Just a quick post tonight to belatedly announce the winner of the signed copy of Invisible Fiends: Mr Mumbles. I was supposed to randomly select the winner on Tuesday, but … um … I forgot.

Anyway, I now have randomly drawn a winner, using the age-old names in a hat technique, and the winner is Joanne B.

Thanks to all those who commented and took part in the competition. I’ll be running more giveaways soon, so maybe your luck will be better next time.

Right, it’s been a looooong day. Off to put my feet up. Next week I’ll be beginning a month crammed full of events, workshops and a tour, but more details of that in the next post.

You might have noticed a new menu option has appeared just below the logo up at the top of the page. Because the Gangrene website is woefully out of date, I’ve put together a Comics page here on BarryHutchison.com, which will allow you to keep up to date with everything I’m doing in the wonderful world of comic books.

My big project at the moment is Gangrene, which has been mentioned a number of times on here before. The book is going to be published by Markosia, and it’s currently all systems go as we race to make sure it’s published later this year.

There are a number of costs involved in getting a comic to the point where it’s ready for publication, let alone the money required for marketing. To help with these costs, we’ve come up with a number of fund-raising schemes, the first of which – the ebay auction mentioned yesterday – will be launching this weekend.

In the meantime, if you’re feeling flush and want to help with the project, there’s a donate button at the bottom of the Comics page. There are various freebies and trinkets on offer to everyone who donates, along with my undying respect, appreciation and – yes – love, so be sure to give generously!

It has been a long, bumpy ride, filled with danger, excitement, and some stuff about water pistols, but we made it, loyal readers. We made it to 250 posts.

Being a naturally lazy person, with little or no inherent motivation to do anything that requires any effort whatsoever, getting to post 250 is a big achievement for me. It gives me hope that one day I might reach as many as 260, or even 285 posts! Can you imagine?

But let’s not get carried away. For now, let us enjoy post 250 for what it is – one post more than 249, and one less than 251. Look at it sitting there, all quarter-of-1000-esque in its charm and beauty.

Of course, 250 is a special number anyway. We all know there were 250 Munchkins in the Wizard of Oz (of which 4 didn’t commit suicide on set). There were 250 drafts of the script to Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, each one infinitely worse than the one before. And, of course, there are 250 days in a year, if you take away 115 other days first. It really is a special, almost magical number, which is why I feel it must be celebrated.

But how to celebrate? A party? My house isn’t big enough for all of you to come. A special plaque of some kind? No, that costs money, and I’m far too tight to spend any.

So how about a giveaway? Two giveaways, in fact?

THE GREAT 250th POST GIVEAWAY #1

You’ve probably heard about my children’s horror novel, the frankly brilliant Invisible Fiends: Mr Mumbles. Maybe you already have a copy. But do you have a signed one? Signed and dedicate to YOU? Or to someone else you know? Do you? No? Well then this is the giveaway for you.

One lucky winner (just one, mind) will win a signed and dedicated copy of the book. To enter, you just have to leave a comment on this post, making sure you include your correct email address so I can get in touch with you if you win. The comment can be anything you like, as long as it makes some kind of vague, coherent sense. No single word/single letter comments, please. Say hello. Chat about the weather. Tell me you love me (you don’t ever do that any more). Whatever. Just leave a comment and you’ll be entered into the draw. The winner will be drawn on 27th April.

THE GREAT 250th POST GIVEAWAY #2

But like I said, there can be only one winner of the signed book. For those of you who don’t win (and for the lucky so-and-so who does) I’m offering another book for you to download and enjoy for FREE!

This is one of my early attempts at writing a children’s book. It’s a comedy sci-fi adventure for 9-12 year olds, called Johnny B. Weeyerd and the Cosmic Annihilator. It has everything – aliens, super-powers, purple hot dogs – they’re all in there somewhere, waiting to titilate and excite your eyes. It’s a first draft, so it’s far from perfect, but hopefully it’s enjoyable all the same.

The file is in PDF format, so you’ll need Adobe Acrobat Reader to open it, but that comes as standard on most PCs, so you shouldn’t have any problems. You are free to download the ebook, read it, pass it on to your friends, whatever takes your fancy. Try selling it or profiting from it in any way, though, and I swear to the gods I will hunt you down and beat you with a rubber hose. Capiche?

Grab your copy of the ebook by clicking here. You might need to right click and select “Save Target As”, depending on how your browser is set up.

