The Ballad of Falling Dragons
The Ballad of Falling Dragons
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Sarah A. Parker on The Ballad of Falling Dragons
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
Setup, consequence, and the feelings she couldn’t keep outParker framed the two Moonfall books as a single machine with two distinct jobs. Book one, ‘When the Moon Hatched,’ assembles every piece; book two puts them under pressure. At an event at Christchurch City Libraries she told the audience what that meant in practice for readers coming in with questions the first book had left open.
So much more. I’ve barely scratched the surface. Book one really sets the scene, so to speak. Plot wise, we’re barely past the starting block, but we have all the pieces to build the puzzle now. SO much happens in book 2. So much character growth, relationship growth, plot advancement, revelations … Buckle up.
twelvepaleroses.wordpress.com, “Exclusive Author Interview: Sarah A. Parker – When The Moon Hatched (Moonfall #1)”Writing a sequel meant Parker finally had the architecture to do what a first book could not. She made this point in a Cosmopolitan piece that ran alongside an excerpt from the novel, speaking to what the shift in scale cost the characters emotionally rather than just what it added to the plot.
This was the point where I could really let the story expand. The action is more explosive, the emotional consequences far greater than ever. I can’t wait for readers to be whisked back into the escalating pulse of the Moonfall Series.
Beneath the structural reasoning sat something more personal. Raeve, the book’s central character, spends the novel learning to accept love against every defensive habit she has built. Parker told the Christchurch audience that the mechanism driving Raeve is one she recognizes in herself, and the remark landed as the closest she came to explaining why this particular story needed to be told.
A lot of us have an ‘other’ inside of us.
Parker went on to describe her own shadow as a habit of stuffing everything down until it forces its way back up. That is Raeve’s mechanism exactly, the feelings she throws under the ice, and Parker has said she tried not to imprint herself into her work. With this book, she couldn’t keep the two entirely separate.
How she wrote it
Two years, a leaking cover, and fifteen chapters still to goParker expected the sequel to come faster than the original. It did not. By the time she attended the Books, Gowns, and Crowns event in late 2024, roughly fifteen chapters were still unwritten. The structure was mapped and dialogue sketched, but in a video interview recorded around the time of the book’s release she drew a firm line between that kind of preparation and the thing that actually costs something.
I had them mapped out. I had the dialogue written. I hadn’t gone through and actually ripped myself open for them yet. [paraphrased from audio]
When she did sit down to write those final scenes, she was moving through a family crisis she hadn’t foreseen. The emotional weight of what she was already carrying collided with what the scenes demanded of her, and she described the result in the same video interview.
It was like I was already ripped raw, and then it was like somebody just dug into this open, weeping wound and just turned everything up. So maybe it was a good time for me to be writing those scenes, because I was an emotional wreck. I felt every word tenfold. [paraphrased from audio]
Parker has spoken warmly about revision as the phase where a draft becomes a book. She worked through beta feedback across two additional drafts after handing in the first, spending six to eight months on that process. Her view of editorial notes, described in a Fantasy-Hive interview conducted during the first book’s release cycle, explains why she didn’t resist that time.
I love it. I feel like the editing process is the time when I grow the most. Every piece of feedback is like GOLD. I use it to invest in myself, to broaden my mind, look at things from a different angle, better my story. It’s hard, yes. Rewrites are painful, but they’re always, ALWAYS for the better.
The world that Ballad inhabits was not built quickly. The Moonfall series takes place in a setting with dragons that transform into moons when they die, a magic system called Elding, and lore that Parker spent years developing before she ever committed to a plot. In a HarperCollins video she described how the world preceded the story by a wide margin.
I spent three years exploring the magic system, familiarizing myself with the lore of the world, and waiting for the story that was going to be amongst the world to speak to me. And then once it did, it didn’t stop screaming. [paraphrased from audio]
The personal thread
What writing the series did for her before readers ever arrivedParker rarely positions her fiction as therapeutic, but she made an exception when describing what the Moonfall series meant during the years she was building it. The remark appeared in a Fantasy-Hive interview and names a state she was in that the work itself resolved, without her fully realizing it at the time.
This story for me was a breath of air when I didn’t realise I was drowning. It was a rich, luscious, exciting, magical, heart aching ESCAPE. I hope it offers the same for others.
By the time Ballad was finished, Parker had spent two years writing closer to the bone than she had before. She cried at the final read-through, closed the manuscript, and described the experience in the Nerd Fam video interview in terms that make clear the book cost her more than the first one did.
The story that I’ve ended up with is one that I’m incredibly proud of. It’s my favorite book that I’ve ever written. It’s got all of me in there. I scraped the bottom of the barrel for that book. [paraphrased from audio]
What she wants us to sit with
A release she won’t prescribe but hopes you feelAsked in a Fantasy-Hive interview what she hopes readers take away, Parker declined to answer directly. The refusal was not evasion: it reflected a position she holds about what reading is for, and it reframes the question of intent entirely.
Reading is such a personal experience, and I hate to ever tell readers what to take away from my stories.
What she offers in place of a prescribed reading is a description of what Raeve’s arc is actually doing. At the Christchurch event Parker connected the character’s slow, resistant opening to love with the work she tries to do in her own life, naming her daughters as the reason she keeps returning to that effort. Raeve is not an allegory, but she is not entirely separate from her author either. Parker had already named the overlap when she described what the series gave her before it gave her anything else.
This story for me was a breath of air when I didn’t realise I was drowning. It was a rich, luscious, exciting, magical, heart aching ESCAPE. I hope it offers the same for others.
Parker closed her final read-through of Ballad in tears and then let the book go, the way a character in the series might release a parchment lark into the air. That gesture, releasing what you’ve made and trusting it to land where it needs to, turns out to be precisely what the novel asks of Raeve too.