The Spoons That Are My Ears!

I can't draw and my lack of ability in this respect is a definite hindrance when I have a very clear image in my mind that I'd love to be able to put down on paper. Ah well! I was recently asked by the (extremely efficient) publisher who hopefully is going to issue Link Arms With Toads! if I had any ideas for a possible cover. Yes, I did. I have been seeing this picture in my mind's eye for months. It's a sort of travesty of The Wizard of Oz, I suppose, but it does fundamentally state in visual terms the concerns of my book: the symbols of three separate genres (robot for SF, ghost for horror, apeman for fantasy) skipping arm in arm together along a road, linked by toads...

The toads are metaphoric chemical bonds, similar to the bonds that link oxygen and hydrogen atoms to make water; the road is time, maybe. I have no interest in writing stories that pillage elemental genres: my aspiration is to combine those elements into a new molecule, a never-seen-before genre, my own private category of literature. This is the Molecular Approach to Fiction: writing as a type of chemistry. To take the old and the already known and perfectly synthesise them into the new! Without toads the process wouldn't be possible. Thank Heaven for little toads! The fact that these toads look more like mad aliens is unfortunate, but the gist remains intact. It's always wise to preserve one's gist, to guard it from accidental breakage. And in fact, rendered as negative images such toads don't look so bad...