So that’s it for post 250. Get leaving those comments to be in with a chance of winning a copy of Mr Mumbles, and if you read JBW, be sure to let me know what you think.

On the day before the 250th blog post we’re taking a look back at the very 1st one. It was written on my mobile phone, using a tiny bluetooth keyboard, as I travelled to Glasgow to meet Kathryn Ross, who would soon after become my agent. Back then, Invisible Fiends was still called Imaginary Friends Reunited, and had yet to be sent to a publisher. I had written Beastly! for Egmont, but hadn’t yet done any of the now-too-many-to-count Ben 10 books.

I wasn’t yet engaged, my daughter, Mia, hadn’t been born, I slept more… So many things have changed since that first post, so why not remind yourself of a simpler time by reading it now?

As for today’s thing that scared me…

I’m not sure if I was ‘scared’ by this so much as sickened by it. Let’s see what it is first, and then I’ll explain why it had such a horrible effect on me.

Holy two-way communication device!

In the 1960s Batman TV show, the Gotham City Police Department elected not to summon Batman by projecting his Bat-Signal into the sky, but rather just to call him up on the Batphone, as depicted above. It’s a much more sensible option, not only because of the money saved on electricity – high-powered searchlights cost a fortune to run – but also because the Bat-Signal only works when it’s cloudy. Also, it only works at night, and since Batman battled evil during the day in that show, the Bat-Signal was all sorts of pointless.

When I was fourteen or fifteen, I had a part time job at a local supermarket. Every Saturday morning, I’d be awoken by my alarm at 5am, so I could get up and get ready to start work at 6am. Being a teenager, I had no idea 5am even existed until I started that job, and so when my alarm screeched out at me as the rest of the world slept, I often felt like crying.

It was made worse by the fact that A) the job was terrible, and B) my immediate superior – and the only other person on duty with me at the time – was a 19 year old half-wit with a curly mullet (the hairstyle I mean, not the fish). Those early Saturday mornings were among the least pleasant of my life, and it was always with a heavy heart that I dragged myself out of bed to walk – through the dark and the wind and the rain – to work.

What’s any of that got to do with the Batphone? The noise the Batphone makes when it rings is the exact noise my old alarm clock used to make when it went off. As a result, whenever I catch an episode of Batman and the Batphone rings, my heart sinks and I am transported back to those agonisingly unpleasant mornings from 17 years ago. I feel my chest tighten and my breathing begin to race, as I suffer what can only be a mild panic attack.

So that’s yer lot for the Countdown to 250. Join me tomorrow, for a special 250th blog post, on the day the winner of the first ever Author Blog Awards is due to be announced at the London Book Fair (assuming anyone can get there, what with the volcano an’ that). I’m not going to win it, obviously, but it has been fun to be in the running all the same. My money’s on Neil Gaiman, but I’ve been known to be wrong before.

Once.

A long, long time ago.

Not got much time to post tonight. Had a hectic day of stressing, worrying, panicking and eating ice cream (the last one wasn’t so bad), so going to try to get a couple of hundred words of Invisible Fiends book 4 done before heading down to watch Flash Forward.

So, very quickly, here’s your post from the archives – a five page preview of Gangrene, my comic mini-series due to be published by Markosia later this year.

And, even more quickly, let’s take a look at something else that terrified me as a child, and still gives me the heebie jeebies now…

Need I say more?

I’ve just realised I’ve made a grave mathematical error when counting the number of posts remaining until the 250th. I thought that, after today, there would be 2 more posts and then it would be the 250th. But I was wrong. After 2 more posts we will only be on the 249th. Aaargh!

Still, never one to abandon an idea, no matter how flawed it may be, I’m pressing on regardless. I’ll sneak an extra post in somewhere between now and then, so the 250th post will be the 250th post. If you see what I mean?

Anyway, I’ve combed the blog and dug out The Idea Fairy for you to look back at today. Those of you who struggle to come up with ideas for your own stories might find it useful.

And for today’s glimpse into my damaged psyche, we’re going to take a look at yet another thing that used to terrify me as a child…

SQUIRRELS!

For pretty much my entire life I have been blessed – or cursed, I often think – with a highly over active imagination. When I should be doing every day tasks – washing the car, loading the dishwasher, and so on – my mind is miles away, imagining what would happen if the car started spraying water back at me, or the dishwasher begged me not to fill its mouth with dirty plates.

