I am delighted to welcome fellow writer Vincent Holland-Keen to guest blog today. Vincent is the author of one of my favourite fantasy books ‘The Office of Lost and Found‘ – one I described when it came out as “gloriously confusing” back when it came out – and with his new novel ‘Billy’s Monsters‘, he has created yet another fantastic world of the fantastical… or something. It’s brilliant. That’s enough for you to go out and buy it. Here, Mr Holland-Keen discusses monsters…

 How to Make a Monster*

While I have nothing against metaphors in general, I will admit to being a little disappointed whenever a titular promise of monsters delivers a story that’s simply about people being horrible. While it’s true that people can be horrible in many and varied ways, I believe there’s an argument to be made that humans as a species are overused in literature. We’re too familiar with the whole head, arms, legs thing.

Chins? Cliché.

Noses? Passé.

Elbows? A trope we would do better consigning to the past.

This is why I’m happy to report that my novel Billy’s Monsters contains actual monsters. Tentacles, claws, snapping mandibles and giant green eyes all make an appearance.

Now, when I started writing Billy’s Monsters, I had a paperback compendium of monsters to hand as well as Google. Humanity’s accumulated knowledge and creativity regarding unnatural beasts was at my fingertips. This is why the tripoderoo (http://www.mythicalcreatureslist.com/mythical-creature/Tripoderoo) gets a mention early on*. After that… well, turns I don’t play well with others’ imagination. Recycling monsters other people had come up with didn’t feel like the writerly thing to do (the writerly thing to do always being: make shit up).

So I started making shit up. I made up the Moltswyrm and the Jaqissi, the Ralikibh and the Öçunbr’k (no I don’t know how you’d pronouce that either). The Red-Winged Gnossauria was a particular favourite, as was the D’Courcey Prowler, though technically I first name-checked that one in my previous book, ‘The Office of Lost and Found’.

I learned two key points from this exercise:

- Coming up with suitable names is hard. It involves much staring at a keyboard and trying out combinations of letters to see how they roll across the tongue. Does that syllable sound suitably sinister? Does it suggests a scaly specimen or one composed entirely of sputum? Eventually I ended up using a site that took English words and scrambled them up according to various rules – http://www.wordconstructor.com/index.php. Extensive trial and error was still involved.

- There are only so many times you can describe tentacles, claws and snapping mandibles before you realise that variety is the spice of life and one imposing hunk of scales and deadly appendages reads much the same as another. Sometimes the name on its own with little by way of further description is a simple way to trick the reader’s imagination into filling in the gaps with their own twisted imagery, and sometimes you just have to create a bat-winged flying grub that farts smoke.

Having said all that, I should also concede that Billy’s Monsters does also include human beings. In fact, you could make the claim that the monsters are really the supporting cast to Billy, Scarlett and Hester, three young people who are merely three young people sharing traits common to every subject of the human condition; they have hopes and dreams, fears and nightmares, but also a shared inability to launch javelin-like spears from their rumps like super-sized porcupines.

Next time I will have to try harder.

* – The film that inspired the title for this post is actually available on Youtube – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dn0XIINjVlg (discovered via the video for Iron Maiden’s ‘The Number of the Beast’ – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsmcDLDw9iw).

** – No, it wasn’t something I’d heard of either, but it has three telescopic legs and a long snout it uses to fire deadly clay pellets at its prey. Clearly cool enough that it deserves to be better known. My contribution to the canon on this creature: ‘also plays frisbee’.