Goodreads asked E.P. Clark:

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

E.P. Clark I'd been thinking about a Slavic-themed fantasy world that was part of a European/Middle Eastern-inspired world for a long time and already written some short stories based on it. I was planning to start on a new story when I came across the term "The Midnight Land" in some texts I was reading for an Old Russian Literature class (I was working on a Ph.D. in Russian literature at the time). I instantly knew that had to be the title of my next story, only when I sat down to start working on it, it kept getting longer and longer, so that it went from a short story to a novella to an enormous novel. In the same class I also came across the term "The Breathing Sea" to describe the White Sea, and I knew I wanted to use that as a title as well, so that's the title to the next book in the series that The Midnight Land starts. I've actually already written the final book (which will be split into several volumes because of its enormity) in the series. I called it The Dreaming Land, which was inspired by one of the suggested meanings of the word "Siberia." According to the story, it was called "The Sleeping Land" by the Mongols as they were crossing it. I loved that phrase and kept thinking about how to incorporate it into a title.

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