I rarely remember my dreams, though the few dreams I do recall tend to be nightmares. Maybe that’s the reason I remember so few of them!

I do suffer from periodic bouts of insomnia, though, and I find that nothing is worse than being ready, even eager, to sleep, but being unable to. As the hours wear on, you start calculating how much rest you’d have if you fell asleep right away, but as it becomes less and less you become more and more anxious, making it even harder to sleep. Combining that with nightmares that wake you up when you do fall asleep, night after night, informed my description of Madison’s mounting desperation, and her willingness to do almost anything to stop it.

That said, the actual inspiration for dwarf-forged dreams came from a different source. I wanted to write a story about dwarves, so I did some research on how they appeared in Norse folklore. One source—okay, it was Wikipedia—mentioned an Anglo-Saxon charm called a Wið Dweorh (literally, against a dwarf), which was supposed to protect against sleep disturbances. From there, the idea of dwarves crafting bad dreams naturally followed.

For me, a key element of “Dreamforger” was the idea that the protagonist suffered under a curse that made him a better person, a more empathetic being. In a twist on most curse stories, the danger of breaking the malediction and losing its benefit became the existential threat. For you, did this develop as a good story bit, or is there a deeper comment about humanity in the idea?

Like many of the most important elements in my stories, that part didn’t come about until later in the writing process, around the second or third version of the story. I had mentioned the curse in passing as a hand-wavy reason why Nordri would even meet someone who needed his help in such a serendipitous way. But, as my wife pointed out when she read the story, I had just introduced a concept that looked like it would be important and then dropped it.

Later, I was struggling with the fact that I wanted Nordri to help Madison, but I had kept raising the stakes for him, so that the risks for doing so were higher than you could reasonably expect him to endure for the level of altruism I had given him. I also needed him to do more in the story’s closing than watch Madison use the dagger he had given her.

This led me to think more about the nature of the curse. Where did it come from? How did it motivate him? What would happen if he gave it up?

I didn’t really intend it as a comment on humanity, but it does speak to the fact that I don’t think anyone’s motives are purely altruistic. There is always a mixture of compassion and selfishness in what we do. We can let that paralyze us, so we do nothing until we can remove every iota of impure motives, or we can accept that we are imperfect and do the best with what we have.

For likely idiosyncratic reasons, we were delighted when, in the threatening dreamworld, a dagger becomes a flashlight. The idea of revealing light presenting itself as the more powerful weapon was thematically fitting for us. In general, you had a nicely worked out magic system in “Dreamforger.” How long did you work on this? Does it have details and background beyond those used in the story?

The flashlight was the obvious answer to the question of what you need to fight the fear of the dark and the often imaginary threats that reside in it. I particularly liked the fact that the dagger was, in part, forged from darkness.

The basic idea of how the magic worked didn’t take long at all, though figuring out how it all worked together, and what Nordri and Ayen were capable of, didn’t really happen until I wrote the story. I’m mostly a discovery writer, meaning that I have to write before I can fully understand how things work. Ideas that sound good in theory don’t always hold up well in a story. When writing like that, there’s the constant temptation to expand what magic can do in order to solve whatever problem the characters currently face, but it helps that I find the limits of the magic system more interesting than the capabilities.

For the actual magic, I combined a bit of Harry Dresden’s potion making with computer RPG-based magic item crafting. I wanted dreams to be made of ideas and memories, the ephemeral and intangible, as much as rare and magical crafting materials. The idea of correspondence between real world objects and dream objects was a natural fit given that it’s often true that our experiences in the actual world, waking and sleeping, become part of our dreams.

There is certainly more to it than dreams, as we see when Nordri summons light in the real world, but I haven’t written that story yet, so I haven’t figured out what the possibilities and limits are.

“Dreamforger” has promising depth and texture of a series. Your main character is a supernatural creature, a type of dwarf who forges dreams. He operates an alternative medicine store in modern day suburbia where he lives with a large stone cat and his young, precocious daughter. It feels like a home base, a bat cave of sorts from which new adventures will be launched. Do you have plans for more stories featuring the dwarf Nordri, his magical cat Malachi, and young daughter Sudri?

Plans? Not exactly. Ideas? Maybe.

