Dragonflies

Monday Mind Dump

(Oooh. Yeah. ChatGPT got the message after I had to smack it around for putting too many wings on him. More covering armor is needed, but got the look exactly right. Yet, this isn’t one of my primary characters. A secondary. My primaries are less striking. ;) Grays and rusty reds with dark red hair, typically. )

I’m sure it’s easy to see my love of dragonflies. I find them magical in all the best ways. Where I grew up, in the middle of the Texas Panhandle, it was very dry, yet we had dragonflies. Big, huge, colorful ones. Just looked up what kind. Blue dashers. I’d of course, see a lot more near Lake Meredith. Not sure why, but it always felt special to spot them. They were just neat with the way they flew, their speed and maneuvering.

When I write my Fae, I keep that in mind, along with all the time spent creeping around in tall grass catching walking sticks and horned lizards. What really got me was a little over a decade ago, I waited at the mailboxes in our apartment complex for my daughter to get off her bus. One hot afternoon, I walked into a cloud of gnats. We get those a lot.

I stepped back and watched as a pair of big blue and black dragonflies darted into the gnats repeatedly. Within minutes, there were far fewer gnats. I didn’t know they ate them. Hadn’t given a lot of thought to what dragonflies actually eat. I wasn’t into insects beyond they exist, get out of my house, ick.

Predators. Not just a weak little insect, but an absolutely vicious predator that cut through that cloud of annoying pests and devoured them…like tiny sharks in a school of fish. I think that’s when they sat in the back of my mind as something to model my Fae after later.

When I went about creating my Fae races, I decided to use wasps and dragonfly behavior for the Dragonfae. A few years earlier, I’d stumbled across a story about how paper wasps remember who they fight in their colony so they don’t have unnecessary fights. They recall the specific, unique markings on their opponents.

They recognize faces. Human faces. They remember how you treat them…and I observed a nest of them flying right next to people’s heads without the person knowing…and doing nothing. Even if the people disturbed their nest. In this case, it was a hanging wind chime in front of a door. They didn’t sting or attack. Then, it came to me that, they knew when they were LOOKED at and when you actually gave them a REASON to attack.

They know individual people’s faces! I put it to the test over more recent years. I let them have their nest on our porch to take care of mosquitos and other pests. They did their job. Occasionally, the idiots flew into the house and we had to escort them out. I never got stung by them. Not until I disturbed a nest I didn’t see beneath our mailbox.

It’s funny. I got a WARNING hit from the queen of that nest. She smacked into my hand but didn’t sting me. Unfortunately, because I didn’t see what had hit me, I didn’t move away fast enough for them and got stung by a different one. How do I know it was different? Because I saw the one that bumped into me and it was bigger. Yeah. The entire nest was sprayed because they couldn’t be under the mailbox.

I found it fun to pattern the appearance of some of my Dragonfae after wasps and dragonflies. Mostly, it’s their wing coloration. However, there are some that have skin colors patterned the same way; bright stripes mixed with black skin. It was meant to give them a more primitive appearance, justifying how they’re looked at by the Soliel as vicious monsters. Never mind they’re far more reasonable than the more human-appearing Fae.

• TC Ross, who actually scheduled this one the day before!