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“As usual, with this chapter, I was spoilt for choice with so many vivid images conjured by the words. In the end, I chose to depict a fossilised dinosaur from the museum Kyp describes. I have very fond memories of going to the local museum with my grandmother when I was a little boy. I…
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The previous edition of the Kick-About featured a rather precarious vision of a civilisation held together by threads. I won’t labour this analogy any further, but suffice to say civilsation feels a good deal more secure this week! I feel a bit of a celebration coming on. Anyone fancy a boogie?
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A final batch of martime tuftiness from my trip out to Tankerton Slopes at the beginning of the week. I was just thinking how some of these would make for particularly cruel jigsaw puzzles…
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It’s 4 o’clock, there’s a nip in the air, and with a little bit of luck there’s a slice of cake nearby. Time then to rejoin Kyp Finnegan and Atticus Weft in their continuing adventures in the fantastical realm of Chimera, the realm of lost things.
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Another celebration of the always-surprising subtleties of texture, tone and colour in the everyday scrub of another patch of local wild plants and grasses. As I was taking these images, I could smell the sea at my back and hear the keening of the gulls above me, and somehow the waves found themselves into my…
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Chapter 9 of Chimera Book 1 – entitled Captain Toothache & The Silver Locket – takes place in a locked room, with Kyp Finnegan, the book’s 8 eight year old hero, and Atticus Weft, a snake comprised from all the odd socks that go missing from your washing machines, baring their souls. It doesn’t have…
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It’s a lesser known fact about me that I’m sometimes known to write a song or two when the mood strikes. That mood used to strike much more often, I think because I didn’t second guess myself as much as I do now. I’m no musician after all, so what gives me the temerity to…
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More salted, windswept skeins and matted hummocks on the sea-facing rise of Tankerton Slopes.
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Chapter 9 of Chimera Book 1 is a very important one to me. I took the decision at the outset of the very first draft of Chimera that the reader’s first experience of the novel should mirror Kyp Finnegan’s – a head-long rush down the rabbit hole, breathless, panicked, sensorially intense – a boy on…
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A short walk along Whitstable’s blustery sea front and you arrive at Tankerton Slopes, a long steep rise of scrubby grass, hog’s fennel and brambles. In the depths of winter, kids sledge down the slopes, speeding down towards the colourful beach huts and the shingle beach. Now, the long unkempt grasses are dry and bleached,…
Red's Kingdom 