These are really great, but what are these ones over here?' Looking at the whole thing, as a whole, I had a gut feeling that it was too heavy. I showed them the oils, saying, 'What do you think?' And they, 'These are lovely. And I just happened to have left some of the ink sketches sitting out on my desk. But it was one of those good instincts that was confirmed by two artist friends when they came around. Sometimes you get into a project and you can't really see it anymore. And this is just ink and ink washes then with the occasional splash of color - of watercolor. So I went back to the drawing board and ended up redoing everything. And that whole thing was totally in full color when I realized that it was just too much - it was too heavy and the simplicity of the book had been lost. And I got all the way up to 'T' in full color oil painting, collage and a whole range of media.

This book has been about two years in the making and I started illustrating it from 'A' to 'Z' once the stories and the rough drawings were all in place.

And, with fresh eyes, it was pretty obvious which ones weren't up to scratch, which ones weren't going to work. So I would write all of them and then I would leave it for a couple of weeks and go back and read it with fresh eyes.

They all had to flow together and there were various things that I would consider. Every other story has had several reincarnations. The only stories that have remained pretty much true to the first version are 'A' 'O.'. On how much the stories changed from their original versions they clashed with another idea at another time and the explosion created a third idea, or they would just live there. And so I would put all these concepts - these nuggets of ideas - into my sketchbook, and there they would live either until. And a lot of ideas that I've had have had either a beginning or a middle without an end, or a beginning and an end without, really, a middle. Those things are so simple that people often forget them. I think what every really good story has is a beginning, a middle and an end - the arc of a story. Actually, that is what the idea is - it's a whole bunch of half-cooked ideas. The ideas came from all different places, really.

Oliver jeffers penguin