Slowly, quietly, I have started pulling ideas together for what may be Phase Four. As ever, ‘he sat there thinking,’ while true, doesn’t exactly make for riveting blog material! But on my breaks I’ve been putting stuff up on Trapped By Monsters: click the link for (lately) Warren Ellis on Rescue Fiction, Elmore Leonard’s Rules of Writing, the very latest in monster fashions plus, as ever, all sorts of goodies from my esteemed fellow cave-dwellers.

Have you seen the TIM Reader Quotes page? My favourite quote on there is from a young gentleman called Finn. It says:

“If you don’t like books with action-packed chapters with big scary monsters wrecking national monuments and giant cockroaches killing people, you will not like this book. I loved it.“

Yesterday I got the chance to meet Finn and thank him personally for his kind words. Read all about it, here.

I’ve just embarrassed myself with this on Trapped By Monsters, so I figured I may as well do the same here, too! Following on from a post there by Ali Sparkes asking other TBM authors about our early writing efforts, here’s, um, this below…!

It’s called THE HAUNTED CAVE. I found it in a cupboard about ten years ago just before moving out of the house where I grew up: it’s my earliest surviving complete story. I think I wrote it when I was seven years old!

As you can see – if you overlook the cliches and so on, gah! – certain characteristics of my, heh, later work were already set in stone. Notably speed, action, and dreadful handwriting! ;p

Check Trapped By Monsters for the sorry saga of awesome author Alexander Gordon Smith, and his doomed attempts to rescue us from captivity. 😀

Here’s a treat for you. Check Trapped By Monsters for an exclusive brand new story by YA horror prodigy Dean Vincent Carter.

Snort! Chew! RAAAAAGH! 😀

My brain has conked out for the holidays. I’ll be back in Jan, I swear, even if I have to feed electrodes up my nose and JOLT the porridge-like grey matter into life to do it (again ;p) Mean time, here are some FESTIVE MONSTERS.

First up, by way of the ever-brilliant Boing Boing, check out this Siphonophore. It’s “an eerily fantastic creature that appears to be a single, large organism, but which is actually a colony of numerous individual jellyfish-like animals that behave and function together as a single entity.”

Isn’t that amazing?? I do my best to make up decent monsters, but… wow! Put this/these dude/dudes in a book, someone, please!

Next, in case you haven’t seen it already, here’s some recently released footage of an extremely rare elbowed Magnapinna squid who recently paid a visit to a deep sea drilling site….

As Ryan North of Dinsoaur Comics says in his inimitable style, “So octopods are terrifying and we all know that but […] oh hey, looks like they’ve DEVELOPED ELBOWS AND INSANELY LONG ARMS AND LOVE TO STARE UNBLINKING AT THE CAMERA. holy crap you guys.” Quite.

Third, here’s something that I’m secretly a bit pleased with. In one of my other lives I get to play with some truly excellent musicians in a band called Sour Mash Daddy And His Sixty Wives: I don’t normally mention our activities here, partly because we appear in public about as often as… well… the elbowed Magnapinna squid! But on Dec 6th we did play a gig, and some film footage of this rare occurrence has survived (thanks, Laura). I should explain that singing duties are normally taken care of by members of the band who actually, like, know how to sing. But…

Heh (blushes) Hope you get a kick out of it! ;p

My thanks, and a HUGELY HAPPY FESTIVE WOSSNAME, to everyone who happens to be reading this. Here’s to 2009, and whatever new adventures we have in it!

This is what the first lines of a film deal look like:

Yep: I’ve been waiting to tell you about this for quite a long time(!) but now the deal is signed: Tim, Defender of the Earth has been optioned by Universal. As of November 20th 2008, producer Chris Meledandri and his team have begun developing Tim into a live action feature film.

Neil Gaiman, an author with a lot of experience of film deals, said on his blog once that: ‘My attitude on all Hollywood things is not to expect any of them to happen until I’m sitting at the premiere eating my popcorn. Worrying about the ups and downs of getting a film made could drive anyone to drink.’ A lot of stuff has to happen for Tim to get made into a movie. Besides, I write books. I aim to write a whole shelf of them and make each one as good as I possibly can , so that’s what I’ve got to be getting on with.

But, yes. Some cackling, some leaping, some waving about of arms and some grinning of huge, cheesy grins are all most definitely in order. 😀

Here’s the view from my window…

Here, I kid you not (Hell’s teeth!) is a BOATLOAD OF SUSHI-!

And here, recorded live in London this very evening but, thanks to the ever-evolving wonders of t’internet, watchable to me and now you, if you fancy it, is some awesome music from my mates Simon Metheringham and Adrian Taylor.

Tomorrow, the New York Comic Con, to do whatever I can for Tim there. HUZZAH! I’ll keep you posted whenever I can.

For now, though, ‘nighty night. 😉