The Dream Guardian series

was partly a creative construct and partly a marketing-focused one.

At the time I had a futuristic on submission that was running into a problem — it was too futuristic for the romance imprints and too romantic for the sci-fi imprints.

So my agent suggested that I return to the drawing board while we waited for word and think of something else. Kensington has my historicals, a futuristic was on submission, that left me with contemporary.

I thought of all the paranormals I knew of — weres, vamps, magic, faeries — and wanted to do something different. I thought about it and came up with the dream/nightmare idea.

“What if the man of your dreams was real?”

Then my imagination ran with it. What if Nightmares were real? What if they were beings that fed off the fear and distress created by bad dreams? And what if good dreams were real? And what if the good dreams were the reason we have bad dreams? And what about wet dreams? The possibilities just kept stacking up.

I had to research wormholes, spacetime, string theory, Roman rings, parallel dimensions, closed timelike curves, Shinto temples, and various physical ailments that affect restful sleep.