Campfyre Stories

Behind the FyreGoddess:

So, you want to know who I am? Well, there’s no real nutshell that I’m going to fit into. You can get a sense of it from the stories I tell, which means a time investment on your part…

My story starts out as… I was raised in a VW bus by travelling street musicians. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been cross-country.   In my short life, I’ve met  Artis the Spoonman, who taught me to play the spoons, Junior Marvin and the Wailers, Wavy Gravy, Richie Havens, BB King and Robert Plant, just to name a few (and all before I was 20).  I’ve been to more concerts than I could possibly count, starting with my first Grateful Dead concert when I was only 6 months old.  (I don’t remember it ).  I learned at a young age how to get in with the bands and, when I go to concerts will often figure out a way to stick around, sneak backstage or ambush musicians as necessary.

I’m 30-something years old, a mother, a songwriter, an IT girl… I have more interests that I am capable of listing off and find new ones every day. I’m all about living each day to the fullest and finding the fun, even in the tedium. I’m not afraid to try new things and, despite the fact that I play online games, blog, belong to several online communities and see ridiculous amounts of movies, I still manage to have a pretty full life. Shoot, I don’t know… what do *you* want to know about me?

Adulteress?

Shortly after our son( Spawn of the Dragonmaker and the FyreGoddess, currently calling himself FlameThrower - heh) was born, I married my high school sweetheart, the Dragonmaker, when I was 18.  We had been together since I was 13/14 and it lasted until I was 23.  We remained legally married until July 2006 after 12.5 years of wedded legality.  I lived as a technical adulteress for a little over 7 years.  My ex and I have a good relationship and I get along well with his new wife and their baby.

The extension of the marriage after it was over has left me rather bitter on the topic of marriage, in general, though less so since the divorce than prior.  To quickly sum up, I think that marriage is an outdated concept, that the idea of spending the rest of your life with a single person is romantic, but unlikely, that people change too much to be able to commit so greatly.  I like the idea of civil unions - for straight people as well as gays, because I don’t see why there has to be religion involved, but I also don’t understand why romantic love should be tied with a legally binding contract.

The persona:

Many years ago (1998?), before I established any kind of online presence (save email), I was a part of a pretty eclectic circle of friends.  We spent a lot of time hanging around smoking cigarettes (among other things), playing music and just being free spirits.  A handful of these friends NEVER had a cigarette on them (generally because they were unemployed and didn’t have any money FOR cigarettes) and would bum them constantly.  NONE of these friends ever had a lighter, so my habit of *always* having at least one lighter on me made me invaluable to them.

One night I was at a party with two of my friends who were bumming smokes all night long.  I finally got fed up and told them, "Alright!  if you’re gonna bum smokes off me, you’re gonna call me the Cigarette Queen!"  When they had their cigarettes and asked me for a light, I replied "Okay, fuck Cigarette Queen, you want a light, you call me Fire Goddess!"  One did, the other went off in search of an alternate means of fire.

All night long, after the party was over and we returned to the Mercer St. house, I made them call me Fire Goddess, since I was the only one who could produce fire in a house full of smokers.  We stayed up all night.  The next morning my (now) best friend, Girl, who I had only just met, stumbled out of her bedroom, just waking up.  She came into the living room and asked "Does anyone have a light?"  The one person who had the hardest time with my demands of the previous night (and who spent the ENTIRE night lighting his own cigarettes off of the already-lit smokes of others, rather than ask ME, which was kind of the entire point) snarkily told her, ‘She does, but you have to call her the Fire Goddess."  To which Girl replied, "I’ll call her whatever the hell she wants if she’ll light my fucking cigarette."

What can I say?  It stuck.  From that moment on, most of that circle called me Fire Goddess whenever they needed a light (which was often). 

The evolution of the persona:

Though it started as an inside joke, I thought that this would be a decent handle for the internet.  The unfortunate discovery I made was that several people had already beaten me to it.  All the Fire Goddess handles were taken, all the forms of it, too.  The only way I could have some of it was to add numbers, so I got a little creative.  Fyre_Goddess got me a hotmail address (no longer in use) and, as I explored the internet, I found that with the slightly different spelling, there were a lot of places where I could claim the name.  Even when it was already taken, I could get away with only adding a single number in most cases.

The Sims Online allowed me my first opportunity to develop FyreGoddess as an actual avatar.  She was tall and dark with flaming red hair, she wore an evening gown, avoided water and walked - never ran - everywhere.  While we shared some personality traits, she was designed to epitomize the concept of FyreGoddess that I could never put into short story form…  this wasn’t me, but rather a character that I had been working to create for several years.

City of Heroes was next, but I never really felt the affinity to FyreGoddess as a hero that I wanted.  It wasn’t until I tried out City of Villains that I was able to create the power set and character for the persona I’ve developed for so many years.

Now, the handle is mostly mine.  There are a couple of places around the internet where I can’t have my name, but from what I’ve seen, most of those are larks - they don’t last too long.  Run a Google search on FyreGoddess and you’ll be hard pressed (over the first few pages at least) to find things that don’t relate back to me and are still in existence.  The many "We cannot find this user" messages might be me.  The women on the dating sites probably AREN’T or, if they are, I haven’t logged in in forever…  we learned our lesson from the online dating thing long, long time ago.

So there you have it:

That’s the story…  and now, when we play the "How did you get your handle game" in any of my communities, I can just point people here.