Hello excellent pals,
KV here.
I wanted to let you know that something has been flickering at the edges of the DEAD GOOD studio this year. It’s been whispering in the dark and tapping at our windows. It wants to be let in to stretch its wings.
LV has been illustrating her heart out in 2025, creating pictures for a rhyming story about fear, the dark, death, and light, and that’s lain dormant for F I F T E E N years.
This is a dead good story for the daydreamers and night-thinkers, the sensitive souls, and the woodland dwellers. And it’s nearly ready to share.
Today, I will tell you the book’s origin story that began way back in 2010…
LV wrote the story in the back of her notebook on the number 86 bus between Chorlton Library and Manchester City Centre, when she was a tired 30-something parent, trying to make art on the half-hour commute to a job in arts administration she hated.
She wrote the rhyming story in a single week of bus rides. The words arrived quickly, almost fully formed. The cadence carving the path as much as anything.
She’d also race to Manchester Museum in her lunch breaks, sketching and illustrating from display cases packed with moths and caterpillars.
It felt urgent and exciting to be creating art at the margins of her life.
She knew the story was original and that it would appeal to others with weird and wild imaginations. Her family and friends encouraged her to illustrate the story, to bring it into the world before she gave birth to her second child in 2012.
And then LV stalled.
Everything she drew felt wrong. Too literal, too flat, too clumsy.
Sketches fizzled. Ideas wriggled away.
The moth went quiet.
And so the story cocooned itself, waiting.
Waiting.
Then, somehow, fifteen years had passed.
When LV was hospitalised this time last year, and when it looked like she might die, one of her immediate regrets was that she had not finished this book.
And so, as part of her recovery this year, we have carved out two dedicated illustration days each month, which LV has been using to create the story’s visuals.
Some stories take a long time to emerge.
Some moths wait until the dark is right.
In 2026, this book will finally take flight.
Follow along as we bring this book to life, pals.
It’s on its way.
Love you bye.
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