Looking ahead: NewfoundSpecFic

As always, we at Engen Books are trying to look ahead to the future, hence the slogan 'Never Look Back'. Every so often that involves looking into your own future as well. With that in mind, Engen Books is proud to announce it's plans to release NewfoundSpecFic for Spring 2009, in joint effort with local Newfoundland authors Jennifer Graham and Devon Drover.

The collaboration will feature tales of speculative fiction from some of Newfoundland's most innovative new writers, and Engen Books is proud to be a part of it.

We recently got the chance to sit down with one of the editors / creators of NewfoundSpecFic and ask him a few questions about the project.

Engen Books: How long have you been writing?
Devon Drover: Well, that's hard question to answer exactly. Even when I was nine or ten I started creating different stories. When I was nine I even tried creating stories with my all-time favorite superhero character - Batman! Eventurally when I was like eleven I started writing some stories set in this ficitonal "SUIDI" Universe, a fantasy universe of sword and sorcery inspired by Robert E Howard's "Conan the Barbarian" short-stories and JRR Tolkien's famous "Lord of the Rings" saga. These stories I've had on the go up till last year, including making a few multiplayer computer games from them, which I found pretty cool to share my loves of game design and fantasy books. Then this year I started to take it more seriously and started learning about writing and started working on Aerials - my current project, and NewFoundSpecFic - a project I'm co-founder and editor in.

EB: What first inspired you / What do you like to read and watch?
DD: Well, I guess we can date that back to my love of Batman: The Animated Series when I was very young. As a young kid I was Batman obsessed, and still am. After collecting loads of Batman comics, cartoon tapes and movies, and I started getting interested in tv shows and movies like Star Trek and Star Wars, while beginning to read alot of Robert E Howard Conan the Barbarian stories. Then from those books and shows I got interested in things like Doctor Who, Firefly, and R.A. Salvatore's great Forgotten Realms series.

EB: How did you get started with NewfoundSpecFic?
DD: NewFoundSpecFic started after both Jennifer Graham and I wanted to get published as authors. Both of us wrote alot of short stories that were ethier science-fiction or fantasy, and one day I just mentioned the idea of an anthology. Soon enough, we started planning, set up a site and got in contact with Engen Books for publishing, started accepting and stories and soon the project was off.

EB: How did Engen get involved?
DD: Originally we were going to publish it ourselves following the footsteps of other publish-yourself writers, and when thinking this I contacted a fellow writer - Matthew LeDrew. Matthew liked the idea and offered us that Engen Books could publish it - which we accepted without much hesitation.

EB: How can people get their stories in?
DD: For people interested in accutally submitting there stories, they can just go to the submission guidelines and follow the instructions. We're currently accepting submissions until the 30th of Augest - get them in!

So, there you have it! We here at Engen Books hope that this starts a long tradition of bringing you the greatest Newfoundland has to offer, not only in horror but now also in speculative fiction!