Origins of Like A Flame

A question I get frequently from my coworkers is “where on Earth did this story come from?”

I have always loved underground cities. The underground tunnels in Magic Kingdom. The underground mutant city in Futurama of Old New York. Underground cities in fiction held a particularly honored place in my heart.

And then I moved to Seattle, which had public transit tunnels underneath the city. I always thought about what if there was a society underneath the city and what kind of interactions might they have? It wasn’t nearly enough to write a whole book about, but the concept of a literal underground culture was always of interest to me.

Eventually, I discovered there was something called the Underground Tour in Pioneer Square. There was the “family friendly” version and then there was an “after dark” version for adults. I opted for the adults only version. I learned about Madam Lou and the seamstresses who held up the backbone of Old Seattle and rebuilt it after a local devastation. I learned about the reason there was an underground (which would go on to be used for bootlegging in the 1920’s) and my curiosity continued even after the tour (no spoilers, but it is very prominently displayed at the end of Part One of Like A Flame).

I started getting back into writing years after college, but I didn’t want to touch this concept of an underground society because I still had no clues of where to start. I got into Dungeons & Dragons, but most importantly, faeries and the Faewild specifically. For the unaware, the Faewild is a D&D plane filled with creatures of folklore and newer inventions like Tolkein.

After a time, I started falling out of love with D&D (I’m very bad at math) but I still loved the concept of a world full of storybook creatures and started getting into period TV shows/films and rewatching faerie content from my childhood. I started realizing all my favorite period pieces were almost exclusively in the Victorian/Gilded Age, demonstrating an almost extreme version of what America is going through right now. Eventually, I started running a prequel in London using a hacked version of Kids on Bikes called Paranormals on Pennyfarthings, but that was after I decided to write a book and had groundwork done. I thought Like A Flame would just run the expanse of the aforementioned spoiler, but then my characters took the reins from me and has become multiple novellas.

– Forest