It has always been the case. In any given situation I will usually imagine at least one or two bizarre things that might happen to change the situation, usually resulting in me becoming completely distracted and failing to carry out whatever task I was doing in the first place.

The first time I thought of my imagination as a curse was when I was about six or seven. I was in Aberdeen, visiting my grandmother, and was walking through a park. In the middle of the path I came across a dead squirrel. And I mean it was a really dead squirrel. It had guts poking out through its eye, limbs snapped off – it really was the deadest squirrel you can imagine.

As I looked down at the squirrel, my first thought was “That’s a shame. Poor squirrel.”

My second thought, however, was “What if it comes back to life? And jumps up and grabs me by the face, and starts clawing out my eyes?”

I then went on to picture this zombie squirrel leaping up and attacking me so clearly, that I instantly gave myself an intense squirrel phobia. Now, if I see a squirrel – even on TV – I’m reminded of that monstrosity on the path, pretending to be squashed and lifeless, but secretly lying in wait to jump up and catch the first unsuspecting child to wander by.

I may have left the park with a lifelong fear of the things, but all things considered, I reckon I got off lightly.

Continuing our countdown to the 250th blog post here on BarryHutchison.com, I’ve dug this little gem up from the archives.

An Open Letter to Wasps.

And as for today’s Thing That Used to Scare the Crap out of Me…?

This is a still from a movie produced in 1978 – the year I was born – called The Swarm. It stars British acting legend, Michael Caine, and tells the story of a swarm of African killer bees descending on a town and doing what killer bees do best.

It’s a terrible, terrible film which makes little or no sense whatsoever, but at the time it terrified me. In particular, the scene above reduced me to a blubbering mess on the floor when I saw it, aged about 9.

The child on the bed has just lost his or her parents to the killer swarm. I say “his or her” because I can’t remember whether it was a boy or a girl, and that hairstyle is kind of non-gender specific. I’m sure you’ll forgive me for not noticing the child’s gender, what with all my attention being fixed squarely on the frickin’ enormous bee flying above the bed.

What made it so scary, for me, was the fact that neither Michael Caine, nor the woman beside him could see the giant bee themselves. It was just a great big scary hallucination the boy/girl/other on the bed was having.

The entire scene was made up of A) the child weeping and howling like a maniac, B) Michael Caine shouting “There is no bee in this room!” and C) Michael Caine shouting “Reach out and touch it. Touch the bee!”, which completely contradicts what he was saying in point B. Reach out and touch the bee that isn’t there, Michael? Are you trying to mess with the poor kid’s head? He or she has just seen his or her parents murdered by African bees, it’s no time to be playing mind games.

Anyway, the kid did reach out and touch the bee, only to discover that it wasn’t actually there at all. Personally I’d have jumped up from the bed, booted Michael Caine in the groin, then legged it out the door before I got a stinger through the face, but that’s just me. The boy (or girl) in The Swarm was evidently made of sterner stuff than I.

Technically it should be “The Count up to 250″ but that just looked stupid as a post title, and I look stupid enough in my day to day life without doing it here, too.

By my reckoning (or, more accurately, by my website stats) this is the 244th post on BarryHutchison.com. Since I did nothing whatsoever to mark the 200th post, I’ve decided to do something special for the 250th post. I have no idea what it’ll be yet, but it’ll be at least reasonably good. I think. Just promise me you won’t set your expectations too high or anything, eh?

Anyway, I thought I’d start building the excitement now by having a countdown (or up, if accuracy is your thing) to post 250. Each day, for the next five days, I’ll be pointing you in the direction of one of my favourite older posts on the site.

As if that wasn’t enough, I’ll also be giving you a glimpse into my psychological make-up by revealing every day something that either scared me as a child, or scares me now. Or both, in most cases.

Today we kick off by looking back at the 100th Post Spectacular – the first (and currently only) blog milestone celebration I wrote - and by recalling the fits of sweaty panic brought on whenever I saw this man on TV in the 1980s:

Andre the Giant was a professional wrestler from Grenoble in the French Alps. He weighed 380 pounds – or 27 stone – and from what I can tell from looking online, his height ranged from 6 ft 10 in to 7 ft 5 in, suggesting he could alter it at will.

