Matthew Ledrew's Blog, page 54

What is Call of the Sea?

Wondering what one of the newest Engen titles, Call of the Sea by Amanda Labonté, is all about, let the wonderful author tell you in her own words!

Advance Praise: “A mysterious figure in the ocean, a suspicious loss in the waves, a riveting treasure hunt, and surprise after surprise, how could anyone not want to read this novel?” ~Alice Kuipers, author of 40 Things I Want to Tell You and Life on the Refrigerator Door.

“Call of the Sea is a vividly imagined novel of folk lore and legends smoothly mixed with realistic, colourful characters of an East Coast village. Amanda Labonte’s paranormal coming of age story effortlessly lifts you along with Alex’s journey to the brink of suspended disbelief…” ~BR Myers, author of Asp of Ascension and Girl on the Run.

Call of the Sea, as well as all Engen titles, are available online or through Broken Books at the same price we charge person-to-person. Check them out today! If we don’t have the title you want on hand, let them know and we’ll be sure to make it available.

Amanda Labonté named WANL Treasurer

Engen Books would like to congratulate one of our newest authors,  Amanda Labonté, on being named to the Writer’s Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador’s Board as Treasurer!

Amanda’s premier novel, Call of the Sea, will soon be available through Engen Books, with sequels planned for 2018 and 2019.

She divides her time between writing, co-running a thriving business, raising two wonderful children with her husband, and now her WANL duties.

Congratulations Amanda!

Engen Books available at Broken Books!

Sci-Fi from the Rock 2016

As a part of our buy local / support downtown initiative, Engen Books will now be available at Broken Books, the trendy coffee bar and bookshop of downtown St. John’s! Broken Books is a bookstore that offers up hand-brewed coffees and teas, baked goods, and quality books and magazines from some of the finest publishers around! Located at 183A Duckworth Street, right next to the War Memorial, it’s a perfect place downtown to chill out, grab a coffee and a snack at Fixed Coffee, and start your next favorite book. it’s open from 11am-7pm daily.

Because of limited space, Engen will be rotating the titles in stock. This month it’s this year’s surprise classic Sci-Fi from the Rock, featuring the prequel to The Six Elemental by Ali House, as well stories by Sam Bauer, Gold and Steel‘s Chris Walsh, Matthew LeDrew, Erin Vance, Jennifer Combden, renowned Canadian sci-fi legend Kenneth Tam, award-winning author Scott Bartlett, Tara Murphy, Jay Paulin, Melanie Collins, and the premiere story by both Matthew Daniels and Peter J. Foote, and much more! Not to be missed!

The collection is on sale at Broken Books now for $20, the same price as here on the Engen website and at our table! With the same amount of money you can support two great local businesses, have a great collection of new fiction, and feel good about your purchase! Pick one up today, and stay tuned to Engen Books as we announce future titles coming to Broken Books!

St. John’s Mayor encourages consumers to “think local”

Sci-Fi from the Rock 2016

After the closure announcements of four different staples to downtown shopping this week, including Ballistic, Biped, Healy’s Deli and Templeton’s, the Mayor of St. John’s spoke out in a rallying cry to consumers this holiday season and beyond.

“It’s very unfortunate that [these] businesses have closed their doors, and in many ways it’s a reaction to the economic slow down that we are going through,” said Mayor O’Keefe.

O’Keefe went on to recognize the growing trend to do shopping online or at big box stores, commenting that shopping at venues such as these has siphoned money from local retailers.

This speaks to a trend that Engen Books has commented on before. Buying local keeps money in our local economy instead of sending it away: $20 spent online only does on person good, whereas $20 spent locally can have a ripple affect that provides for many people, and is part of the reason we have encouraged shoppers to take advantage of more local and non-box store options, such as Boom IT, Mirth Publishing, Midnight Tailors, and yes, Engen Books.

