titles

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Wed 27 Jun 2012

Things I thought about blogging but didn’t have the energy for

Posted by PJ under blogging, lists, titles, writing
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I’ve started several blogs over the past weeks, even got quite far on some of them, but then I’ll get interrupted, or the tone is somehow off and I need to think some more, or yet another Life Thing comes up and I don’t get them posted.  So instead I’m posting a list of titles.  Heighth of laziness, yes I know, yadda yadda.  Some of these may get finished some day, but the wackyosity that is my life these days doesn’t allow me to predict when.

 

  • When is an instinct an instinct and when is it a kangaroo?
  • The League of Anti-Whining Enforcement
  • Journey around my room – The Ice Blue Madonna
  • Momentary angels
  • For Zilznia in her big, comfy chair
  • No-Code me, please
  • Love, and other fragile-enduring things
  • Poll: How do you eat your muffins? (no sexual pun intended)
  • Book review: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
  • Oh right, this is a novel not a novella
  • Jung and the active imagination

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Wed 8 Sep 2010

Which title do you like better?

Posted by PJ under time in a bottle, titles, WIP, writing
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With no context, just which appeals to you the most.

Time in a Bottle

Sympathetic Magic

Of course, neither may work for you, and if that’s the case, feel free to comment as such.

I’ll be honest. I don’t like Time in a Bottle as the title of my current WIP so I’ve been casting about for another title. It is, however, more accurate than the other title. It may be more intriguing? I dunno. That’s why I’m asking.

In other related news, I’ve been working on the opening chapter of the novel currently called Time in a Bottle. When I posted chapter one on OWW, I got two common complaints: people wanted to know more about Molly’s background and her quest sooner, as well as the specific nature of her magical gift. So I’ve been dutifully filling in her background.

If I may be frank, Frank, I had only the essentials of her character down when I wrote the exploratory first chapter. It showed. So now I’m filling in the gaps, excessively, obsessively, even including a genealogical chart. Which isn’t just about blowing hot air out my *** or wanting to make pretty! charts! Molly’s family history is vitally important to the plot of this here book, so.

But being me, I am worried that I have tipped too far into the opposite direction and am now including too much damned detail. (An old and repetitive failing.) Only time will tell, whether in a bottle or not.

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Sun 18 Jul 2010

Why you do me like that, Charlie?

Posted by PJ under a rain of angels, dos lunas, movies, names, stories, titles, venus in transit
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The heroine of my novel Venus in Transit has been named Marian St. Cloud for at least ten years, ever since I first started working on the beginning inkling ideas for the book. Now this movie comes along and I’m thinking the whole St. Cloud family of Dos Lunas might have to have their names changed. I’m not going to do that now, because that name is so entrenched in my consciousness, but I assume that everyone will assume that I stole it from the movie.

It looks like a fairly paint-by-the-numbers, dorky movie, too.

Of course, I still have to finish the read-through, the time with betas, the hardcore rewrite, then the marketing of this novel, so considerable time could elapse before even the possibility of a publisher or readers seeing it. Maybe ol’ Charlie will have faded from memory by then. Or maybe it will become a huge freaking hit, what with soulfully blue-eyed Zak Efron drawing in the sighing crowd. I don’t know.

Names and titles. They’re tricky business in the fiction game.

In other but related fictive news: Titles come to me out of the ether on a regular basis, often without a story attached. I keep a file just for those. Sometimes they’re so suggestive that I have to come up with a story to go with them. It becomes an obsession. Blood Geek was one of those. Ironically, sometimes the name that gets me to write the story becomes obsolete with the writing and has to be changed. Charged with Folly was like that. It became A Rain of Angels. Changing titles like that can be painful.

I’ve got another title that popped through the ether the other day. A drumbeat has started in the center of my body. Good stories begin in my brain, of course, but the ones which have to be written always eventually migrate to my core, to my second brain: the heart. I have no idea what this story is about, but it’s already migrated.

We’ll see what comes of that.

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