All my writing is inspired by my Buddhist practice, but in a way that you probably wouldn’t notice unless you knew to look for it. That’s important to me because I want to write with meaning and relevance, but I don’t want to be preachy.

I strike that balance by grounding my themes in my personal experience. I tend to be a theme-first writer: I know what central idea I want to explore, and I figure out which characters and plot will best embody it. Then I set those characters off on adventures, and the obstacles they encounter and the decisions they make help me reach a deeper understanding of my theme.

In that sense, writing is like therapy. (For some reason, my own mind makes more sense to me when I add dragons.) Through my character’s journeys, I come to know myself better—hopefully even to be better.

So, you won’t find me writing about karma, for example … but all my stories are infused with the idea of consequences—not just the immediate cause and effect, but the hidden consequences that characters carry with them on their psyches.

For me, Buddhism is about exploration and imagination. That might seem strange to you. Yes, discipline, meditation, and training in contentment are exploratory and creative processes. The mind is full of surprises, and new vistas are always opening up.

That’s also why I chose fantasy as my genre. It offers so much scope for metaphor; you can literally make a whole world an extrapolation on a theme.

Dreamwalker, for example, explores the idea of no fixed self. In addition to having the characters undergo an inner transformation, I based the worldbuilding on falling into other people’s dreams, which provided a visual metaphor for the constantly evolving nature of identity.

I also enjoy hiding little Buddhist Easter eggs, like a scene where a character (I won’t say who—spoilers!) walks through a dreamt landscape of the unconscious mind, which is based on the levels of consciousness explained in The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

If you want a primer on spotting my Easter eggs, here’s a free Buddhist book that I highly recommend as both practical and profound.