I wrote the first draft of the lazy wizard, at the end of May 2021, after having a very vivid dream. Like other writers I regularly take inspiration from my dreams and whenever I have a good one, I jot it down in a dream diary which I can come back to later.

In the original draft I drew inspiration from the Futurama episode “Benderama” where multiple copies of Bender are created, when he is too lazy to perform a task himself, with each new generation created by the previous one, the laziness increases whilst their size diminishes. I toyed with the idea of having lots of little wizards running around and avoiding working, but I decided to go with the expansion of vanity instead, with each new generation of the wizard been more handsome than the previous. I finished the second draft at the beginning of July, which is a quick turnaround for me.

In a change to my normal writing style, I wrote the lazy wizard fully from the point of view of an observer, there is not a single line of dialogue. This kind of story is called an “epistolary novel”, which is a novel told through a collection of letters or other forms such as the accounts of an observer, meaning that there is no need for direct dialogue. After being in the habit of writing rather long short stories, I wanted to keep this one short and snappy, at a little over 2300 words I think I made my point with this one.

Whilst I kept the lazy wizard a short story, I ended up spending much more time on the artwork than I have done so on previous accompanying art. My first fort for the artwork was a tower with an interesting cloud scape, since Peter Wickham loves to watch the sky so much. The study would have been an easy one to run with, my last short story was the Cloud Kingdom it’s cover art shows an interesting cloud formation and I didn’t want to repeat two such similar images. Been almost utterly unable to paint human faces I decided against having a line-up of Peter Wickham’s, with each of them been more attractive as you go down the line. In the end I settled on painting Peters study, I wanted to avoid some of the stereotypes such as dribbling candles and skulls, but I included the books that a research wizard would collect as well as the traditional pointy hat. I couldn’t resist adding a pair of glowing green eyes on the bottom left-hand shelf, they could belong to a cat hidden in the darkness, but I will leave the interpretation of those eyes entirely up to the imagination of the reader.