Home from Ireland and London!
I apologize that I'm typing this up so late in the week. I had been trying to post on Tues. each week, but after two weeks away and flying over an ocean to get home, there was no way I was going to be able to type anything of substance. The trip was wonderful. Julia and I had a lovely time and saved some money by staying with relatives and exploring Northern Ireland and London for my signing there. I got a lot of great inspiration and Irish reference for the upcoming series.

I have a wonderful batch of photos that I will reference for architecture, carved details, tile work, stained glass, library design, etc for future Mouse Guard stories. Julia acted a photojournalist for me and took a great many photos with her camera (an SLR that I'm only allowed to play with if I ask). She has been spending the day processing those photos so she can upload and share them with everyone. A few additional ideas came out of our travels for a project I plan on when I need a break from Mouse Guard (not anytime soon) called Fir Darrig, which is set in Irish folklore. The trip will be influencing my work and I hope you enjoy.

But this trip was work too, we were in London for a few days as well which allowed me to do a signing at Forbidden Planet. The folks there were amazing and I really appreciate the warm and polite welcome from my UK fans. The owners of Forbidden Planet are also the owners of Titan Books, who publish the UK editions of Mouse Guard. It was a great opportunity to talk to them and be able to chat about the book's performance as well as looking forward to future UK versions of upcoming Mouse Guard books.

With just under two weeks over there, we had a lot of places to see and talk about, and get reference images from, but among them some of the highlights are the Trinity College's long room, the Book of Kells, Giant's Causeway, Newgrange, Christ's Church in Dublin, Fairy Glen in Rostrevor, and damn near all of London.

I have uploaded photos from the trip to my Flickr page: here

Special thanks to Darcy & Eoin McCartan, Mat Allen, and the folks at Forbidden Planet in London for making sure we had such a good time!