40 WEEKS OF ME-Week 12, Title Trauma

As you can tell by my oh so inspired blog post titles, especially the aptly named 40 Weeks of Me, I have difficulty coming up with titles. I'm always in awe of those books where the title perfectly reflects the content of the book making it unforgettable.

I don't have this particular skill...title maker.

I thought it would be fun to share some of my amazing sparks of creativity. A little background first. I told you about my first writing endeavor. My horror story HOUSE. After horror I moved into the romance novel phase. This was the 80's... Bodice rippers and Fabio.

I spent my teens lusting over any book which had Fabio on the cover because I knew the best authors had him for a model. LaVyrle Spencer, Julie Garwood, Johanna Lindsey were my favorite authors in high school because they knew how to make me laugh. Each book had an element of funny that made reading these books an escape from the daily grind. I still have my collection in storage, and I'll never give them up.

I LOVE HISTORICAL ROMANCE!

These authors inspired my historical romance writing phase. I didn't have titles for those books. I just named them after the characters. Mara and Kiwani, Mac and Eliza, Gabriella and Jace. I wrote these in high school. Nobody read them but my mom. My biggest fan, lol.

I have those stories in hard copy form because my computer died in 1994. I thought I'd transferred them onto floppy disk, but I can't find it. Remember kids, always back up your work.

The next few stories, I wrote in college. I never actually finished. They're in various stages. Some are a couple of chapters and others are upwards of 120,000 words, but incomplete: 5149 and a half, Death, Equal, Jericho David.

Psychic Journey- this title was a play on words because the main character was psychic and her name is Jurnee, ha! I talk about how I came up with this idea in an earlier post if you're interested.

Emerald Ocean- this is a fantasy. No elves, but I have a magic sword and a psychic creature which may or may not be a dragon. Since I never finished the book, I haven't had to decide. I want to add a scifi twist to this one, and I'm still working on it off and on. The world building got a bit too info dumpy. I need to streamline and condense it.

Stink- horror, which has a toilet facilitated suicide. It is everything the title implies. I will finish this one after I revise the beginning chapters because I love the cast of characters. Unfortunately, I had a head-hopping habit with this story. I didn't know better back in the day.

Psyche's Redemption, I went back to my romance roots with this one, and I finished it, ha! I later changed the title to Dying For A Kiss. I know, I know ...

I have many more, but they're even more ridiculous so I'll end it here. So, how do you come up with a kick ass title? Is there a trick to it? If so, please share. I'm desperate for help.

Psychic Journey-Revisted

So, I finished the first draft of JUJU’S Child (74,000 words), which is fantastic since for the last week, I've been fighting off some sort of ICK. I’d pulled on my big girl pants and had the flu shot back in October even though needles make me queasy, so I refuse to say that I’ve been down with the flu. That would negate the whole braving the flu shot thing. Regardless, of what I caught, it sucked me into a weird fever dream in which I was a cross between Laura Croft and Indiana Jones. Pretty cool dream—find the mystery artifact (which I never found) and kick the butts of the evil bad guys (which I kicked hard). I woke up in a pool of sweat since my fever broke and thought, whoa, didn’t I write something like this once.

I began PSYCHIC JOURNEY (silly title, so says the hubby) after graduating from college with a BA in Anthropology. I had also just gotten married, so I put grad school on hold to get some real world experience in my field of choice. For about a month, I worked for a Consulting Archeologist as he excavated a site in the Folsom, CA hills. The site was composed of prehistoric Native American artifacts: arrow heads, basalt and chert flakes, bedrock mortars, burned animal bones. The historic portion of the site was a ranch-building complex built in the 1850’s and destroyed by fire.

The rolling hills looked glorious in the spring. The wildflowers bloomed. Rattlesnakes basked on blue-green rocks. The dig site had been surrounded by a wire fence to keep out the roaming cows and horses, but the babies would stand by the fence and watch us as we worked. The place tapped into a part of my soul that believed in magic and my creativity flowed.

So did my nose. I have really bad allergies and I felt much like I did this weekend. Miserable. My dream job and I couldn’t enjoy it. Allergies stamped out my dream of being an Archeologist and once I finally gave in and accepted the fact that I would be a much happier, snot-free person if I worked indoors, I began working on a way to capture the feeling of being on a dig, particularly that dig.

Psychic Journey is the story of a Jurnee Fontaine, Consulting Archeologist who finds a rare artifact during her dig in the Folsom Hills. She accidently taps into the lines of magic traveling through the site and is transported back in time to 1868. With her knowledge of the future destruction and death of the inhabitants of the ranch in the same year that she finds herself in, Jurnee must somehow alter the course of history, or lose those she has come to love.

I loved this story when I started writing it. I love it now fifteen years later. The problem is that it is already 104,000 words and I never completed it. But, that darn fever gave me an idea. An idea that keeps wiggling in my brain and growing bigger….I have a new project to work on while Juju’s Child is being edited by the critique partners. YAY!!! I’ll keep you posted.