Are you a sleeper or a dreamer?

Jen Williams' The Sleepless and The Dreamless are a dreamy, addictive duology! A combination of thriller, horror, folklore and, at their core the beauty of the connections we can make through our natural world. I fell in love with the books, their characters (the good and the more ambiguous) and for once I loved the

open-ended conclusion (I usually like a good, wrapped up ending)... Read on to learn more about all of this from Jen Williams herself. With thanks to Jen and Camilla at Willow Publicity for making this Q&A possible.

Gods, monsters, magic - world which knows they exist. What’s the key to making all this believable for the reader? I think the key to making wild fantasy worlds work is almost always in the characters, and the details of the world. If the characters feel like real people with real histories and background, the reader will find it much easier to believe in anything else you throw at them – the characters act as an anchor. Likewise, if the world has little, lived in details, it will feel more like a real place: your world might have giant house-sized beetles, but if there’s someone whose job it is to manage the practicalities of giant beetle keeping – polishing their giant shells etc – then it feels grounded in reality.

Is there any one particular legend or story from folklore that really stands out for you? I always enjoy creating new mythologies, so coming up with the pantheon of twelve gods was probably the most fun for me. I wanted to have a few very wild or odd ones in there, because why not? There’s your usual trickster god, and your god of the hearth and home, but there’s also a god of small creatures who looks like a big mouse, and a god of hunting that appears as a series of floating disembodied wolf heads.

Artair is a possessed, cared for in a monastery. Do you believe possession is always demonic? Lucien seems very much so I will admit that I didn’t really think of it in those terms at all. Obviously at the beginning of the books Lucian is regarded as a kind of demon or dark spirit, but I always knew there was more to him than that – and generally I think when writing ‘monsters’ or villains or other kinds of strange creatures you want to treat them as complicated beings who have more going on than falling into the evil part of the alignment chart. I was always interested in what it would be like for a character to have half their life lived by another person, with no idea what might be going on while the other entity has control.

I imagine Elver as a mysterious woodland creature, one everyone was afraid of. She’s there to protect. Do you want readers to understand that despite everything her at her core she’s good? Yes, I think like a lot of people Elver is a complicated person who has experienced things that have made her wary of those who might do her harm, but at her heart she is fiercely loyal and caring.

Elver is both light and darkness. Artair light, Lucien dark. Why did you give Elver one personality, changing dependent on situations but Artair and Lucien two people in one body? Mainly, I thought it was a cool idea for a love triangle! There are lots of interesting and thorny questions around the idea of sharing your physical body with another soul, especially if you are in conflict with them. Add in someone who you are both attracted to, and it becomes extremely complicated indeed.

How did you decide on the titles. Was there a specific moment or was it an idea that came gradually because it suited? Originally The Sleepless had a very different title. When I was sketching out initial ideas, the project was called The Fox and the Fallow (Lord Tisk, the trickster god who takes the form of a fox, has been present from the start) and then for a little while it was called Sleepless in Serpent City. Ultimately though, a shorter, punchier title seemed like a better idea, and The Dreamless followed on naturally from The Sleepless – and of course, dreams feature quite a bit in the second book.

When you were writing did you feel that you were living in their world? The world took a little while to come together, with a few different ideas and characters circling before falling away. Once I’d closed in on the concept of the sleepless themselves, the Queen of Serpents as a god of monsters, and the idea that magic had to be paid for by offering sacrifices to the gods, it began to feel like its own thing.

Is it important for you to inspire the use of imagination and escapism to other worlds for your readers? Absolutely. What is the point of writing fantasy at all if you’re not asking people to use their imaginations? The idea of escapism is often presented as a negative one, although I’ve never quite understood that. If we are trapped, we want to escape; escapism provides relief from suffering and a path to freedom; escapism in fantasy allows us to see things from new angles and imagine new lives.

The stories are a romance. I this to remind readers there can be love no matter how dark, evil or sinister the world may seem? I almost always include romance in my books, although I tend to think of it more as including relationships in books. All stories are ultimately about people and their relationships with each other and their environments, and if you skip all of that you’re losing something vital. People do fall in love during the darkest of times. Sometimes it’s the thing that gets us through.

The ending is beautiful, leaving an opening, for more stories. Do you plan to write some parallel stories as a complement to the duology? I am quite a fan of ambiguous or open-ended endings. I just like the idea that maybe the story is still going on, somewhere we can no longer follow. I doubt I will be writing any further stories in this particular world, because I am content to let the characters live their lives, but you never know!

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