I was sitting on the couch, reading Mistborn (for the first time, and I'm still not done, and if you spoil anything about it for me, I will seriously not be your friend anymore), and it hit me, the same way it always used to:
I had to write.
I've said this other places before, but writing inspiration feels kind of like wetting your pants: sudden, urgent, and embarrassing, because I stop being able to human until I either 1) write, or 2) lose the inspiration, which is sad.
Luckily, when the inspiration hit, I was at home with Gabe, and he is excellent at not butting in on things. I got up, got my laptop, and started writing The Fire Fairy Story.
What is The Fire Fairy Story?
The Short Answer:
A story based on my friends and I that I started writing when I was twelve.
The Longer Answer:
It was July 6, 2006. Jesse had a sleepover birthday party and invited me, my sister Sarah, Ellie, a girl named Zoie, and a girl named H...Hailey? Haley? Hayley? I don't know how to spell it, but you get the idea.
We were all AVID imaginers and pretenders. Almost all we did when we got together was play pretend, whether that was with dollhouse or our actual bodies, most often the latter. This birthday party was no different.
I believe it started with the sparklers. As we played with them in Jesse's front yard, we began play fighting with them.
"When I say 'duck,' you duck, okay?"
"Okay."
*dance around, wave sparkler—*
"DUCK!"
*playmate ducks dramatically as the yeller whips her sparkler over the space previously occupied by the ducker*
Pretty soon, play fighting with sparklers led to being creatures who could produce fireballs with their hands. The creatures were fire fairies.
Four of us were also dancers, and really enjoyed playing—try not to judge us too hard—slaves, orphans, and spies. Without any effort at all, The Fire Fairy Story, which incorporated all of those elements, was born.
We served an evil Fire Lord. We were forced to dance for him. Jesse's older brother became a character who was the Fire Lord's most trusted spy.
We each came up with a fire fairy name for ourselves. Mine was Ember. (A dance class friend, Karlye, is the one who introduced me to "Ember" as a potential name.)
We needed a name for the fire fairies' city. We asked Jesse's mom what the French word for "fire" was. She said she wasn't sure, but that it might be furier (FYOR-ee-air). It turns out it's not; it's feu (fooh, kind of with the "oo" in "cook"), but the city is named Furier to this day.
I had a mood ring from The Greensboro Science Center gift shop that I wore ALL THE TIME. From this piece of jewelry came the idea of fire fairy eyes: they change color with the fairy's mood.
I started penning (well, penciling, with an orange mechanical pencil that had a blue eraser) The Fire Fairy Story, with TONS of help from these girls. Evenings, get-togethers, phone calls, any available moment.
I finished the story one night when I was the only kid who had tagged along with her parents to church band practice. I sat in the row of rough church chairs, feet on the back of the chair in front of me, and madly wrote the last scene. My eyes widened.
It was the first—and still only—story I'd ever finished.
What's Happened Since:
For the four best friends (me, Sarah, Ellie, Jesse), The FF Story became part of our identity. We know the world of Jeolotoe and its vocabulary in a way that can only take root in children.
October 2006: Sarah, Ellie, Jesse, and I fashioned fire fairy costumes out of Goodwill findings and poster-board wings and went as fire fairies to a fall festival.
2006–2007: I wrote three or four sequels/books of the series.
April 2007: My family went to Disney World for the first time and I got Ember engraved in a leather bracelet that I wore for years.
2008ish: My youth group did a series on making your dreams happen, so I slowly typed up The Fire Fairy Story (it ended up being maybe 60 pages) and gave it to a friend's mom who was in publishing. All she would say was that "it was very good," though in a tone that told me it was absolutely not and I had a long road ahead of me.
2009–2010: I left the story largely alone, though periodically rewrote it, reread it, started it again, changed things.
October 2011: We had a Fire Fairy Reunion (pictured below). We did another Goodwill trip for costumes and had a sleepover where we choreographed a dance, reminisced, and read over parts of the story (some in notebooks, some in thick, typed stacks held together with alligator clips).
November 2011: I "won" NaNoWriMo (wrote 50,000 words in the month of November) with The Fire Fairy Story.
2012–2019: I kept rewriting the story, rereading it, starting it again, changing things. There are probably 12–15 versions of Book 1 floating around in various notebooks, on various hard drives. This story will not leave me alone.
Today:
It sounds ridiculous, but I don't know how to explain the level of influence The FF Story has had on my life. I don't want to speak for the others, but my identity is inextricably bound to this story. When I posted my wedding photos just three years ago on another blog, I captioned the ones of Ellie and Jesse with "childhood best friend and fire fairy."
Ember isn't "me," but she's a deep part of me. If someone yelled "Ember!" across the room, I would turn. She's the bolder, braver, brasher part of me—and the me I might have stopped at if it weren't for Jesus and glowing up. (Recently took the Enneagram test for her, and she's an Eight too and that makes so much sense given her history.)
The Fire Fairy Story has never left me alone. For some reason, I guess I need to write this story.
So, I'm at it again*. I wrote 20k words in two weeks a little while ago. Then I read it over and was mildly appalled. It's not good. I'm not being down on myself, it's genuinely not there yet. But instead of feeling discouraged like I usually do, I'm feeling okay. So I only keep about 2,000 words of what I just wrote. (There are probably 200k words of the story I've written over the years that I'm not going to use.) If God wants me to write this story, it'll get written. If he doesn't, then I don't want to write it anyway.
Fun Facts For Ya:
A new neighborhood that my family eventually moved into matched the map of the world of Jeolotoe with forests, bodies of water, and appropriate houses/buildings in the exact places as the map drawn in my little red notebook of years before.
Two of the fire fairies' unconventional and unpredictable love stories have happened exactly as written in the story.
~Stephanie
* again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again.
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