Matthew Ledrew's Blog, page 47

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I didn’t write The Six Elemental with any sequels in mind. It sounds crazy to me now – that I put all this effort into creating a future world with a detailed history and never thought of another story for it (“Twenty-One”, in Sci-Fi From the Rock, was adapted from a scene that got cut early on). But, to be fair, I had doubts that I would ever finish this novel – I mean, I’d worked on it for over a decade – so the thought of writing a second was crazy.

But, on the other hand, I’d created an entire future world! Was I ready to just let it go? Surely there’s at least one more tale in there that wants to be told…

For a while I wondered if there was another story to tell… Was there something I had missed?

Then I realized that there was a secret I’d placed in The Six Elemental that I never told the reader. It’s not an obvious secret – it’s more of a secret in the personal history of one character, which explains some of their actions – but it’s there.

And maybe that’s all it takes to spark an idea. Maybe all you need is a look or a glance or a word from a character, which you realize has more weight behind it than you thought. Then you think about this character and their past and their future, and what they might have gone through or who they might have met. And scenes start forming, and characters show up, and dialogue pops into your head…

And from that one, seemingly minuscule, thing you’ve grown a whole new story.

I mean, I’ve still got to write it, but that’s a whole other kind of problem.

______

*Or maybe, if you’re one of those people who likes to plan ahead, you’ve actually inserted secrets into your stories knowing that they could become their own stories. If so, please teach me the ways of future-story-planning.

 

5 shocking / weird things about the Engen Universe

The Engen Universe — a shared fictional continuity between three different series of novels and many short stories — is host to some strangeness: monsters, demons, and unbelievable turns of circumstance. But some things about the Universe — and how it came to be — are weirder and more shocking than others! Here are the Top Five weird things about the Engen Universe, we think. [Some spoilers ahead.]

[image error]5. The Black Womb books were written out of order: Always a source of confusion for fans of the series, despite being a stickler for continuity, Matthew LeDrew has often stated personally and through his “From the Author” segments of the books, that they were written in a very different order from which they are being published and occur internally. For the record, the books starring Black Womb / Xander Drew were written in the following order (assuming the numbering continued unbroken into the Xander Drew series): 1, 3, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13. This means that the first book written was Black Womb and the latest in terms of when he wrote them was the latest book published Sinister Intent, but that some of the other books, even those not yet published, were written long ago.

4. The Infinity Series is unnumbered: Despite being only three books long with a few short stories currently, creators Matthew LeDrew and Ellen Curtis often refer to Infinity as the “flagship” series of the Engen Universe. Novels in the series are slow to emerge because of the meticulous nature of how the authors work together to craft them, but there series has been left unnumbered both to reflect the “infinite” nature of it and to allow other books to fit in between when necessary.

[image error]3. Blackheart is the only character with “shared” creator credits: Despite the collaborative nature of The Engen Universe, who created which characters and concepts is still set in stone… except for the character of Blackheart. Originally appearing as an antagonist in the fourth Black Womb novel Roulette by Matthew LeDrew, the character was adopted into the first three Infinity novels by Ellen Curtis, who took the character in such a wildly different and iconic direction that she is now credited with the creation of the character.

2. Gavin was supposed to be dead: Due to some artful phrasing at the conclusion of Ellen Curtis’ seminal short story The Tourniquet Revival, fellow Engen-creator Matthew LeDrew was left with the impression that the antagonist Gavin was meant to be considered alive — or at least that there was a loophole in the phrasing that implied he could be. He then went about planning the novel The Tourniquet Reprisal to see the characters return, while Curtis was busy with her edits of Infinity. LeDrew was long into the drafting process before Curtis alerted him to her original intent, and the two came to an agreement on the character’s use.

[image error]1. There are mysteries hinted at in Black Womb that have yet to be solved: The Black Womb series is at this point known for two things: it’s mysteries, and its tendency to pull the rug out from under its readers regarding those mysteries. Series creator Matthew LeDrew has stated that he wanted the reveals in the third book, Smoke and Mirrors, to cause readers to go back to the first novel in the series with a more critical eye, and to teach them not to necessarily trust the information he was giving them at face value. As such — and as a direct result of the books being written out of order — Black Womb and its sequels  are filled with hints and setups to mysteries that won’t be solved for years down the line. A few astute readers have picked up on this and have correctly deduced some of the intents, but several of the largest hints remain hidden between the lines.

Do you agree with our list? What are some other shocking things about the Engen Universe? Comment below!

