When I first decided to write Dream Duology, it was always meant to be two books — hence the word “duology.” But somewhere along the way, I briefly thought about stretching it into five books… then four… and then finally realized it really did work best as just two.

The story itself actually came from ideas I’d written way back in high school and early college. One was a super short story called Dreams — only about five pages and nowhere near fleshed out at the time. I also had another story called The Princess, the Traitor, and the Savior, which helped shape a lot of the deeper plot elements. For example, Alan training her over several years came directly from that second story.

Dariel went through quite a few name changes too. He originally started out as Najod before I finally settled on Dariel, which felt right. And when I came up with Morca’s dream-world name, it actually helped inspire the name for her magic as well.

Funny enough, I wrote book two before I wrote book one — mostly because I loved the second book more and was way more excited to write it first. But in the end, I was really happy with how book one turned out.