If you haven’t met already, allow me to introduce one of the most famous and fascinating Japanese monsters, the Kappa.

Handsome, dapper, charming…

…are all words that /don’t/ usually get applied to Kappa.

However, as I’ve just discovered from this video, it turns out that Kappas can be excellent dancers. Click the link to see for yourself.

-Sam

To my horror, I’ve just uncovered incontrovertible evidence that the monsters are currently engaged in a stealthy public relations drive. All over the world’s media the psychological warfare has begun. Seeds of doubt are already being planted in hapless human minds. The old certainties about monsters are being eroded and undermined, leaving humanity utterly vulnerable to their unguessable ultimate intentions.

Examples? Well, this T-shirt design, for one.

The message these T-shirts would have you believe is that giant monsters are not terrifying city-smashing behemoths [like (say) the ones found in Tim, Defender of the Earth] but are in fact harmless, tidy creatures who take care of their environment and clean up after themselves and others.

After a year in the company of monsters – scorched by their eructations, forced to wallow in their effluences – we TBM authors can state categorically that nothing could be further from the truth.

The two benighted souls in the picture above think they’re just wearing cute T-shirts. In fact they are colluding in the spread of monster propaganda.

Don’t buy this T-shirt and make the same mistake!

Sam

It’s been a busy couple of weeks for one of my absolute favourite monsters, THE KRAKEN.

Reprising the classic look from Ray Harryhausen’s original film, the Kraken appears for a whole gleeful climactic eighteen seconds in the current trailer(2) for the soon-to-be-released remake of Clash of the Titans.

To my enormous delight, the Kraken was also recently honoured as Badass of the Week by Ben Thompson, on his brilliant website of the same name: click here for a great piece that rounds up some classic Krakenology in fine style.

However: Mr Thompson’s excellent description of his subject as (I quote) “basically a giant-ass emotionless cephalopod who lives solely to eat boats, destroy all life in the ocean, and violently implode warships with his ultra-powerful crush-o-matic appendages of doom“, while wonderful, isn’t, I believe, quite the whole story. There’s a very different side to our titanic tentacular friend, as anyone familiar with the Kraken’s starring role in my own Tim, Defender of the Earth might already know.

Another mad year draws to a close. I am knackered, but with CRAWLERS poised to launch in April (and plenty more thrilling projects in the pipeline) I’m very, very happy.

Thanks, best wishes and Merry Christmas to anyone reading this. I hope you enjoy your food. ;D

SNEE HEE HEE!

Sam

I spent half an hour this morning mucking about with a camera, Photoshop, and Sam Enthoven’s hat. I’d have loved to have had more time to work on this picture, but I’ve got a stack of work to get through before Christmas, so unfortunately I had to rush through it.

Still, I think the finished result isn’t too bad. Meet me as Mr Mumbles, the villain from the first in my INVISIBLE FIENDS horror series. Click the image to see it in all its glory…

This amused me no end, and since it’s packed full of muppety monsters, it seemed appropriate to stick it up. That said, I hope it doesn’t give the monsters in here any ideas – the last thing I want is to be subjected to their singing.

Two items of Q&A for you.

The first is something I was asked this week via the MySpace page of Jagmat from The Black Tattoo. Huge respect and kudos – partly just for not letting the whole shapeshifting blancmange monster thing put him off! – to Mykell, from Maryland, USA, who wondered:

What kind of research do u do when u are writing ur books?

Research… hmm. If you’re talking about facts and figures, details of setting and time and place and action… it depends.

I think details are important, especially in a fantasy story: they give the reader something to hang onto; they make things seem real. For instance, I got the fight scenes in Black Tat checked out by genuine martial artists. While I was writing the book, I met a lady at a party who turned out to be the ranking Number 3 North European Women’s Sabre Champion! She was wonderfully sporting about reading Black Tat’s swordfights for me: I got these excellent emails from her saying, ‘Well, ok: if I was fighting a thirty-foot-long hedgehog centipede beast, I suppose I’d start off on the back foot, with this sort of a grip…’ and off she went. I hope those kinds of details give some realistic weight and crunch to Black Tat’s fights. And if a story needs other kinds of information, I’ll find out everything I can.

