From High School Notebooks To Finished Novel: The Origins Of “If I Die Before I Wake”

If I Die Before I Wake was the first novel I ever finished and will always hold a special place in my heart. Back in high school, my friends and I loved weaving stories of adventure. We’d pass notebooks around between classes, each of us adding new scenes filled with magic, mystery, and the occasional dramatic cliffhanger. It was chaotic, creative, and honestly one of the best parts of growing up.

By my junior year, a few of us decided to level up: we started writing our own full-length novels. (Call out to Adelle Yeung’s “Cycle of the Six Moons!”) Every time someone finished a chapter, they’d print it out and hand it to the group. We’d take turns marking it up in different colored pens, each color belonging to a different person. You could tell who’d been extra nitpicky that day just by the rainbow explosion of ink. I used a sparkly, purple gel pen, by the way.

The idea for If I Die Before I Wake came from one of those late-night “what if” conversations. What if dreams weren’t just dreams? What if, when we sleep, we’re actually seeing another dimension, and when we wake up, we just snap back into our own bodies? But sometimes… we don’t. Sometimes, we get stuck.

I’ve always been a sucker for both sci-fi and fantasy, so mixing the two felt natural. The real “aha!” moment came when I decided that mythology itself might come from these other dimensions, that all the gods, monsters, and ancient stories we know could be echoes of real things, filtered through time and misunderstanding. (Yes, you can blame my Stargate SG-1 obsession for that one.)

It took me about two years to finish the manuscript, which felt like forever back then. After that, I kept writing, more novels, more worlds, all connected by this bigger story about The Keepers, interdimensional beings who keep the balance between realities.

Sadly, a lot of those early stories got lost to corrupted files and ancient laptops that refused to boot up (RIP, Windows XP). But I still have piles of handwritten notes, old outlines, and random doodles tucked in folders and notebooks. Who knows? Maybe one day I’ll dig them out and breathe new life into those lost worlds.

Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned since high school it’s that stories have a way of finding their way back to you, no matter how much time has passed.