The Girl Who Found What I Was Still Looking For (On Writing Luna)

Twins are a specific kind of impossible to write.

Not because they're complicated — because they're too known to each other. The shorthand between them is so deep it barely looks like communication from the outside. The silences mean things. The small gestures carry weight that would take paragraphs to explain to anyone who isn't them. You have to find a way to put all of that on the page without spelling it out, because spelling it out would be the one thing that rings false.

Luna was the hardest character in Echo's Song to write. She was also, in some ways, the most important one.

Here's the thing about Luna: she finds her dragon on the first day.

The very first day. Eight years old, standing in a clearing full of dragons, and she walks toward the rose-gold one and something in the air between them crackles and that's it — she's chosen, she's bonded, she's whole in a way that is visible from three feet away. From Nova's three feet away.

I needed that to happen. The story required it. But writing it meant writing Nova watching it happen, and that was the scene that told me what this whole book was really about.

There's a particular kind of love that is completely genuine and also quietly devastating — the love you have for someone whose life is going the way yours isn't. You're not resentful. You would never wish it away from them. You love them so much it lives in your chest like something permanent. And you watch them have the thing you're still waiting for, and you smile, and you mean the smile, and you carry the rest of it somewhere private where it won't touch them.

Nova loves Luna like that. Completely. Without reservation. And completely privately.

That's the dynamic I kept coming back to as I wrote them — the way Nova protects Luna from the weight of her own waiting. Luna knows her sister. She's not fooled, not really. But she lets Nova have the privacy because that's what Nova needs, and knowing when to let someone have their silence is its own kind of love.

They don't need to fill the space with words. That's the first thing I wrote about them, and it's the truest thing in the book.

Silence between them is never empty.

I think about what it would mean to grow up alongside someone who always seemed certain — who moved through the world like she already knew where the floor was going to be. And to love that about her. And to wonder, quietly, what it said about you that you didn't feel the same way.

Luna isn't oblivious. She isn't the easy foil or the perfect sister who makes the protagonist look worse by comparison. She's genuinely, deeply good — and she carries her own things, her own version of not knowing, even if it looks different from the outside. Writing her that way mattered to me. She deserved to be as real as Nova.

They're twins. They've been each other's whole world since before they had words for it.

That doesn't mean they know everything about each other.

Sometimes the people closest to us are the ones we most carefully protect from what we're carrying. Not out of distance. Out of love.

Echo's Song: The Dragon Curse Saga Book One releases October 24th, 2026. Pre-order now at moonlightdreamsbooks.com/books.