Fantasy Titles

Courtesy of Orbit books:

Full Disclosure: I have a wip entitled, “Arena of the Dragons.”

Yes, “dragon” is the most common word in fantasy titles. *grin*

Here’s some other ideas for titles using these popular words (why not go with what works?):

Blood of the Death Dragon’s Shadow God
Edge of the Dark Red Zombie Wolf
Bite of the Black Elf
Angel of the Sin Spells
Queen of the Iron Dragon Fire
Map of the Rising Ghost City
Tomb of the Seeker’s Daughter
Kill the Assassin
Princess of the Silver Storm
Bound to the Witch Hunt

Cheesy? Sure! But look what happens when you try to come up with titles that don’t sound traditionally fantasy:

An Accountant’s Guide to Taxes
Things to Wear with Shoes
A Big Green Garbage Can
The Best Restaurants in South Carolina

Now, those may be great books, but if you were looking for sword and sorcery, they wouldn’t be very appealing, would they?

How about the straight-forward approach:

Dudes With Pointy Sticks Kill Each Other
A Girl Grows Up Despite Being Chased by Weird Guys in Black Cowls
Hobbits Decide to Get Foot Wax
Farm Boy Makes it Big
Glowy Magic, Big City
Lifestyles of the Rich and Magical
Generic Castle, Unwieldy Sword and Winged Reptile
Elves By Any Other Name Would Have Ears Just as Pointy

Fiction After Marriage

Romances usually build up to a climax. And you know which climax I mean. Or maybe you don’t.

The classic romantic story is about falling in love — following the ups and downs, ins and outs, togethers and aparts, of a couple as they approach physical and emotional intimacy. They may have one or the other, but until they both lust for and love each other, the romance, for the novelist, is not “consumated.”

I love romance, and I love this traditional formula for creating romantic tension and satisfaction in fiction. The formula is not just a part of the romance genre, but usually also helps structure the story arc of any genre fiction — fantasy, adventure, espionage, action, mystery. I want to emphasize also that I love genre fiction and don’t use the term “formula” as a derogative, any more than I would use the word “sonnet” as a derogative term in poetry.

As I mentioned in my post yesterday, I had a fight with my husband, whom I love. And, poor man, his foibles and mine inspired me, and I outlined a scene from Dindi Book 2.

Now, here’s one advantage of writing a book/series over a long period. This tale is a braid of several intertwined plotlines. The main story line, which I wrote first, is a Coming of Age story. It follows a fairly conventional fantasy trope of a young person coming into her power and falling in love.

Another strand of the story, however, follows another couple (a generation earlier), and though their story also starts with them falling in love, I wanted to continue to follow them after their happily ever after. That isn’t as common, though two books I’ve read recently which did do this are The Time Traveller’s Wife and Michelle’s Cinders (*cough* go buy it, *cough*). In genre, this is okay to do with secondary characters.

(After I wrote most of this post, I discovered that Courtney Milan had blogged about how to to this in the Romance genre, by having a previous hero/heroine show up in a new heroine/hero’s book.)

Since the after-happily-ever-after story is so unusual, it opens up a lot of possibilities. One choice is to make it all about falling out of love, which leads to a dismal story, unless the protagonist is saved by falling out of love with the wrong person and falling in love with the right person. But in that case, it’s really just a story about falling in love, isn’t it?

The other possibility is tragedy. Of course, in many dramatic traditions around the world, a love story is always a tragedy. You realize you love each other and are finally together — thanks to the motherlovin’ sword piercing you together like pineapples on a shishkabob! *Wipes tear from eyes. Sniffles.* So beautiful.

And so not for me. Sorry, I just don’t enjoy dramas ending in divorce or death.

So what does that leave? Comedy, as always. Almost all sit-coms are about married couples and/or families, aren’t they?

Nah, still not what I’m looking for.

What I wanted to write was the opposite of the Coming of Age/Falling in Love story, but not a simple (depressing) opposite. I wanted to write a Coming of (Older) Age/Falling (Deeper) in Love story. Dindi, the heroine, has to learn to transcend her limitations, to find her own power and to realize that the man she loves is better than she has been led to believe. Vessia, the other, has to learn to live with her limitations, to sacrifice some of her power, and to accept that the man she loves is only human.

I promise it doesn’t end with a shishkabob. I don’t promise it won’t be bittersweet.

Bad Morning

I am not having a good morning.

I’ve been working on updating my website. No big deal. I should have done it a long time ago, but I was quite busy last year. All the more reason to get it up and running before school starts.

Rrrrrrr. That is me growling. For some reason, this resulted in a big fight between me and my husband. He’s furious with me, I’m furious with him, it’s just not pretty.

UPDATE: Marital discord successfully channeled into a scene in Dindi Book 2. Woohoo! Suffering = Inspiration.

No wonder writers are prone to manic-depression.

Too Artsy?

My first born is also available for human sacrifice. Just give the word.*

When I started this blog, I had no readers, so I was free to treat it as my diary, and just jot down whatever I liked. I think I once wrote a post about swine herding in Papua New Guinea. I found it fascinating, anyway.

Now that I have huge numbers of readers (eight? twelve? depending on whether you count the people who googled for the soft porn, “Kama Sutra,” and got me instead) I have to treat it as a professional thingymabob and sound all grown-up and stuff. Agh.

The catch is, I would like to share my ongoing career (ahem) as a writer, but I’m not sure where disclosure crosses the line into unprofessional. No, I’m not going to inflict TMI about my bladder, or my cat, or my cat’s bladder. (Although if I had a cat and that cat had a bladder, you’d better believe I’d be blogging all about it.)

I have my book out on submission with a publisher I am very excited about. (And by “on submission” I only mean they haven’t rejected me yet — I have no idea how close or far I am to acceptance.) Is it a good idea to blog about how nervous that makes me? I’ve been feverishly working on (a) the sequels, (b) a promotion plan for the whole series, and (c) counting the chicks sure to hatch from those eggs in my fridge.

I suddenly panicked, for instance, about a “literary” technique I use at the end of Chapter Three in Dindi. I have a few paragraphs where I use — wait for it —Second Person. I call it a literary technique only because I don’t think you’d blink if you were reading a literary novel and a chapter or two in Second Person, or Present Tense or whatever weird shit, suddenly popped up. But will Fantasy readers be Able To Handle That? Or will they scratch their heads and go, “Huh? Why is the author talkin’ to me?”

I think fantasy readers can handle it, and I think it works. But maybe the editor will disagree and reject my book because s/he will think, “What is wrong with this author? Did she forget she was writing in Third Person Past Tense? Goddam writing n00b.” Or maybe, “Wow, how pretentious. Who does she think she is, Khaled Hosseini? Gimme a break.”

And honestly, although I’m fond of the Second Person scenes (there are only three, I swear, to emphasize three key turning points in the novel), I’m not so attached to my Second Person scenes that I wouldn’t consider dropping them. Which maybe makes me a wimp rather than an artiste, but there you have it. I’d rather have my books be accessible than artistic, but if possible, I’d like them to be both.

Any thoughts, blog world? Anything too artsy to stomach in a book? Does it depend on the genre? How much of your novel would you be willing to change if asked by an agent or editor?

* But better read the The Ransom of Red Chief by O Henry before you try. (“IT LOOKED like a good thing: but wait till I tell you….”)

Sketches of the Hero

Here I’ve attempted, rather poorly, to capture the hero, Kavio. I’m not very good at guys. Also, I still need to master the art of drawing crackling lightning.

Puddlepaws

Puddlepaws, Dindi’s kitten. Because every book should have a kitten.