One thing we asked for with the temple that John didn’t supply was a sort of optical-illusion motif. Think MC Escher– but we specifically asked not to use the “Escher stairs,” which we thought were kind of played.

However, we set that idea down before we came up with the golems, and the vastness of the library John smoothly establishes here is a lot more important. Sometimes the Waltrips have saved me from ideas that were visually ambitious but not conducive to storytelling.

If you really have to work with somebody with whom you have mutual distaste, you can usually find a conversational safe harbor in shop talk.