Three Chapters In: On Wild Stories, Illustration, and Learning to Let the Garden Lead

There's something quietly thrilling about reaching chapter three of anything. It's the point where a story stops feeling like a hopeful idea and starts feeling like something real, something with weight and momentum and a life of its own. And I'll be honest: I didn't entirely expect to get here this quickly.

The Frog's Ledger, my serialised illustrated novel (which I still can't quite believe is real) delivered monthly through a snail mail subscription, has been one of the most unexpected creative adventures of my life. Not because it's been difficult (though illustration, it turns out, is considerably harder than I'd anticipated), but because of where the story keeps coming from.

I am, in the most literal sense, completely surrounded by my material.

My garden. My neighbours' gardens. The conservation area I'm lucky enough to live beside, teeming and tangled and entirely indifferent to narrative convention. And my family, who are, without question, the beating heart of this world. My children are an endless source of the kind of logic that only makes sense if you're small and utterly convinced of your own genius. My partner, meanwhile, has become something of an unlikely creative collaborator. He is, to put it plainly, obsessed with our pond, and is the dedicated cameraman behind what we have come to call pondcam. The footage is extraordinary. The commitment is perhaps slightly unhinged. I mean that as the highest compliment.

What I've discovered is that this isn't conventional storytelling. I have a story arc, yes, a proper one, with characters and tension and a bureaucratic organisation that takes the chaos of nature very, very seriously. But the wild keeps unfolding around me, and I keep finding that it has better ideas than I do. A creature appears. Something blooms unexpectedly. The pond does something remarkable at 2am. And the story shifts, slightly, to accommodate it. I am less the author and more the documenter. It makes the whole thing feel genuinely alive, even if it is not the most straightforward creative process I've ever undertaken.

Does that make it more exciting? Absolutely. Unreservedly. Yes.

The other thing I wasn't quite prepared for is illustration itself. I've painted for years. But illustration, proper illustration, where every mark has to carry meaning and mood and move a story forward, is an entirely different discipline. I've found myself going back to illustrators I've long admired: Shane Devries, Quentin Blake, Judith Kerr, there's a reason those names endure. They understood that illustration isn't decoration. It's narrative. It's architecture.

Which brings me, rather neatly, to something I'm almost unreasonably excited about.

My background is in architecture. And slowly, that training is finding its way back into this project in the most unexpected and wonderful way. I've begun working on blueprints — proper cross-section drawings of the locations within the story's world. The mines are coming. And my current work in progress, the house of the Order of the Acorn, is taking shape in a way that makes me feel like every detour my career has taken was quietly pointing here all along.

Chapter three is where things get interesting. The world is bigger than it looks. The paperwork is considerable. And something is stirring in the cherry tree.

If you'd like to follow the story as it unfolds, illustrations, dispatches, the occasional pressed botanical specimen and a good deal of bureaucratic correspondence, the snail mail subscription is open. A letter once a month, through your actual door. There's nothing quite like it.

Your Letters Await...

Well, that's all from the garden for now,

TTFN