Dreams Never End follows a man struggling to regain his grasp on reality who returns to the underworld in hopes of finding purpose in his life as it continues to fall apart. One of the most enjoyable parts of this book is Giels’s relationships with friends. How did you write the characters’ interactions to develop their bond?

It’s funny. The original draft had a couple more friends join the adventure, but I found so many characters diluted the interactions, as you might expect. This was a learning process for me, as I hadn’t had this many characters drive a story before. I was happy with the groups it ended up with, however. Because the secondary characters had little air time, so to speak, I thought of them like the groups of dwarves in The Hobbit or Snow White, where each individual had their own quirk that would come through. No one is named Sneazy, of course. These are realistic people with a degree of complexity and subtlety. But their salient traits ultimately play a role in the serial, which informs the nature of the interactions and how those interactions push the story forward in every chapter. Their growing bonds are essential to those interactions and were probably evident in the writing out of necessity.

What was one scene in the novel that you felt captured the morals and message you were trying to deliver to readers?

Not to give anything away, but one underpinning I try to hold with my themes is the ambiguity of morality. Geils is confronted with some opposing realities and viewpoints that he initially rejects, but they seep into him, becoming part of him. That’s one of his biggest struggles. It might be a bit subtle, but in the end, when he and Cleo talk about “going back” or not, they are talking about two very different things. Giels is alluding to how they cannot go back to the type of life they had, and Cleo is talking about literally going back to the place they’d been to. So not only is Giels feeling the change in perspective despite himself, but he’s also not even talking about the same things with the person he’s closest with, whose perspective has, since the beginning of the story, been at odds with his own. So, whose morality is correct? Should Giels protect his tribe by hiding what Giels is learning, or not? And, should they return to, and help, a culture in need that lives life in a way that doesn’t mesh with their world? During a time in our culture when so many people express their views with such absolute certainty, I like to dig into the uncertain, shaky substrate of what makes a person “right” or “wrong.”

Will there be a follow-up novel to this story? If so, what aspects of the story will the next book cover?

This serial will have three more installments. I expect the characters in the next installment to have to sort through some of the moral delemmas described above. Decisions need to be made, and those decisions will orient the characters towards their final paths for this serial.

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