Nordri and his family grew as I wrote the story, becoming more fleshed out from revision to revision. As characters grow, they gain more solidity and depth, which gives them more ways they can continue to grow and have more adventures. There’s definitely more that they could do.

I am wary that a certain sameness would sneak in if I told the same sort of story each time, of battling dreamforgers in a dreamscape. A character’s growth will quickly stall out if they just keep doing the same thing. But if I do come up with an idea that fits where they are now, I’m sure they’d be happy to show me what they’re capable of.

You and your wife, Kristin Janz, publish the online magazine Mysterion at www.mysteriononline.com. Tell us a little about your goals and mission with Mysterion.

My wife and I are both writers, and we’re similar in that we don’t write stories with the intention to meet a market’s theme. We write the stories we’re interested in writing, and then look around to see what market might want to publish them.

But some of the stories we wrote just didn’t have a market. We’re Christians, and our faith is important to us, but there didn’t seem to be any markets for our speculative fiction which dealt with Christian characters and themes in a way that reflects our own faith and our struggles with it. Christian markets for short speculative fiction—and there are very few such markets, especially ones that pay even semi-pro rates—often have very narrow guidelines for the language, morality, and theology of their submissions. They tend to be more interested in getting the right answers than asking difficult questions. And in the general speculative fiction market, you rarely see much interest in taking religion seriously, especially when you raise the possibility that it might be true.

So we decided to create the market we couldn’t find, one as interested in the questions of faith as the answers, that took the Christian faith seriously and loved the characters, but acknowledged the flaws and failures and difficulties. And one that paid professional rates, even though it’s a struggle to keep up with SFWA’s ever increasing requirements.

And, sadly, we still don’t have anyplace to send those stories, as we don’t publish our own fiction. But hopefully, we’ve given other people some place to send theirs. And as of January, we’re now officially recognized as SFWA-qualifying.

Donald, you have said of your Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from MIT that you found it “more useful for writing fantasy than you had expected, though less helpful for writing science fiction than you had hoped.” It’s an intriguing statement that we hope you can expound on a bit for us.

One thing I do when I write stories is build a system. It could be a magic system, it could be a society, it could be a technology. Then I kick the tires a bit and make sure it holds up to casual scrutiny. Finally, I look for the weaknesses. Where could it break down? What would happen? It’s at those points of breakdown that the most interesting stories take place.

As I mentioned before, I’m more of a discovery writer than a plotter, so many of the details happen as I write, rather than as part of an extended planning phase, but I certainly spend a good bit of my first draft just figuring out how things work, and making sure the system makes sense.

The discipline of engineering is very useful for this. A large part of it is looking for flaws and failures, avoiding them as much as possible and planning for ways to prevent catastrophe when they can’t be avoided.

But another thing that electrical engineering taught me is to be critical of other people’s systems, especially when they get things wrong. I read a lot of science fiction stories where the science just doesn’t make sense, where the technology lacks basic safeguards that a first-year engineering student would know are needed. It often takes me out of the story when that happens.

That makes me very reluctant to write science fiction unless I’m confident of my science and technology, and the more I learned the more I realized how much I don’t know. Science and engineering are vast fields, where no one can know everything. So that’s a large part of why my degree makes it more difficult for me to write science fiction.

Fantasy is another matter, though. I don’t need to get the science right, because I can make the science (aka magic) up for myself. And at that point, it becomes an exercise in system building, which is one of the parts of writing I enjoy the most.

Also, I did once write some stories with a magic system that was basically electrical engineering, so it was useful for that too.

This is our Writer’s Spotlight, so the last spot in this interview is yours to do with as you wish. Tell us something you would like our audience to know; ask us a question, promote a project, or just pontificate on the fate of humankind. The floor is yours:

Check out my wife’s blog, at www.kristinjanz.com. She publishes a lot of great stories, and talks about her garden and cooking, for folks who are interested in that sort of thing.

And I can’t go without promoting Mysterion. The stories are free online at www.mysteriononline.com, and we’ll be releasing our second anthology this year. You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, where we use our press name, Enigmatic Mirror Press. Finally, Mysterion’s Patreon is at www.patreon.com/Mysterion, which helps us to continue paying professional rates for our stories.