A firedrake, obvs—though my answer apparently requires a long-ass preface and an eighteen-page short story.

Some of my best ideas, connections, and so-called mini-revelations have come at night, so I needed a reliable way of tracking them. Hence, sticky notes.^[1]

Drakeling grew out of a sticky notes idea I had on September 1.

This particular note imagined an animal familiar so closely connected to a woman that her suffering became his without her knowing. I wrote down three possible directions. In one, she realizes what’s happening and gets better, allowing him to recover. In the others, recognizing the connection comes too late—or knowing what’s wrong still isn’t enough to change it.

Underneath, I wrote: “Third one is most interesting and tragic but I could be biased.”

That bias has something to do with my daddy.

Drakeling is a standalone short story set in the fantasy world I’ve been building for eons, where my next book also takes place. I wanted to explore some unfinished business there, forming a bridge of sorts between my memoir and my fiction. My fictional characters always feel like real people to me, and I want the relationships I write about to carry questions real people have to live with. Earline and Seraph gave me a way to approach some of those questions from both sides.

I know what it feels like to keep giving because someone you love is hurting. I also know the guilt of being sad and realizing that someone who loves you is worried about you. There are pieces of me in both characters. This fictional relationship doesn’t correspond exactly to the one I had with my dad, but that was never the point. My feelings about responsibility aren’t neatly settled by the end, the same way they aren’t in the memoir. I wanted to leave some of that real world difficulty in the story.

I think my bond with my dad needed to change—should’ve changed—much sooner than it did. Before his death forced that change upon me. By my own choosing. By both of ours. I couldn’t seem to love him without giving all of myself to make him feel better. But I like to imagine that, had he lived, we might’ve found a way to have a healthier relationship; one that allowed more room for each of us to thrive within it.

That’s part of what draws me to fantasy. It gives me room to return to questions my own life left unanswered and imagine what might happen under different circumstances. An invisible connection can become a physical bond. The cost of giving too much can become something the characters can actually feel—and have to reckon with.

There’s catharsis in exploring a possibility I can no longer pursue with my daddy. But I also think imagining another world can help us recognize choices in this one. Sometimes we’re too close to a problem to see what might change it.

Giving it another shape, or wings, can make a possibility visible that we couldn’t recognize while living inside it.

That’s the bridge I hope Drakeling builds: from the true blue life I’ve written about in my memoir to the fantasy world I’ve been building since before high school, carrying some of the same messy, human questions between them.

So yes, I’d choose a firedrake. (If I could control my emotions properly, of course.) Preferably one like Seraph, though I might keep my good shirts somewhere beyond sneezing distance.

[1] For anyone unfamiliar, “sticky notes” is what I call the document where I collect my late-night ideas. I jot them down on my phone, then transcribe them the next morning—the worthy ones, at least—for safekeeping.

inspo: a late night sticky notes idea // giving beyond your limits, responsibility, worry // the difficulty of changing an intimate relationship // what I like to imagine could’ve been, had my daddy lived // watching and worrying over my sweet Sillygirl, partially inspiring that late night sticky notes idea // a way to make shared feeling, its cost, and its loss physically perceptible to readers // several writers, as always, but primarily Robin Hobb’s treatment of bonds and grief, particularly in Fool’s Errand (highly recommend that series) // mostly, using my fantasy world as a way to explore feelings from both sides of a relationship: being the one who gives too much & being the one who discovers how much has been given

Read Drakeling now by following the link below:

Kinsey Keys

aspiring memoirist rummaging through my noggin, stubbornly clutching the past to my chest like it’s a newborn babe starved for mother's milk.

See Full Bio