Nothing in the paragraph above was the root of my fear, though. I didn’t care how tall he was, how frickin’ enormous his arms were, or how many times he sat down heavily on Hulk Hogan’s unsuspecting face. Even as a child I was tall myself, so I knew I had nothing to fear from people who just happened to be big.

No, what scared me – what made me run upstairs crying whenever he appeared on screen – was his voice.

His voice, for those of you who have never heard it, was like the rumbling of two tectonic plates deep beneath the Earth’s crust, or the yawning of some long-dormant sea monster. It was the deepest, most resonating sound I had ever heard, and it scared the bejeesus out of me.

You know in the film Titanic, when the boat’s big foghorn thing gives that long, ominous blast after they hit the iceberg, and you know virtually everyone is going to die a horrible death? Andre the Giant could make that exact same sound just by breathing in.

What’s worse, he made those noises with a heavy French accent. To a boy from the Highlands, who had never met anyone from another town, never mind another country, this only added to the sheer, unwavering terror his voice caused inside me.

A few years later, I saw him as the lumbering, deep-voiced giant, Fezzik, in the movie The Princess Bride, and all was forgiven. Although his voice was still unrelentingly chilling, I realised he probably wasn’t going to use it to murder me with, and that – despite his repeated stamping on the face of Randy “Macho Man” Savage – it was clear he was just an unfortunately huge French bloke with a heart of gold.

Which may have played some part in him dying of a heart attack aged 46. Or it might not.

I realised this morning that BarryHutchison.com was born exactly two years yesterday. On 15th February 2008 I was on a train, heading to Glasgow, where I was due to meet up with Kathryn Ross, who I hoped would become my agent.

We spoke about the work I had been doing for Egmont, about some ideas I had, and about a little manuscript I was working on featuring a boy whose childhood imaginary friend returned seeking revenge. At the time, that manuscript went by the working title Imaginary Friends Reunited. You, of course, know it better as Invisible Fiends.

It’s an old cliché, but it does seem like only yesterday I met Kathryn. Prior to that I had tried submitting a couple of manuscripts for both adult’s and children’s novels to various publishers, with zero success. So it’s a testament to the abilities of Fraser Ross Associates that now, exactly two years later, the manuscript we discussed at that first meeting has been published by one of the world’s largest and most respected publishing houses.

Did I think when I started this blog that two years later the first book in my six-book horror series would be on the shelves? No. I hoped so, of course, but things move slowly in the publishing industry (unless Michael Jackson dies, then they’re all like ferrets up a drainpipe) so even with the best will in the world I thought we might have secured a deal by now, with publication still a long way off.

I’ve already mentioned how I owe pretty much the whole thing to Kathryn and Lindsey at Fraser Ross Associates, but my editor, Nick, at HarperCollins had a big part to play, too. There was someone else involved in the book being taken on, though. Someone I don’t give credit to often enough.

Me! I’ve always had doubts about my abilities as a writer. Now that I’ve seen my first book on the shelves, and read the positively glowing reviews it has been receiving, I’m prepared to admit that, yes, I’m actually pretty good at this whole writing lark.

Note the phrase “pretty good”.

I’m not very good. I’m nowhere near great. But I hope to be one day. I feel that every book I write is a little better than the last one. Every time I finish a story, I grow as a writer. It’s cliché time again, but practice really does make perfect. I’m working on the fourth Invisible Fiends book now, and it’s showing all the signs of being the best one in the series so far.

So yeah, I’m pretty good. One day – many years from now – I may well be great.

Hey, a guy’s got to dream, right?

To celebrate BarryHutchison.com’s second birthday, here’s a picture of me with an odd facial expression. It was taken at the launch event held at Scottish Book Trust HQ in Edinburgh recently. Thanks to Chris Newton for the photo. More to follow in a day or so.

Me and Mr Mumbles. I'm on the left.

As you might have noticed, yesterday I didn’t make a blog post, and so I have failed in my attempt to make a post every day during the month of December.

There’s a good reason why I didn’t post anything. It’s a very good reason, actually.

You see, I did write a post, but there was this dog that ate it.

No? OK then, a big boy stole it and chucked it in a puddle?

Oh, all right, the truth is I forgot. I was so caught up working on something else (something which will be revealed on Wednesday) that I just forgot to make the post.

So, that’s it, then. The mission was a failure. Disappointed as I am, though, I’m going to keep going and try to post entries every day for the rest of the month.

Fingers crossed.