In a further statement, O’Keefe mirrored that ‘think local’ sentiment: “We can lessen that, we can minimize that, all of us together, if we shop more locally… In particular we advocate for the downtown because our downtown is very, very unique, very vibrant. We do what we can as a city and as a council to keep it in a condition where it’s filled with vitality.”

One such location downtown ideally located is Broken Books, a great alternative to big box book buying. It’s right next to the War Memorial and Fixed Coffee, great place to stop and do a little holiday shopping.

Read the full article on CBC here.

 

Standing Tall, A Daughter’s Gift by Jacqui Tam | Other Indie

[image error][image error]A Daughter’s Gift is a 2010/12 (depending on the edition) IPPY Award-winning memoir written by the acclaimed and accomplished Jacqui Tam. It chronicles the life of her father, Richard Joseph Barron, and his struggle with Alzheimer’s Disease, as well as she and her family’s coming to terms with it. It is unique in that it can be read as a memoir from two points of view: both as Tam’s account of her father’s illness and as a posthumous memoir of the man himself, preserving the memories of this great man in a way his illness, sadly, prevented him from doing.

Tam writes: Richard Joseph Barron had sailed the world over, fought in war, and returned home to Newfoundland to raise three children with his beloved wife. His life had been full of adventure, and he shared his stories without malice or ego, whenever he was asked. Until they were stolen from his memory. When ‘Dick’ Barron fought Alzheimer’s, awareness of the disease was still limited. He knew that he was forgetting, but not why. His family knew that he was disappearing, but not how. Yet beneath the shadow of that slow tragedy, the spirit of his life was not lost. Emerging from the darkness, his daughter learned an important truth: what the mind forgets, the soul remembers.

Memoirs are difficult to review. Discussions of plot, character, development, and closer all go out the window immediately: life doesn’t have those things, although I will argue that it’s obvious that Tam took great pains in arranging the scenes and moments in such a way to best convey her message to the reader. What a memoir does have in common with other literary work is style, composition, and execution: all of which Tam has in excess. No scene or emotional event is given too much time, or too little. The exact right amount of gravity is put on each event in Barron’s illness and his family’s struggle, meaning that each note hits home perfectly. This book can be emotional, and I did become emotional reading it, but Tam never manipulates: she’s not presenting the world in a certain way to elicit an emotional reaction,  she’s presenting the world exactly as it is, and that in and of itself presents the reaction.

It is at times uncomfortable, as Tam pulls no punches with regard to putting you right there in her living room while her father bore the brunt of this ravenous disease.

In revisiting this wonderful book to write this article, I am at the very least filled with some measure of hope through the heartache presented here: in the years since the publication of A Daughter’s Gift, there have been great strides made in Alzheimer’s research. We now know about the musashi protein, a protein which actually causes memory erosion, proving that forgetting is an active process, rather than the lapse of an active process as we long thought. An active process can be thwarted, maybe.

So there’s hope.

I love taking the Freudian method of dream analysis and applying it to literature. Quick/Dirty rundown: you take the part of the book that bothered you the most, then spin the analysis so that that is what the book is about. At least, what it’s about for you.

What ‘bothered’ me about A Daughter’s Gift should be immediately apparent: the thought of losing my memories, and my sense of self, to something I can’t fight or control is immensely terrifying. Preserving those memories is what this book is all about. It’s on every page, in every line, and felt in every tear.

This book is a must read for anyone who has been touched by Alzheimer’s disease or anyone who is in dire straights and needs to be reminded of the amazing nature of the human spirit. It is one of those books that, if you haven’t read it, you simply aren’t complete.

[image error][image error]I should also mention that a second book in Tam’s Standing Tall series, Twenty-One Days in May, was released two months ago. It deals with the death of Tam’s mother, Mary Louise Barron, after a twenty-one day battle with cancer.

Both books are available in print and electronic formats from Iceberg Publishing by clicking either cover on this page. I encourage anyone and everyone to try this wonderful, emotional books and be all the better for the experience.

