There’s something you should know
about me right off the bat, and you may find it a little shocking – I’m white.
I’m not just white, I’m also male, and
on the wrong side of forty. And I live on the East Coast.
I tell you all this to illustrate
that I am about as far from a sixteen year-old Navajo girl as you can get and
still be a member of the same species.
Which is sort of the point, I guess.
Let me back up…
Back in the heady days of 2003, Tom
Deja – writer, podcaster, and proprietor of this very blog – was editor for a
prose superhero anthology called Truth,
Justice, And…
I wrote a story for it called “The
Origin of Flight” about a teenage girl who gained the power to fly when she
came into possession of a Thunderbird feather. The character didn’t exist, even
as an idea, before Tom put out the call for stories. I Frankensteined her
together from a bunch of different things I was interested in at the time (mythology
and coming-of-age stories, mostly) strictly to meet the requirements of the
anthology. I called her “Fly Girl” – a term that was about a decade past its
cultural sell-by date even then, but I liked it because it was silly and
simultaneously obvious and not obvious at all. For her real name, I decided on
“Caryn Clay” because there’s a long, proud history of alliterative civilian
names in superhero comics (Clark Kent, Lex Luthor, Peter Parker, Reed Richards,
etc.). I left things open at the end, like any good origin story, but I didn’t
have a venue to continue publishing her, so I moved on to other projects.
Over the next ten years, though, Fly
Girl kept nagging at me. Without consciously trying to, I was figuring out her
backstory, building a rogues gallery for her and a mythology around the feather
that provided her powers, answering questions I didn’t realize I’d left unanswered
in that first episode.
I think a lot of writers go through
a phase early on when their protagonists are essentially themselves – but aside
from the fact that we both went to high school in Phoenix, Caryn Clay was
nothing at all like me. I wasn’t born into a culture I didn’t want to be part
of, and, as noted above, I was never a teenage girl – not even for Halloween.
I couldn’t fly either, of course…
but it turned out that was the least interesting thing about the character –
any kid who’s ever picked up a comic book will tell you that “flight” all by
itself is just about the most bargain basement power-set a superhero can have,
after all. It was how different Caryn’s life experience was from mine that kept
my thoughts coming back to her, and that difference started long before she got
ahold of that Thunderbird feather.
I wrote two more episodes and took
notes on a handful of other Fly Girl stories over the next decade, with no real
idea of what I was going to do with any of it. Then, in 2014, I was developing
a serial for Pro Se Press’s new Single
Shots Signature Series line and realized that, for a variety of reasons,
the idea I’d pitched to editor-in-chief Tommy Hancock wasn’t going to work.
This realization came along pretty late in the game, and since I didn’t want to
back out of my commitment with Pro Se, I looked around for something else I
could do that would be a better fit in terms of tone and story length.
And here was all this Fly Girl
material I’d been poking away at since 2003.
Fortunately, Tommy was okay with the
substitution, and we’ve been publishing Fly
Girl as a series of ebooks ever since, each episode wrapped in a sweet
Jeffrey Hayes cover. It’s structured like an episodic television series, where
each part has a complete story, and a subplot that runs through the entire
season. We just published episode six, The
Monster Inside of Me, which means we’re a little better than halfway
through the first ten-episode season.
You should check it out – mostly
because I’m proud of the series… but also because I have small children, and
college ain’tgonna come cheap.
And if you like it, you can thank
our host, Tom Deja, for inviting me to pitch for that anthology,way back in the
dark times before Facebook and Gmail and Grumpy Cat.
*
Fly
Girl: The Origin of Flight is the first episode in the Fly Girl series, and
is available for free at all finer
e-book retailers. Here’s
the link to the Amazon listing.
Fly
Girl: The Monster Inside of Me is the sixth and latest episode in the Fly
Girl series, and is not free… but it’s a bargain at 99 cents. You can find it
at all those finer e-book retailers I mentioned, like
Amazon.
Russ Anderson Jr. has written a
bunch of other stuff – much of it readable. You can find it all listed on his Amazon author page.
