Seven teams entered the Trapped by Monsters Wimbledon mini-league. Once again, my team is sadly residing at the bottom of the table. It appears my results in the French Open league were not a fluke – I can now confirm that I know nothing about tennis. This is bad for my bank balance, but good for those of you who know more (or are luckier at picking players) than me! Prizes are poised to be sent out … but they could go one of several ways.

At present the league standings in point order are:

Thaddeus+11 – 1219
Legal Beagles – 1163
Threddy’s Tennis Thrashers – 1126
Cthooligans – 1071
Joe Craig’s Flourescent Chimps – 990
In First Place – 987
Robson Random Backhanders – 962

At the end of the fourth round our mini league average score places us five places above our rivals from the Me and My Big Mouth Blog. The inter-blog challenge will all hang on the outcome of just one or two matches. It’s poised for a nail-biting finish. Will let you know how it all turns out at the end of the week.

Well, the monster did swallow this picture of himself but burped it up a little later. Poor Joe is still missing, presumed digested, though well done for sending us all a message mate. Just so you have a sense of scale – this picture, at 9′ long, is half the size of the real thing. And it is by no means the biggest beast oozing around inside the cave, believe me.

It’s not often we get to see anything pretty down here. I mean, David’s not bad if you squint, but he’s so often covered in snot these days (and how he wishes it was his own…).

So it lifted my damp little heart when I got an email from my publishers via MonsterNet to show me a lovely poster they’re putting up at Wookey Hole Caves in Somerset for me, to promote my Dark Summer launch event on Saturday 4 July. The monsters are very pleased with this event as they don’t have to risk letting me above ground – their warren of passages easily takes in all the routes under the Mendips.

But loook! Oh soooo pretty. I might have to steal one before the monsters wrestle me back down into the bowels of the earth (sorry Joe – didn’t mean to be insensitive).

Hope to see people there. Real people with the regulation number of limbs, eyes and nostrils… Come along if you qualify. There will be cupcakes!

Now we know Joe has internet access, I thought I’d encourage him on his harrowing passage through the monster’s intestinal tract by posting some good news here, for a change.

Yesterday I was allowed out of the caves to do my stuff at a brilliant event, the Leicester Teen Read Expo. Check my blog to hear how it went (possibly! ;p) But while I was there I also discovered that both Joe’s Jimmy Coates: Survival and my own Tim, Defender of the Earth have been selected as part of… this:

This is a terrific list of books, and we’re in some truly stellar company. So chin up, Joe! And take that, monster jailers! We may be trapped in here, but our books are out there and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Except that. And those. And… ow, please don’t do that. No, put those fondue forks down – AIIIEEEE!

Via TBM guest blogger, John Dougherty…

Not knowing where the eight authors were being held prisoner, I figured the best way of finding them was to go through the monster underworld.

This isn’t easy to do, but fortunately Cherry and I have Bernard on our side. Bernard’s a monster, but he’s one of the good guys – and my best informant in the monster underworld.  He also makes a great guide. If you follow a monster who knows where he’s going, you can go under the bed, through the monster underworld, and out from under any other bed in the world.

That was where I hit my first problem. It turned out the monsters hadn’t given the authors any beds. And it’s just not possible for a monster to come out from under a bed that isn’t there.

There was only one thing to do – get the authors to write the monsters some bedtime stories.

The plan worked perfectly. After several nights of hastily-written bedtime stories for monsters, it wasn’t hard for the authors to convince their captors that it’s so much nicer to listen to a bedtime story if you’re actually in bed. And to cap it all, Tommy D artfully suggested that having to put a flat-pack bed together would be a great punishment for an author who hadn’t been writing exactly what the monsters wanted to hear.

So before long, all the monsters were tucked up in their very own beds, each in turn listening to their very own bedtime story written by their very own captive author. And after a few nights of this, it was time to put the next part of the plan into action.

I’m still inside a monster. The internet connection in here is pretty unreliable, so I hope this works…

Straight after the Trapped By Monsters event in Abingdon on Saturday, I donned my pyjamas and dashed off with my monster jailer to a cub and beaver camp in Northampton to take part in the Giant Sleepover.

