The Legacy of the Dreamer follows a man on the brink of death who pleads for his life only to have his wish granted by someone with forbidden magic, leaving him with the unsettling realization that he can no longer die. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

I’ve always enjoyed stories of immortality, but they never end in a way that realizes its definition. Even at a young age when I heard someone say they wanted to live forever, I knew there was no way for that to end well. I wanted to explore what it would be like to truly live forever.

I wrote about how I personally view immortality, as something that could not have a happy ending. With my vision of this, there can only be yearning, despair, and hopelessness in the end.

What were some of the emotional and moral guidelines you followed when developing your characters?

It was important for my main character, Renealt, to be suffering. I was not kind to him. He is grieving, and unable to move on. He suffers the worst fate that I can imagine. His morality changes drastically throughout his exceptionally long life as he loses his humanity. He starts as a fairly neutral person, who becomes a pacifist and turns outright evil.

When I wrote the three short stories that are spread out through the main story, I deliberately based each main character around two of the seven deadly sins. This was a lot of fun to write. Renealt takes the seventh sin through his desire for knowledge and power and to be reunited with Renay. While these seven deadly sins come from a religion, this should not be taken as a tie between Earth and Cenadur.

What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?

Obsession, and the simple fact that things are not always what they seem. People misread situations. People make mistakes, waste time looking into the wrong place, and are flawed. There is always something more important happening in the background, and a greater story is being told somewhere else. Earth is vastly complex, and the world Renealt is in is no different. He is both a cog in the machine, and the machine itself, but at the end nothing he does matters. He cannot have what he desires.

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

When I first began writing this book, I intended for it to be a single novel. As I neared completion I realized I had more to tell. I have begun working on outlines for a prequel and a sequel. They will be drastically different from the story told here, and will not even take place on Cenadur. The Legacy of the Dreamer completes Renealt’s storyline, but how it came to be and its aftermath could be fascinating.

Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon