The pics from my talk at yesterday’s fabulous Leicester Teen Read Expo are… a bit worrying. Perhaps the combination of my recent Trapped By Monsters ordeal and the oncoming deadline for draft three of Phase Three is affecting me more than I thought.

I remember an excellent session, full of great questions from a brilliant audience of keen readers. But these pictures seem to tell a different story. See what you think:

Here’s one of me at the start, waving Black Tat around in my usual enthusiastic manner. Business as normal – or as close to that as I ever seem to manage. But…

Here’s one of me apparently turning into some kind of shambling zombie, animated only by the raging hunger for moist, fresh brains. And here…

…I appear to be advancing on one of my hapless listeners, hands poised to grapple, maim and rend, with the demonic gleam of battle in my eyes!

Erm… I’m just going to hope for the best(!) and offer an enormous and gleeful thank you to Ian and his team for having me along to what was a thoroughly brilliant day. Thanks, too, to awesome authors Bali Rai, Mike Carey, Ally Kennen, Keith Gray and Dan Tunstall, and to everyone else who was there. I returned home feeling inspired and invigorated. I just hope those feelings aren’t because I, y’know, ate somebody.

What do you see here?

A humble bottle of sauce? Or what’s soon to become the most feared literary harbinger of doom since The Black Spot in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island?

For the full story of Saturday’s shenanigans (including heartrending footage of the last words of Joe Craig) click here, and also here.

I’ve been spared for now. But next time, I may not be so lucky. 😀

I think this clip’s pretty self-explanatory. 😉

Are you, reading this, anywhere near Abingdon, England on this coming Saturday June 20th? Then click here for all the details! 😀

Here’s a quick pic from today’s terrific visit to Woodbridge High School…

I gave two short talks in the morning – doing my best to answer some excellent questions – and then stuck around for something new on me, a Literary Lunch.

Myself, fifteen young writers from various year groups and Woodbridge’s Supreme Ninja Librarian Ms Clarke, all sat around a table munching delicious baguettes and discussing some of the nuts and bolts of writing. I enjoyed it enormously. But it did mean, naturally, that I not only had to think of useful things to say, but I also then had to say them without spraying the group with partially chewed food. I /think/ I got away with one of these objectives at least, and I hope for the best with the other. 😉

My thanks to Ms Clarke and to everyone I met and spoke to today for their wonderful warm welcome.

I’m currently hard at work on the third draft of PHASE THREE OF MY SINISTER MASTERPLAN TO CONQUER THE UNIVERSE, so bloggage here may be intermittent for a bit.

-Check my freshly-updated homepage for links to my new Twitter foolishness, plus other places where I might be lurking/procrastinating! ;p

-Like the warning sign above? Click here to make your own (and thanks to Andy Briggs for pointing it out to me!)

When lovely Liz at blatantly brilliant blog My Favourite Books asked me to take part in her current Horror Blog Fest I was thrilled and chuffed and delighted. You can read wot I wrote here, but do click around: the Fest has included some of the finest writers of scary stories working today. They’ve certainly intimidated me! 😀

At the bottom of the interview you’ll also find details about a little giveaway Liz and I are running. To discover how to win yourself a signed, personalised UK first edition of Black Tat, all you’ve got to do is take a look!

PS: Tuesday’s event at Freedom of Expression was an absolute hoot. I took the opportunity to test out the brand new third draft opening of my new book on a live audience for the very first time: reactions included a shiver, two gasps, and a nice round of applause – very encouraging!

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.

If you’ve been following this blog you’ll have seen a lot of pics of me at my events. But if you’re curious about what I actually /sound/ like… well:

It’s a clip of the talk I gave at The Crystal Palace Children’s Book Festival, on April 25th, as recorded at excellent independent bookshop The Bookseller Crow On The Hill. Click here for more of the day’s readings from other authors.

-But before you do! This post is also by way of a plug for my first public event in a while. On Tuesday June 2nd I’ll be doing my thing at Freedom Of Expression, one of the awesome evenings of entertainment arranged by impish impressario Tim Eveleigh. Click here for full details of the event and venue. Hope to see you there!

Here’s a quick pic from today’s events at South Chingford Library, where I was invited to do my thing as part of this year’s Waltham Forest Literature Festival.

I did three sessions of readings and Q&A with Year 7 students from nearby Heathcote School. There were around fifteen students in each group – smaller audiences than some events I’ve been doing lately! But that suited the space, and I think the more low-key atmosphere also led to some really terrific and unusual questions, particularly from the third group. I just had to keep remembering not to be too loud, especially in the readings!

This was my first visit to Chingford. The fact that the name of the place is so close to that of THE CHINJ in Black Tat made me grin to myself when I got off the bus. Passers-by must have thought I was quite mad. No news there, then! ;p

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