A Surprise Passion

Finding Inspiration From a Dream


A dream is, quite literally, where Rheen came from. One cold November weekend, when my wife was away visiting family, I had a dream. It wasn’t particularly complex, but it was real, and it lingered in my mind in a way that dreams never do. So I texted my wife about it and, with nothing better to do with my time [right then], I started writing.

I had never written anything longer than a short story before in my life, and I kind of thought that that was what this would be — just a fun little exercise to occupy my time and get this world out of my head and onto paper. But it didn’t stop. Not in ten thousand words, or even in twenty-five thousand.

It was a complete little world at that point, and it was filled with people and creatures, and it was made from magic, and I loved it. And then our house burned… and thirty thousand of forty-five thousand words burned with it… and I couldn’t bring myself to revisit the corpse of that book for the next year.

But eventually I did! It terrified me to perform that literary autopsy on those remaining pages, but all of my characters were all still there! They were missing significant portions of their lives, and it was sad to see, but I knew them all. And I rediscovered the desire to write down what I had already known of them, and then learn about where their lives were going to take them.

And now I’m writing Book 5 of the series — the last one, it would seem, which is sad in its own way, but also exciting and fulfilling! Hopefully, a few other people will find some little bits of the inspiration that I did in these pages… Hopefully this world and these characters will mean something to them, too.