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In spring 2005, we began to publish a magazine, November Spawned. The idea was to present extracts from some of the best fantasy, sf and horror produced by people writing novels during the eleventh month of the year, aka National Novel Writing Month (see www.nanowrimo.org for details). It seemed like a great idea, because in theory all the copy would be available in December, or soon after, and we would be able to plan the year's issues in style.

However, we decided to knock it on the head after a year, for a few reasons. Inviting contributions proved a bit awkward: it was hard on one hand to be a local organiser warning participants to look out for dodgy publishers, and on the other hand to ask them to give us their writing for free! Plus, we weren't getting many submissions – I hadn't realised at the time, but quite a big proportion of NaNoWriMo participants are first time novelists, and first time novelists tend to have quite high hopes for their novels! Then I read an interview with Chris Baty, organiser of NaNoWriMo, where he talked about having dismissed the idea of publishing a magazine collecting extracts from the best works submitted as being contrary to the spirit of the event. The final nail in the coffin of November Spawned was that none of those problems applied to Theaker's Quarterly Fiction! So we decided to do two issues a year more of that publication and killed this one.

All four published issues are available to read here. Two novels are reproduced in their entirety, bearing testament to how few other submissions we got!

In 2006 and 2007 we revived the name for the novel-writing handouts distributed to Birmingham participants in the event - both handouts are available here for download.

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