This is a bit of an excuse to tell you about what I did on my holidays, but I couldn’t resist showing you some pictures of the library in the woods at End Of The Road.  It’s just such a great idea, these bookshelves affixed to trees in decorated woodland.  They had the bad Victorian version of Scrapefoot there, but they also had the complete works of Emerson, which seemed very appropriate (if only there had been the time to read it).

     

There were no librarians at the library in the woods, although perhaps they were hiding behind the trees.  I wonder what they would have looked like.  For a while, though, Keira Rathbone typed away in a corner of the glade.  She uses a typewriter to draw her pictures.  As a writer who loves his imagery, I find that really exciting.  I try to make pictures with typed words, but she takes it one step further and literally uses type to create images.

   

I’m still trying to draw nixies.  A nixie is a water beast, but is she part-fish or part-frog?  An old art teacher of mine used to tell me I was only any good at drawing monsters, which hurt at the time since I thought I was being an expressionist.  Now I tend to agree with her.  Soon I hope to have a whole shoal of monstrous nixies drawn for you, and we can talk about the wonderful little story in which they belong.