As the series grew more serious to me, meaning that I developed what I actually wanted to happen-which with me usually happens as I write book two of a series, when I sit down and build an arc for the entire series-I 'realified' Alcatraz's world a little bit, if that makes sense, made it its own substantial thing. Remember that Alcatraz was written as a writing experiment, not as something that I was intending to publish. Those were just jokes, inside references to my other books. Though there are other jokes in there relating to my other books-it's much like the scene where Quentin speaks in Spook's dialect. By the end of the book I decided that Alcatraz could not be anywhere in the same continuity as Dragonsteel and that I was probably wrong for including that. Melerand is one of the main kingdoms in Dragonsteel, and I thought it would be amusing for them to be speaking that language somehow filtered into this world.

When I originally wrote Alcatraz Versus The Evil Librarians, I put that in there partially as a throwaway joke.

Why does Bastille say they're speaking Melerandian in book 1 and Nalhallan from book 2 on?

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