Goodreads asked Sylvester Olson:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Sylvester Olson I'm a huge fan of J. R. R. Tolkien, and decided, at age ten, that I would someday write my own epic fantasy. However, I wanted to make the setting more meaningful to my own background and experiences. Tolkien could write about dragons and knights and castles and swords because England was his backyard. While I've visited London before, I've never spent enough time in England to be comfortable writing about it. I decided that if I were to try to use that setting, my story would lack Tolkien's authenticity and might fall flat.

So instead I chose to set my story in a fictionalized version of the Pacific Northwest of North America, a region of the world where I've spent most of my life, and with which I am very well-informed. Figuring out exactly how to write a Cascadian fantasy wasn't easy. I not only had to write my book, but I also had to invent a brand-new subgenre.

But just because it wasn't easy doesn't mean it wasn't fun, and I had a blast doing it :)

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