The Road to Fairy Godmothers Inc. By Saranna DeWylde

The road to Fairy Godmothers Inc. was not the primrose path you might expect for a book that’s about adorable meddling fairy godmothers, silly hijinks, and happily ever afters. In fact, I’d just signed the contract for the first three books in the series right before we rolled over into the hellscape that was 2020. Each deliverable one month after the last one. 

Normally, that wouldn’t have been an issue, but my 2020, like most people’s, was made of smashed buttholes, doom-scrolling, and a lot of fear. 

I contracted Covid-19. I almost died. I had a fever of 104 plus for over two weeks. I lost the ability to walk because I was so weak. I would have been put on a ventilator if my local hospitals had room, but they didn’t. So I stayed home. I wrote letters to my children for them to read after I was gone. Just in case. I have brain damage. I had to relearn homonyms. Sometimes, when I’m writing, I will know a word is wrong. Completely wrong. But I can’t figure out why. It’s been almost a year since I had it, and I’m still just as tired as I was when I first started to recover. 

I was supposed to have a hysterectomy at the beginning of 2020, but it ended up being postponed until May. I’d barely recovered from the worst part of Covid when I went in for surgery. A baseball-sized cyst had completely devoured my right ovary, my fallopian tubes had strangled themselves on the underside of my uterus, and I finally got a diagnosis of endometriosis and adenomyosis. (For those who don’t know, endometriosis is when endometrial tissue runs around the inside of your body and attaches itself to organs and grows there. Adenomyosis is when the endometrial tissue grows into the uterine wall. Both conditions are characterized by debilitating pain.)

After that, my disabled father, who I had been taking care of in my home for the last six years after my mother died, began refusing to wear a mask, refusing to abide by the lockdown protocol, and being emotionally abusive. He refused me even the slightest accommodations, and he knew how sick I was when I had Covid. He knew that I almost died, and still refused to mask up. So I decided to choose myself and enforced my boundaries and the rules for living in my home and still receiving the gift of my care. He chose to leave my house and hasn’t spoken to me since. 

I’d always questioned my self-worth. I always had this nagging feeling that he didn’t want me. That when my parents adopted me, my mother thought she was picking out a puppy at the shelter and that my dad had simply gone along to make her happy. When he left like that, it was one of my worst fears realized. He didn’t want to be my dad. He didn’t pick me. He didn’t choose my life over his wants. 

And while it stung like a bitch, it actually wasn’t as terrible as I thought it would be.  

2020 was all about working through my fears in so many ways. 

So what does all of this have to do with Fairy Godmothers Inc.? It was my happy place. Through it all, I had these books and this world to slip into when things felt too hopeless or too dark. No, wait. “Slip into” makes it sound so easy. It wasn’t. I had to find that place in my heart where I felt those the things I wanted to write about. Where I believed in happy ever after. This world-building is full of magic, hope, and most importantly, love because it’s what I believe in.

That’s part of why I’m so proud of these books. Pessimism and tragedy are easy to write about and commonly considered to be “deep and meaningful” simply by virtue of what they are. Let me tell you, it’s so much harder to choose a brighter path especially in the face of sorrow and pain. 

In FGI, love is what fuels magic, and even after everything I’ve been through not just in the last year, but in my life, I still hold that to be true in the real world. When you love with your whole heart, magic happens. That was the point of writing Fairy Godmothers Inc. It was to put joy out into the world. A portal to a refuge where we can watch people choose who they want to be, choose to do the work to heal their wounds, choose to believe that love is the most important thing we can give each other, and finally choose to take that out into the world and love enough that magic, does indeed, happen.

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Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing