I’m a firm believer in keeping a messy work space, and collecting stuff. Anything that’s of any interest of all gets kept somewhere. So my desk is a jumble of memories, artwork, books, books, books, junk and notes I’ve jotted down. I try not to clean my office too often. The messiness itself becomes creative. Papers, photographs, and books that have never met before will tumble together at times and I am often there to witness their meeting. I think it was this kind of accident that led to me somehow associating the news story of a duck who became frozen in pond ice with some memories of junior high school, sitting in a class doing “remedial work” as they called it at our school, which was work given to people who were considered slow or uncooperative. In the middle of this connection, I stumbled on to an Alchemy website, run by a man named Adam McLean (http://www.levity.com/alchemy/). I was fascinated, and read quite a bit on how alchemy worked. I put these ideas into a blender (metaphorically speaking), ran it on high for 4 minutes, and presto, Duck Boy was born.