How the strangest things can get ideas started. A friend sends a link to a ghost story. I get about a tenth of the way through, and the images it conjures up send me looking up encaustic and wax and going back into the ideas of fragments of images buried in semi-opaque whiteness. Before long I’m hunting down candles in the house and melting them into ice-cube trays, pondering on the carbon smoke that the candle spits out and constructing plywood shelters in my head.