used more than seventy times and managed to whittle it down to nineteen.
Three Jobs, Three Headspaces.
No single day at BKC looks the same. Some mornings I'm behind a camera by six am, or earlier depending on the season, editing images by ten, and drafting a blog post by two. Other days I sit down with a novel chapter at eight in the morning and I'm still there at six that night, having barely moved from the chair.
When One Cover Has to Become Five
Non-designers often think designing a book cover means making one image. In practice, it means making one image that has to work as a 24-by-36-inch poster, a postage-stamp-sized eBook thumbnail, a perfectly square audiobook icon, and a wraparound paperback jacket with spine width calculated down to the page count. All without mangling the image or creating six different books.
What a Dragonfly Taught Me About Photography
Everyone assumes a dragonfly shot comes down to reflexes. Fast hands, fast shutter, right place at the right time. I believed that too, for about two weeks.
Those two weeks were humbling. I'd spot one perched on a reed, wings catching the light just right, and I'd move in for the shot, only to watch it lift off the instant I got close enough to focus. I'd find it twenty feet away, try, and lose it again. I did this for the better part of an afternoon at a pond, sweating, half-crouched, convinced the problem was my speed. I just needed to move faster, get closer quicker, beat the dragonfly to the punch.
I never caught the dragonfly. Not once.
From Rough Draft to Finished Story: My Process
Every story begins the same way: with a blank page.
Getting the story out of your head and onto the page is often the hardest part. It took me a long time to accept that I didn’t need every sentence to be perfect before moving on. In fact, trying to make every paragraph flawless usually meant I wasn’t making any progress at all.
Writers generally fall into two camps: plotters and pantsers.
A New Title Coming
We are very excited to announce a new partnership with Sharon Ahern, co-author/creator of the bestselling sci-fi/action-adventure series THE SURVIVALIST. Sharon and Sean previously worked together on CAMP ZERO (2016) which was set in the same universe. (Incidentally, long-suffering fans, the second CAMP ZERO adventure is also coming soon).
I love the smell of fresh ink in the morning!
The latest issue of Backwoods Survival Guide is heading to newsstands coast to coast May 29th 2026 — and it's got my byline in it!