But here’s the thing: that stuff should only ever be in service to the story. The story comes first. Because no amount of detail is going to make the readers care if they’re not involved in the scene, feeling for the characters, wondering what’s going to happen next.

The story is the hard bit – the main thing to focus on – it seems to me.

…Which brings me to my second question.

Slice Three of JETHRO’S ACE OF HEARTS, the thirteen-part story I’m currently serializing here on TBM, goes live for your delectation tomorrow (Friday) at 12 noon GMT.

My current plan is to have Slice Four go up this Monday, Slice Five go up next Friday, and so on. But a couple of my fellow prisoners (looking at you, David and Barry!) think I should go up to three episodes a week – posting on Wednesdays, too.

You, reading this: Hello! What do you think?

I think savouring the story slowly would be best – three slices a week might dominate the blog, and the story would finish very quickly. Or am I just being mean and stingy?

Leave a comment either way. I’m all ears.

…No, Bluggsvo Multilug, don’t get up: I was speaking metaphorically. No (sigh) I’m not really ‘all ears’: if you had eyes as well as ears you would be able see that. Of course I think you have ‘nice lobes’ but no, we’re absolutely not ‘destined to be together’. No: leave me alone! NO! Stop! The wax! THE WAGGLING! AAGHlp

According to this article at my favourite film website, Twitch, yesterday was the fifty-fifth birthday of one of the most famous and greatest (not to say biggest and angriest) monsters of them all…. GODZILLA!

…AND WE FORGOT! No presents, no cake, not even a card for him – nothing.

Run away! Run away very fast! AAIIIEEEE!

Maybe it’s just me. Maybe being in here has made me paranoid, but these days I’m seeing monsters everywhere. Including on the covers of Brazilian parenting magazines.

Whatever that thing is, someone needs to hit it with a shovel right now.

Have you ever watched passers-by in Halloween costumes? Have you ever wondered whether any of the people you’re seeing might actually be monsters? Perhaps they’re using this holiday as the perfect chance to go about their dark and nefarious purposes in full view of the human public. Because if they /are/ monsters, how would you know?

Dear reader, as our first Halloween since we TBM authors were consigned to monster captivity approaches, I can exclusively confirm: IT’S ALL TRUE. Shaken (and stirred), I have just been forcibly returned to the caves from this special TBM Halloween Event. Some one hundred and fifty awesome young people were there, from no less than thirty different schools… and monsters walked among us. I mean, check out these disreputable characters…

Sadly, in a last-minute decision by our captors, Tommy and Andy were kept back at the caves. Lately the monsters have been using them as lab test subjects for some new and interesting diseases they’ve invented: unfortunately both these benighted souls were deemed too dangerous, unstable and, frankly, [ew], sticky to travel.

Joe and I were there, though, and we had a fantastic time. A monstrous thank you to everyone we met and spoke to!

Mark was there, too – or so we thought. See for yourself:

This guy claimed to be Mark Robson wearing a Death mask. Hah! I knew the truth: it was something else, and whenever it pretended to doff its disguise, this nameless horror was wearing a Mark Robson mask.

Mark? Mark! What have they done to you?

Monsters. What would we do without them, eh? They entertain us, they fascinate us, they look after us so, erm, nicely in this cave. We think we know them so well, but does the relationship get stale? Of course not. Because monster know just how to keep things fresh. It’s like a good marriage. Monsters can still surprise us by crawling up out of a lake in Panama and attacking small children.

Check out this latest news on the exploits of Mefanwey, the brother of one of my excellent monster chums here in the cave. And when I say ‘chums’, I do of course mean tormentors. And when I say ‘excellent’, I’m sure you realise I mean the old sense of the word, which roughly translates as ‘cruel, sadistic, disgusting and devoid of any moral sense’.

Anyway, here’s the news story.

 And here’s what poor old Mefanwey looked like after the children had stoned him to death and thrown his body back into the lake, then he’d been washed up on the shore again and picked apart by buzzards: 

Now I think about it, surely that’s the real story: humans discover an amazing new creature that  nobody’s ever seen before, so we immediately stone it to death and throw it back into a lake. Sounds about right.