 

‘Other Indie’ is a recurring series of articles on Engen Books in which authors highlight the best in independent publishing, in the hopes of helping readers break through the cluster of books they may not be sure about in an age when anyone can publish via digital formats. Engen Books is an independent small-press publishing company based in St. John’s Newfoundland and is proud to highlight the talent of independent authors not our own. A Daughter’s Gift is © 2010 Jacqui Tam. Twenty-One Days in May is  © 2016 Jacqui Tam. This review is © 2016 Matthew LeDrew.  ‘Other Indie’ banner photo credit: Steve Lake.

Kevin Kendall appearance today! | Black Womb artist

Join Kevin Kendall, artist on the amazing international cover for Black Womb by Matthew LeDrew and Song of the Mockingjay by Erin Vance, in Stephenville today from 11 am to 4 pm at the Kindale Library.

“Set up in the Library Boardroom – just to your right when you enter the Kindale Library,” reminds Kendall via Facebook.

Local artists from Bay St George Artists’ Association will be displaying original art for sale at fabulous prices — from small to large in size and just in time for the Christmas season.

There will be over 75 creative pieces of original art for sale, representing all mediums: oil , acrylic , watercolor , photography and mixed mediums .

“We look forward to seeing you there!” — Kendall.

WorldBuilding Step #1: Destroy the World!

It was early in the year 2000, and I was standing in my aunt’s kitchen, trying to destroy the world. No, I wasn’t having a premonition about all the terrible things that would happen in 2016, I was trying to come up with a new world to write about.

See, I had friends who were writers, and they were writing about these crazy, complicated futures, with technology and people with amazing powers. Meanwhile, I was writing about assassins in present day. As much as I liked the story I was writing, I also wanted to write about people with cool powers, so I decided to push myself to come up with an interesting new world.  Not an alien world, but an Earth that was different from the one we had now.

For some reason (I forget why), I wanted to avoid big cities. If I was destroying the world, maybe I could do it in a way that smashed the land into bits, and the biggest pieces left over were the size of small cities. Then these islands could be grouped together based on proximity, and joined by overseas highways, and people could travel between them!

But it would be difficult to build up all these new cities if the entire world had been smashed to pieces, so maybe I should keep one large bit intact. Then, once the remaining people had recovered from the huge war that had decimated their world, they would have the resources to go out and build up the islands for habitation.

Yes… this could work…

So I moved on to creating characters and stories, not realizing that there was more that I should probably take into account.  In my defense, the internet in the year 2000 was nowhere close to being the resource it is today.

Years later I found a worldbuilding website and skimmed through their check-list.  The good news is that even though I hadn’t consciously thought about agriculture or climate, a vague idea was there in the back of my mind.  When I actually thought about those features and the reasons why things were the way they were, it gave me a better idea of what kind of world my characters were living in, and it made the world more tangible.

Also I’m able to justify why this world still has beer and Hawaiian pizza.

Priorities.

_____________

Websites that I found helpful:

30 Days of WorldBuilding
Fantasy Worldbuilding Questions

Call of the Sea Bookiversary

Today marks the one year anniversary of the release of Call of the Sea. This is my first novel, so the learning curve was steep but the process was very fulfilling but the journey of getting from my laptop to the store shelves was a long one.

I started writing Call of the Sea about eight years ago and I had no idea what I was doing. It took six years to write and submit to a publisher. Then it took another year for the publisher to get it to print. Then, eight months in, the publisher went out of business.

But everything happens for a reason, and that’s where Engen Books comes in. They not only took over the publication of Call of the Sea, but also the follow up novels in the series (coming out in April of 2018 and 2019).

So while there have been many twists and turns in the road so far, I am thrilled with how things are going right now and I am really excited to be working with all the awesome people at Engen Books.

Hanging out at my first signing – a wonderful/terrifying experience.

Just read ‘Flight from Dodge’… now what?

[image error][image error]So you’re reading Sci-Fi from the Rock you just read Flight from Dodge, the preview to the first book in the cyberpunk satire series Out of Dodge by Scott Bartlett, and you’re wondering: what happens to Carl next? Where does the story go from here? Where can I get the rest of the series?

