I was in my early 30s when I started working on Dragonflies. I had a weird idea about steampunk aviators and shared it with my friends during a night of drinking, watching Firefly, and eating Chinese food (a tradition that continues to this day).
The Night It Took Flight
I mentioned that I would love a world where the damsels were the heroes instead of the other way around (we were watching Shindig at the time, and the juxtaposition of Kaylee covered in grease and dressed to the nines for a ball was burrowing into my subconscious).
Anyway. I told them my idea and, like every book idea I’ve ever had, saying it out loud to my friends caused it to grow like a kudzu vine. Before the end of the night, we had chosen character names, call signs, plane names, heroes, villains, and most of all… the name of the team.
The Dragonflies.
Why Dragonflies?
Why Dragonflies? I don’t think we knew at the time, but looking back, we were all drawn to it for a reason.
The dragonfly is said to symbolize transformation and change, and what we didn’t know that night was all the change that was on the horizon for us.
A Life Raft in a Hurricane
Within a few months of finishing the first book, this one, my nine-year relationship ended. The same for the one we’ll call Greta. We bonded together through trauma and a deep need to be seen.
We recognize now that we were each other’s life raft in a hurricane. Clinging desperately to the only things we could. Each other.
And a story.
How They Would Finish
The Dragonflies trilogy is a story of friendship, strength, loss, love, and the true value of knowing yourself. But it didn’t start out that way. It started with a joke about girls who wore fancy dresses and could fly planes at night for nefarious reasons.
Looking back at the story from the beginning to the end, I know now that this was never about where these women started.
It was always about how they would finish.