Last night around 3am I awoke and could not sleep. All I could think of was work, my day job, whirling and whirling and keeping me awake. I had to break out of that spiral so I tried to think about Puppetland, and about the storybook I want to write. It was hard — work kept reasserting itself. But I kept lying there, pushing through the distraction.

The fundamental problem with the storybook was that I’ve already told the story of how Punch killed the Maker in the introduction of Puppetland. I needed a new approach, a new way to make the story breathe in storybook form.

Then suddenly I had it. It just burst into being, all of a sudden:

“The world is a mirror maze, and in every reflection there is a Mr. Punch. But the most terrible Mr. Punch of all, the one locked away for all the crimes of all his reflections across history, was a prisoner of Bedlam. And there he wondered day and night at the injustice that he was locked up in here while his Maker, who made him this way, was out there free and he was locked up trapped. And so he sought to escape, and to kill the Maker, that he could finally be free.”