Alert readers of my book, "The Piglys and the Hundred Year Mystery" tell me the following is NOT much of a spoiler:

Twenty years ago, I began a book with the idea that history, in the town of Pigville, had been rewritten to the harm and hurt of three intrepid pigs, our heroes. A big, beautiful mansion was built by their great-great-grandfather so it resembled, well...a PIG. Then re-built, by his arch enemy, to resemble a lion. In a novel about talking pigs, I felt free to indulge in architectural puns, and to use architectural skulduggery to advance the plot.

I blithely wrote the idea into the first draft, and then faced the challenge of making it happen in the illustrations. And then, for my own satisfaction, drawing interior floor plans so that the windows and doors crucial to the plot were in the right places.

Readers anywhere can see, above, how the Pigly Mansion, front and back, was designed, and then, how it was re-designed.

Readers in Northern Ohio may be interested to know that the model for the Pigly Mansion is the GreatStone Castle in Sidney, Ohio (pictured below, formerly known as the Goode Mansion.)

You can hear more about local architecture, history, and talking pigs at the St. Marys Community Public Library next Wednesday, March 11th, at 6 PM.