Tuesday 15 February 2011

Subtitles

"Hang on to me and I'll hang onto you..." -Carbon Leaf, Deep Blue Sea


No, not the kind you're thinking of. They kind that come after a colon in a book title, preferably to help delineate the chunks a longer-than-one-book story has been broken into. Like Dragonlance: Dragons of Spring Dawning. Or Somethingvaguelyhauntingandprofound: A novel. Depending on your genre preferences.

Anyway, awhile ago (months, really. I should have posted this long before. Mea culpa.) I came up with working subtitles for the four parts of Soulwoven. I'll share them in a moment, but the interesting thing that came out of the subtitles is that they are helping me immensely in focusing the books. The more I tell of Soulwoven the more it tries to do what epic fantasy inevitably does---sprawl out and out and out, and the more picky I have to be about choosing which stories to tell and which to leave untold. The subtitles remind me of the themes I'm working with. They help me decide which episodes should begin and end the book-length chunks of the story I'm writing. This is not a development I predicted. I simply decided one day that if I wanted to maintain any sort of control over the titling of what would eventually be four or more books, I ought to make a real attempt to title them. The focus was just a happy side effect.

I share this in the hope that somewhere out there someone will read it and think "Aha! That's what I need!"

It may not be true. Or it may. But either way it's worth noodling.

And oh yes, the (working) subtitles are:
Soulwoven: Exodus
Soulwoven: Exile
Soulwoven: Redemption
Soulwoven: Brotherhood


I like 'em. Someday it will prove interesting to see if a marketing department does too. :-)