Call of the Sea: Goodreads Giveaway Closed

Over 1,700 fans entered the Goodreads Giveaway for a copy of Amanda Labonté‘s debut novel, Call of the Sea. Two entrants have won and will be receiving their books soon!

Still more Engen novels are available at this time via the Goodreads Giveaway program, so sign up and rate your favorite Engen classics today. If you haven’t read our novels yet, add them to your “Want to Read” folder and Goodreads will notify you when the book is being given away!

Goodreads Book Giveaway


Roulette
by Matthew Ledrew

Giveaway ends April 01, 2017.

See the giveaway details

at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

 

Introducing: Supernatural Causes by Amanda Labonté

Engen Books is proud to announce the latest book in its banner 10-year anniversary 2017 lineup: Supernatural Causes by Amanda Labonté!

Described as a paranormal medical mystery, Supernatural Causes features college freshmen Liesl Andrews as she spends her days studying pre-med and her nights stitching up werewolf bites. As a human who has the rare capacity to see the vampires, werewolves and witches who live in the shadows, Liesl pays her tuition by moonlighting as a medical intern at St. Benedict’s Hospital for the Underworld. She figures she’s doing a decent job of balancing her two lives until Jax Halloran walks into the ER. Not only is he tall, dark and obnoxious, he’s also a high-ranking vampire who needs her help. A virus is threatening the vampire community and Liesl may be their only hope at finding a cure.

“We’re very excited to be bringing this into the world,” says Engen founder Matthew LeDrew. “We have a proud tradition of genre fiction at Engen Books, and it’s part of our mission statement to prove that innovative, exciting, thought-provoking fiction like these can stand up to snuff in our market.”

Supernatural Causes will start as eBook only, with the first installment being released on April 15, 2017 in time for Sci-Fi on the Rock. The series releases will be structured like an ongoing serialized television show, with a new “episode” once every two months. Each 4-episode “season” will tell a continuing story and will be collected in print and digital collections.

Look for Supernatural Causes to hit all digital formats this April, and Never Look Back!

Ana Paulin: The Cardboard Kid

To our minds, there’s no better way to celebrate International Women’s Day yesterday than to celebrate the youngest creative woman in our circle of authors! The wonderfully energetic and talented Ana Paulin, daughter of Ink’d Well Comics founder and Engen Books contributor Jay Paulin, has started a YouTube channel The Cardboard Kid to review board games: from a kid’s point-of-view!

Great work Ana! We can’t wait to see what you do!

International Women’s Day and the entrepreneurial spirit

I wrote a post on my Facebook page recognizing the business women in my life and, particularly, my mom.  I was asked to share those thoughts (with a bit more detail) here on the Engen blog. I hope you enjoy!

In honour of International Women’s Day I wanted to recognize the female entrepreneurial role models in my life, particularly my mom.

In my other day job, the one where I am not writing fiction, I own a business with my mom. We started out from almost nothing to build a business that employs over a dozen full and part-time employees (not including ourselves) and deals with over one hundred clients a day. But this isn’t a blog about our awesome business skills, this is a blog about getting a seat at the business table.

One of the most important lessons I got from my mom is that if no one will give you a seat at the table, then you need to build your own table. There are more men building tables, and often they get better seats at the table and that’s the more reason we need women to get involved. Especially minority women and women on the fringes either because of age, social standing, or other factors.

I feel like starting a business is a highly creative endeavour. And like other creative pursuits, it’s a richer experience when there’s a greater diversity of voices.

But starting a business is hard and I am not trying to make it sound easy. There are all sorts of barriers. I guess all I am trying to do is recognize the good work the women around me are doing and hope we can all support each other. Even if it’s just to say: “Good job!”

I don’t want it to be business as usual anymore, not when, if we all have a seat at the table, it can be business as extraordinary.

Writing marathons: Don’t take my word for it

I’m pretty excited about hosting a writing marathon in the St. John’s region this coming June. But while this is an easy sell for me, it may seem a little daunting for some. That’s why I decided to do an interview with writer Kaarina Stiff about her experiences with novel writing marathons.

Kaarina is a full-time writer and editor living in Ottawa, ON.  She has participated in three novel writing marathons and was the Young Adult category winner in the Toronto Novel Marathon in both 2015 and 2016. She was gracious enough to answer a couple of questions about the process so that I could share her experiences with potential participants.

Did you ever have any anxiety about participating in a writing marathon?