I’d been asked to read a spooky story to the assembled campers before they settled down for the night and helped raise money for some great causes. But I wanted to go one better, and so I wrote an exclusive Scream Street short story called Sweet Screams.

After meeting up with some of my fellow ready-for-bedders (and being interviewed by ITN!), I stepped out into the evening sunshine to run some gruesome games, and then read the terrifying tale to what we learned was the biggest sleepover on the planet that night!

Sleepers at other events around the country were treated to the story on video and – for those of you who couldn’t make it to your local lie-in – here’s what they saw…

Now, if you will excuse me, I’m off for 40 winks…

Tommy

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?

In addition to Tommy’s horrifying post below, further distressing details of Saturday’s dark doings may be discerned at the Mostly Books blog, here.

Well, I suppose it had to happen…

Tired of keeping us locked in dark, depressing caves and watching us struggle to understand the unfamiliar Monstrese letters on our bone keyboards as we write for this blog, the monsters went one step further.  We were blindfolded and taken to a theatre in leafy Abingdon where we were forced to compete in a series of humiliating games for their amusement – with the loser destined to be eaten when the spectacle was over!

The first thing we noticed as our blindfolds came off and our elbows were untied was that Barry Hutchison and Mark Robson hadn’t survived the journey.  One of our monster jailers – Pigsnotter, a squidgy purple beast with three and a half noses – had become peckish en route to Abingdon and had snacked on them.  Mark and Baz are expected to return once they have passed through Pigsnotter’s complex and disgusting digestive system.

So, just six authors remained – Andy Briggs, Ali Sparkes, David Melling, Tommy Donbavand, Sam Enthoven and Joe Craig – but which of us would end up served with garnish to the king monster, topped with low salt, reduced sugar tomato ketchup?

David Melling immediately tried to suck up to the king monster by painting a portrait of him while the rest of us were thrown to the front of the stage to begin competing for our lives.

Joe Craig, who had drawn on a new beard with a Sharpie for the occasion, took the role of host and began (under monster orders) to introduce a series of soul-smashing activities that saw, among other things, Ali Sparkes reveal what goes on in her imagination, Tommy Donbavand transformed into a cuddle beast, and Sam Enthoven attempt the frankly unlikely task of impersonating a break-dancing frog.  Even Andy Briggs’ improvised scenario about trying to stop a robot made from cheese by throwing bananas at it (which some consider to be his best work to date) couldn’t lift the authors’ collective spirit.

With the audience baying for blood and – I’m sorry to say – actually laughing at our plight, Joe added up the points at the end of each round as the king monster’s dinnertime crept closer and closer.  But who lost?  Which of the six remaining authors scored the lowest and was served on a slime-covered platter?  Unbelievably, (and Joe’s scoring system was unbelievable), we ended up with minus one point each – and the audience was instructed to decide which of us would become a monster’s meal.  We sat, trembling, as they voted – eventually choosing…

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… Joe Craig!  Yes, after what was clearly an attempt to save his own skin by cheating with the scores, the audience decided that the Jimmy Coates author was the one they wanted fed to the most royal of all monsters.  If you can bear to watch – here’s video footage of Joe’s final moments…

But, what of the rest of us?  Were we granted our freedom and allowed back to our homes and families?  No such luck.  Our only reward was a nibble on a Trapped By Monsters cupcake, then we were bundled into rough hessian sacks and carted back here to the cave.

We must thank Mark from Mostly Books in Abingdon – he gallantly, at great risk, provided copies of our books for the audience to purchase and remember us by – but if we ever find out that he was working in league with our captors to actually arrange the event – he’ll be on the very next monster menu himself.

Will the monsters ever try something as diabolical as this ever again or are we now saved from being the king’s playthings?  The only way to find out is to keep reading Trapped By Monsters.

The Wimbledon Draw is now available to view at Wimbledon Draw

If you look in the purple section on the left side of the page, there is also a printable version.

Good luck.