Everything old is new again
February 27, 2009
You may remember that, upon selling the first book of the Wolfbreed series to Bantam, I had titled it, simply Wolfbreed. You may also recall that Bantam asked me to change the title. So, after much debate, I came up with Lilly’s Song. We’re all happy. Now, apparently some shifts in the power structure at Bantam meant that the current mucky-mucks at Bantam didn’t much like Lilly’s Song as a title. So it got changed again. To Wolfbreed.
They wanted a change they could believe in. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.
)
Jokes aside… I hear that Margaret Mitchell revised the working title of her mega-bestseller-to-be a lot of times, until the title GONE WITH THE WIND arrived. A good title isn’t easy to come up with.
No, it isn’t, I just feel weird dumping all the work I did and going with the original title. . .
Now I have even less clue what the title on #2 is going to be.
There’s this little joke I invented some time ago: the “Generic Fantasy Title Generator.” Use this handy device to randomly generate titles for books, games and films! Just combine words from the following lists into fantasy titles:
1. Subject:
HERO/ES, WIZARD, WARLOCK, ELF, HOBBIT, KING, QUEEN, ORC, UNICORN
2. Object:
RING, SWORD, DAGGER, SCEPTRE, SPEAR, STONE, JEWEL, CROWN, THRONE, CASTLE
3. Relevant Astronomical Object:
MOON, SUN, EARTH, STAR/S
4. Mood:
DARK/NESS, SHADOW, NIGHT, LIGHT, DAWN, SILVER, GOLD
5. Action:
QUEST, FALL, RISE/RISING
6. Fillers
A, THE, OF, OVER
Example: “A Dawn of Unicorns”
Or: “The Sun Dagger King’s Quest”
Or: “Fall of the Hobbit-King’s Shadowquest of the Moonsword Castle”
[...] Passed 75K on Wolfbreed 2, which means I’m very close to wrapping up the first draft of this novel. Now all I need is a new title. (Haven’t we been here before?) [...]