Fear not, “Flight from Dodge” was merely the first small snippet of a multi-volume work that will keep you interested for the foreseeable future. The first two novels in the series, Flight or Fight and Craven New World, are both available now, with more on the way!

[image error][image error]Taking place in the city of Dodge, a governmentless, anarchic place where everything is run by private corporations, everybody hates their job, and everybody works to get on a plane to the “New World”, a place of peace and plenty. Early in the novel, the main character, Carl Intoever, is told he is the messiah of the only religion -that being Probabilism- and as such, is labelled “Schrodinger reborn.” The novel then chronicles his change from being desperate to “get out of Dodge” so he may fulfill his destiny in the new world to that of taking on the corrupt establishment of Dodge at great personal risk.

 

[image error][image error]For daring to oppose the ruling corporations, Carl is shackled and escorted aboard one of the horrific prison barges – vessels designed to break those considered problematic by Dodgian society. Carl decides he will not be broken. Instead, he starts building a rebellion on the high seas. The barge captains are merciless, however, and if Carl isn’t careful, he might just get his lifelong wish: to live in the New World…

Craven New World is the second book in the Out of Dodge dystopian satire trilogy. If you like fast-paced fiction that paints a picture of a bleak but recognizable future, while making you laugh at the same time, then you’ll love this captivating series from a multi-award-winning author.

Get your copy today to find out what happens next in the breathtaking Out of Dodge series!

Get to know Paul Carberry, author.

Paul Carberry, with daughter.

There have been several new faces around Engen Books lately, as we’ve been signing on new talent prepping for our 10 year anniversary celebratory year. You may have also noticed the return of creepy, unsettling imagery to the mastheads of the Engen Press websites, something largely unseen since the Black Womb series ended several years ago. Both these things have one thing in common: Engen Books signing on Paul Carberry, iconic Newfoundland thriller author of the Zombies on the Rock series.

Carberry started his series in 2015, but by the end of 2016 had moved it to the Engen Books publishing company, which allows him freedom to write and get him book to a more diverse area of the province and country.

But who is Paul Carberry? Get to know him in his first Engen Interview!

1. What is your favorite word?

Paul:  My favorite word is ‘zombie.’ I hear anyone say that word and I know that I could talk to that person for hours. For me it’s a connection to a lot of friends.

2. What is your least favorite word?

Paul: My least favorite word is ‘cancer.’ It’s just a horrible thing when you hear somebody say it unless you hear a story about how they beat cancer, but unfortunately you never hear that enough.

3. What is your favorite movie?

Paul: “Jaws. It’s a timeless movie that still keeps me terrified of the ocean.”

4. What is your favorite book?

Paul: “Dead City by Joe McKinney or The Odyssey by Homer”

5. What was the last book you read for pleasure?

Paul: “Last book I read for pleasure was Sci-Fi From the Rock. It’s awesome seeing all the talented writers on display under one cover. Looking forward to being a part of that soon.”

6. What are you currently working on?

Paul: “Currently working on Zombies on the Rock Book 2: The Viking Trail”

7. How did you get involved with Engen?

Paul: “Met at Atlanti-Con this year and I was fortunate enough to meet Matt there. Things just fit together like a puzzle.”

8. What is your favorite Engen Book?

Paul: “Black Womb by Matthew LeDrew. I picked it up at Atlanti-Con 2 and it inspired me so much it got me to write met own novel. I absolutely love the atmosphere created in that novel.”

9. What (professionally) would you most like to accomplish?

Paul: “My dream goal for writing would be to have to be winning a Bram Stoker award for horror.”

10. What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?

Paul: “I’d love to be a quarterback in the NFL. It would be a dream come true for me.”

11. What profession would you not like to do?

Paul: “A cemetery care taker because I’d have myself to afraid to go to work.”

12. What’s Next?

Paul: “What’s next for me? That’s a great question. As a writer get my second book completed. As a member of the Canadian Armed Forces I’d like to become an officer.”