Vanessa Fogg’s story “In Dew and Frost and Flame” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 3 June 2016.
This story was born from the wreckage of a different, failed story.
I’d been trying to write a story about a wizard’s house. In this story, a house has been abandoned for years, is eventually taken over by the county for unpaid taxes, and a housecleaning crew is assigned to clean the place up for sale. Since the house belonged to a wizard, the housecleaning crew finds all kinds of strange and wondrous things within. . .
But the story never worked because there was no real narrative: it was simply a whimsical list of magical objects. But one of those objects stayed with me. It was a pen that wrote in ink made of moonlight, a pen the wizard and his wife used to write love letters to one another, letters that only they could read. . .
So I took that pen and transformed it, and gave a magical ink to a different couple. I think Laura and Eric used it well. “In Dew and Frost and Flame” also draws a bit upon my own life experiences, as one can probably guess. Any long-term relationship goes through its ups and downs, and when you add children to the mix it all gets much harder and complicated. But it’s still worthwhile.
Subscribe to our e-mail updates so you’ll know when new stories go live.