Absolutely, but it was the best kind of anxiety—the kind that says, “Oh jeezus, is this a good idea? I have no idea what I’m doing! But wait, it it doesn’t matter because I have absolutely nothing to lose by doing this!” I absolutely believe this is true—only good things can come from it.

Would you recommend a novel writing marathon to a new/emerging writer?

In a heartbeat. The best thing about a novel writing marathon is that it forces you to put words on paper, and to put them there quickly. They won’t all be in the right order, and many of them might not belong there in the end, but the most important thing is that you get the story idea out of your head and on to the paper so that you have something to work with.

What was your experience with the adjudication process after the marathon ended?

From the outset, it’s heartening to know that the people who judge novel marathons know that you wrote a marathon, and so they’re not expecting perfection. Knowing that mistakes are okay is incredibly liberating—you just need to get the story out as best you can. For the Toronto Novel Marathon (which is a comparatively small event), the judges gave amazing feedback on what worked for them in the manuscript, and where they saw room for improvement. Receiving their comments gave me a reason, and a path, to move forward with the stories I wrote. I was also thrilled to have won the Young Adult category in the Toronto Novel Marathon in both 2015 and 2016. Although the publisher ultimately passed on both manuscripts, they also provided incredible feedback that still left me feeling that these are stories that I can work on, and take somewhere.

What were your favorite parts about the marathon writing experience?

Two things stand out for me: focus and creative energy—especially for in-person events like the Toronto Novel Marathon. By signing up, you commit to focusing on your writing, and nothing but your writing, for a whole weekend. In the grand cosmic scheme of things that’s not a very long time, but it’s time that we never usually give ourselves to write. It’s a wonderful gift to give yourself, regardless of how much writing you normally do. And once you’re focused, there’s nothing better than being surrounded by other people who are doing the same thing that you’re doing. It’s like ideas are floating in the air all around you, and you just have to reach up and grab one when you need it. People feed off of each other’s excitement, and encourage each other to keep moving when you feel stuck.

Any negatives?

Inevitably, you hit points where you think, “Why on Earth did I invent this character?” Or worse, “This whole story is stupid.” You just need to remember that this is a completely natural response—writers go through it even when they’re not writing marathons. Since a marathon is time-bound, you just need to get over it faster. Oh, and as someone who adores sleep more than most other things, it’s an exhausting weekend. But that would never stop me from doing it again.

Do you have any advice for first time marathon writers?

Do. Not. Edit. I know that no one will follow this advice, but really—try hard not to edit while you work. When you get stuck, instead of going back to tinker with what you’ve already done, work on a different scene or chapter to keep you moving forward. You can edit later. Also, take breaks. It might feel counter-intuitive when you have such a limited time to write, but your mind will stay sharper if you give it an occasional rest (or heaven forbid, a few hours of sleep).

Anything else you’d like to add?


Have fun. If that means surviving off potato chips and cheesy popcorn for three days, then do that. It’s a wonderful thing to take a few days and do nothing but write. Make the most of it.

Kaarina Stiff is a professional writer and editor in Ottawa, ON. For more on Kaarina check out her website at onpointwriting.ca

Goodreads Giveaway: Roulette Ashcan Edition!

Goodreads Book Giveaway


Roulette
by Matthew Ledrew

Giveaway ends April 01, 2017.

See the giveaway details

at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

We’re giving away 5 copies of the Roulette ashcan edition this month! Enter via Goodreads by clicking the link above!

Make Time to Read | My Writing Process | Distractions

[image error]One of the oldest clichés when it comes to writing advice is that if you want to write, you need to make time to read and you need to read a lot. I will confirm: yes, yes that’s absolutely true.

It’s entirely subjective evidence, but I find in my own life that when I do hit the rare dry spell writing, I’ve also hit a similar dry-spell reading. Perhaps life is just getting in the way too much. Perhaps I’m reading a particularly lengthy book that I’m not enjoying as much as I’d like and is “bottlenecking” my desire to get back to things. Or perhaps I just find myself seeking other, less engaging forms of media that week. (I enjoy games, the Lego games especially).

All that is fine as a temporary issue, but if you don’t have the discipline to finish a book, how do you expect to have the discipline to… well… finish a book? But it’s more than that. It’s a creative muscle that you’re flexing when you read, and it’s informing how and how well you write. I’ll attempt to break down my experience and the pseudo-science behind it.

“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.” — Stephen King, On Writing.

Reading — and writing — are both global processes. By which I mean, when at their best, they are using both the right and left hemispheres of the brain. Reading a book isn’t a simple one-action, it’s a complex series of actions that is going on within you: there’s the actual act of reading and understanding the symbols representing language before you, but also the picturing of what you’re seeing. These pictures are both drawn from memory and imagined whole-cloth by you. There is also a predictive nature to reading, when you’re unconsciously noticing the patterns taking place in the plot and story and using it to predict where that story is going. These predictions and then mitigated and adjusted with each new sentence — each new bit of patterned information — you receive. With all this going on, it’s amazing people say they’re just going to “relax and read a book,” because it takes a lot of work.

That act of picturing what you’re reading, that is a creative act. When you read, you are as much the creator of the story as the author. That’s a part of the reason there can be so many varying interpretations of the same work, and all of them be valid: the author is only doing half the work, the other half is up to the reader. When I read Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov or Taking Stock by Scott Bartlett, neither give me descriptions of the narrator: these things are left up to the reader, and you don’t notice because your mind fills in these things automatically. You, the reader, created them from nothing: and your creation affects how you view the story. When I create the image of Humbert Humbert in my mind he’s not the dashing handsome man from the film adaptations of Lolita, he’s a sick old man who thinks he’s such. He’s deluded. I brought that to the table. Would it stand up to critical analysis? Absolutely not, there’s no basis in the text for it: but nevertheless, it affects how I read the story.

So let’s accept that you’re creating the story as much as the author. Great. So you’re excersizing those creative muscles that you’re going to use when writing, but it’s more than that: you’re also learning patterns. Lots of patterns, all of them. The human brain is astonishing at seeing patterns: it may be our most advantageous attribute. It’s how we do everything: we’ve learned the pattern for work, for play, for gaming. Everything. When you read you are learning — on some level — that author’s pattern. If you’re reading Stephen King, you have learned Stephen King’s pattern. But it isn’t a perfect copy, it’s filtered through your lens. Now, if all you ever read was Stephen King, then your writing may well come out as a sort of King-clone, as a lot of work does, him being so prevalent. So the goal would be to read as much as possible from as many different sources as possible, so that you see these different patterns and they all merge together in you, to form different ways your story can be told and your plot can progress. The new patterns is part of the reason i love reading indie books lately: I’ve noticed that the big-publishing house process of bringing a book to print — and deciding which books get printed — have a way of ironing out the patterns and making them a bit too uniform. I get more “new input” from reading indie.

Have you ever known the plot twist of a movie or book long before any of your friends could see it… sometimes before you can even explain why you see it? Congratulations, your brain is a extremely finely-tuned pattern-recognizing machine, so much so that (when it comes to fiction) you border on the precognitive. You’re ready.

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To all the gamers out there, you should get this part of pattern recognition: have you ever played a boss from the 16-bit era? They usually move in a fairly set, recognizable pattern, right? Your job as the player is the recognize that pattern and slip past it, to get into the gaps and force the pattern to change by hitting the boss. That’s what you’re doing when you write. Readers, have you ever been reading and gotten to a point where the author makes a choice your brain doesn’t like, and you go: “Here’s how I would have done that”? That’s the reading equivalent of seeing through the bosses pattern and jumping in for the strike. Your mind has made the logical leap from going along with the author to creating all on its own: you’ve consumed enough material, it’s time to play with the big kids and create something all your own.

The FINAL Fantasy from the Rock author announced!

The wait is over! The eighteenth — and final — author to join the cast of 2017’s Fantasy from the Rock is…

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Christopher Walsh! Christopher Walsh is an epic fantasy author from Brigus South, Newfoundland. His fantasy series, The Gold and Steel Saga, is one of the most ambitious works in the fantasy genre to ever come out of the province: an series of mammoth volumes that tell stories grand in scope in the prose style of Tolkien and Martin while promoting feminism and the fight for equality. In supplement to the planned seven novel series, Walsh pens short fiction to further flesh out his world. Last years From the Rock collection introduced the world in “Stealing Back Freedom” to much fanfare. This year Walsh brings with him two new stories set in the Gold and Steel Universe.

As a powerful voice in the Fantasy genre in Newfoundland, Walsh joins Heather Reilly (Binding of the Almatraek series) as the all-star authors of the Fantasy from the Rock collection, lending their talents and their extensive casts of characters to share the stage with our newer authors to promote exceptional young talent and give their voices a chance to be heard.

Engen Books would like to thank Christopher Walsh for his generous contributions to this year’s collection!