One thing I’ve come to realise about my writing is that sometimes my ideas have to brew for a while. I usually do a whole pile of plotting and characterisation up front, but quite often, once that phase is over, I’ll put those plans aside and go back to an older idea and take that forward instead.

Like my other novels, The Dream Alchemist was conceived and plotted out in detail several years before I wrote it. I remember the flurry of initial energy I expended on it. It was February and I was on a family holiday. The living room of our rented cottage had a real fire and the evenings were spent—after the children went to bed—scribbling down the nuts and bolts of my world of dreams, Somnus, in a little notebook in front of the flames.

When the holiday was over, I wrote a chunk of the story, maybe 15k—but… it felt off. And anyway, by then another, older idea had grabbed me by the throat, so I abandoned it. The older idea became the Enlightenment trilogy, so it was three books later and late 2013 before I picked up The Dream Alchemist again, and at that point, when I reread both my notes and the 15k chunk I’d written, I saw why I’d fallen out of love with it years before: one of my main characters was all wrong. 

I had no issue with the other main character—Laszlo Grimm. Him I could see needle-sharp, and I loved the central idea of him—a man who doesn’t experience emotion. A man who cannot feel. But the other main character just wasn’t clicking with me. That’s the good thing about having a fallow period with a story—it gives you that little bit of perspective. I ripped huge chunks out of that old, partial draft and began searching for a new main character

And that’s when Bryn Llewelyn came to me: a messed-up, strung-out drop-out with a penchant for silver rings and leather bracelets. A guy whose dreamwalking abilities impact on his real world life by muting his senses, inhibiting his appetites. A man who—like Laszlo Grimm—cannot feel, although his problem is with sensation, rather than emotion.

Yes.

Finding Bryn was the key to unlocking this story. The parallels and contrasts around him and Laszlo excited me, and I rewrote that original chunk quickly, then rattled off the rest of the first draft pretty quickly (for me) thanks to those old detailed blueprints. The revisions were hell, of course, but they always are 😉

I like to think Bryn was always there, in those notes and in that draft, fighting to be seen. Or maybe just waiting for me to see him.