Hi! I’m Phil Griffin.
I was born in 1956 in a part of Kent called the Medway towns (actually, in a village just outside the towns called Upchurch; for those of you who know the area) – a place hardly anyone outside Kent has ever heard of . . . and for good reason!
Because my place of birth was to the east of the River Medway, that makes me a ‘Man of Kent’. Had I been born to the west of the river; that would have made me a ‘Kentish Man’ . . . apparently!
These days, I still live in the gently undulating, agricultural landscape of Kent; though I’ve moved further east to the quiet, rural hills between Faversham and Canterbury. My house is perched about a third of the way up the North Kent Ridge; and in mid-winter, when the leaves are off the trees, if I lean out of my front bedroom window at a dangerous angle and stretch my neck, I can ‘enjoy’ an extensive, panoramic view of the mouth of the Thames Estuary plus (on an exceptionally clear day) the distant shores of estuarine Essex.
Although my home is barely twenty-five miles from where I grew up; I have, in fact, travelled quite widely and lived in many places, both here in the UK and overseas. And it was while I was on my travels that the various ideas that would eventually congeal, contort and crystallise to become ‘The Fictionary’ were born.
It was in South London (Clapham, Brixton, Camberwell Green, Lewisham) in the late 1970s where, fancying myself as a budding writer, I started playing with possible nom de plumes . . . including Eli Zatt (as in "What-the-hell-is-that?"), Ovi D’Amoun (as in "Over-the-moon!") and many others.
Three years later, in 1982/3, I was working in Hong Kong, and it was here that I came up with ‘Olfactorial Menace’. The original concept was a spoof 1920’s silent comedy skit, opening with Miss Ellany tied to a railway track with a runaway steam train thundering towards her, and her evil Uncle Harry (a cross between Dick Turpin and Ben Turpin– remember him?) rubbing his hands in maniacal glee while threatening not to let her free unless she divulged the secret source of her wonderfully evocative scents.
I actually started work on the first draft of ‘The Fictionary’ in 1984 when I was living in Nagoya, Japan. By then, most of the characters and ideas had already assembled in my mind . . . but not all! Hopi, for example – who plays such an important role in (literally) moving the plot forward in ‘The Dawn of Civilisation – A Quest for Eli and Ovi’ – was very much a late-comer to the party; but, like all the other characters, quickly evolved once I started writing him in. Indeed, I still blush when I recall the features and characteristics of a hopinevasaurus I rejected in favour of unimaginably bad breath and light-beam-eyes!
So much for the ensemble of personnel in ‘Jacomo’s Fictionary’ of 1984!
When it came to writing ‘Codoné‘s Fictionary’ in 2006-8 in the quiet of my cosy Kentish home; with a lapse of over twenty years, it was, of course, inevitable, that many fundamental changes occurred to both the plot and the cast of characters.
As the rewrite unfolded, not only did Jacomo undergo a sex change to become Codoné; a curious ‘living rock’ outside Œfiauce’s cave called ‘The Watcher’ found itself surplus to requirements; the dramatis personae of ‘Olfactorial Menace’ shrank from ‘a few dozen’ to just three or four principal protagonists; and, another central character in ‘The Dawn of Civilisation – A Quest for Eli and Ovi’ – the wonderfully enigmatic Al – kaleidoscopically metamorphosised into the magnificent mythological beast he is today from what was originally just a mildly eccentric ‘giant-dodo-type’ bird with fierce teeth and a bit part!