Never Judge a Book By Its… Title.
A friend sent me this link to an article at the Awl in which four literary writers talk about their reactions to editorial title changes. An example, from author Suzanne Morrison re her book Yoga Bitch:
A lot of writers think their editors are crazy when they try and change their titles, but I didn’t. I knew exactly what she was talking about, because I had been worrying about the same thing. In writing the story as a book, deeper themes emerged that hadn’t been present in the play; fear of death, yearning for faith, the hunt for something real. I was as worried as my editor that these more earnest aspects of the book would confuse or disappoint readers looking for a light, edgy, sardonic tale. I imagined a woman in skinny jeans and halter top reading about my secret yearning for God and faith and throwing the book underfoot to poke holes in its cover with her stiletto heels: I was promised bitchy! This isn’t bitchy!
::waha:: I have to confess, I had the same worries about The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms — which, As You Know, Bob, was once called The Sky God’s Lover. Back when I first came up with that title (12-ish years ago), I was worried. It was meant to be a double-/triple-entendre (there are two sky gods, and three lovers; it’s a reference to the Gods’ War being a lovers’ quarrel), but I feared that it would a) make SFF readers dismiss it as romance, which would be easy since even my full name could do that, and b) make romance readers angry because it wasn’t romance. I imagined a woman in practical flats throwing the book underfoot and declaring, I was promised a lover! What’s this polyamorous shit? And why do two of the lovers hate each other? And so on. I imagined the stomped-upon book then being sniffed at by a sneaker-wearing man who wouldn’t even bother to pick it up: Oh, my. I believe that novel might be… girly. He’d then walk off in a huff.
Still, it was the best title I could come up with, so I ran with it. The original titles of all three novels were The Sky God’s Lover, The Bright God’s Bane, and The Broken God’s Get. And I’d labeled the trilogy as a whole a somewhat hippieish “Earth and Sky”, though I was waffling between that and “the War of Earth and Sky” because I thought fantasy trilogy titles needed more words. (OK, not really. I was actually just trying to capture the feel of old-school epics, a la “the Epic of Gilgamesh” and “the Sundiata Cycle”. But also, I thought it needed more words.)
When the book sold (the first book was finished when I sold it; was still working on the next two), my editor let me know they might need to do a name change, for the exact reasons that I’d worried about: the title made it sound like something it wasn’t. I wasn’t privy to the discussions about the title between Orbit’s folks; I gather it was a joint discussion among several people. But then my editor asked me how I felt about The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, which had been suggested by Orbit’s publishing director, Tim Holman. I fricking loved it; it solved so many of the problems of the old title! But it also carried some baggage of its own. I pointed out that the story wasn’t really about the kingdoms, after all; there was a reason I wanted the gods mentioned in the title. “The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms” is just the name of the world — a la “the Entire” of Kay Kenyon’s “The Entire and the Rose” quartet, just a grandiose name for “everything under the sun” — which readers would only realize once they started reading the book. I also worried that the new title would obscure the breadth of the tale, making it sound more small-scale than it is: a story about the kingdoms of humankind, rather than the way humans navigate in a universe of gods. I envisioned a reader of indeterminate gender stomping on the book with cherry-red Doc Martens and shrieking, I was promised kingdoms! Where are the other 99,998?
Amusingly, it did get that reaction from a few readers, though not nearly as many as I’d feared. Many more told me that the very reason they’d picked up the book was because of the title — not because it promised numerical kingdomy goodness, but because of its grandiosity and the implication of great scale. It’s impossible for any fantasy novel to focus on a hundred thousand kingdoms, or anywhere near that many — so most readers who picked it up seem to have correctly intuited that the story was about something more than just kingdom-level politics.
Retitling the other two books in the series was a given after that; the original titles had all been meant to go together, since they fit the whole “the something-god’s something” pattern. So since the folks at Orbit had hit it out of the park with the first book, I gave them carte blanche to come up with whatever they wanted for books 2 and 3. I did suggest some titles — trying to play on the “the something-number of nouns” pattern, I experimented with The Million Shadowed Streets and The Single Shining Star for books 2 and 3… but thankfully they didn’t use those. In retrospect, they’re a little cheesy.
Then I sold the Dreamblood books — a duology that, until recently, I’d been calling “the Tales of the Dreaming Moon”. Originally the first book was simply titled, Dreamblood — which, if you’re familiar with the world, was simply the name of one of the forms of magic used in the land of Gujaareh, based on the four humors of Egyptian/Greek/Roman medical/alchemical antiquity. Not so bad — but the second book was going to be called Dreambile, which some of my early readers declared “gross”. Eh, yeah, I could kind of see that. So when my editor decided to go with Reaper for the first book and Conqueror for the second — you’ve probably seen some mentions of that in the marketing thus far — I was pleased, because those were better. But still not quite there, somehow. So she sent me a list of alternate suggestions, but none of them leapt out at me. I sent some counter-suggestions; they were “meh” too. I felt kind of like Urban Waite, in the Awl article:
You wake up in the morning with a list of fifty titles next to your bed, and go to sleep with every one of them crossed off, while trying to think up the next day’s list. It becomes a process. It goes on for a month, this daily grind of panning for a title, hoping against all odds for just a small piece of gold.
…and after a few rounds of this I just gave up. I was tired. I had one book to write and another two to revise, and a hardcore day job, and family drama to deal with, and so on. Frankly, that’s why books have publishers: to do all the marketing-related stuff — titles are marketing — that authors don’t have the time or energy to do. (I don’t know if I’ll ever do self-publishing for that very reason; it sounds like a great whopping pain in the ass, when all I want to do is write.) I told them I’d go with whatever they chose. So eventually Devi sent me The Killing Moon… and I liked it. At more than “meh” level! But she was stuck for what to name the second book. So although I’d kind of written off the whole process, I sent back a short list of suggestions that I didn’t really care about, and appended, “Oh, and what about, I dunno, The Shadowed Sun to play off the pattern of the first book?” — since that book is set more in the desert beyond Gujaareh, and is a darker book than the first one, involving a plague of nightmares and cheery stuff like that. I didn’t think that one would work for her, honestly. I’d just sort of pulled it out of my ass. But to my utter and absolute shock, she liked it; for the first time, I’d picked a title that stuck. We had a duology.
I say all this to preface: I run into people all the time who ask me whether it bothers me to change the titles of my books. And the answer is: no. If naming the first book of the Inheritance Trilogy Penobscott, the Grzylwazl of the Stars would sell it, then so be it. (OK, I might be a little squinchy about it, but if it sold, I’d get over it.) I care more about titles with respect to my short stories, because short stories are so short that titles can and often do act as part of the narrative. But for novels, titles are just marketing. So I was glad to read this Awl article, in which fellow authors confide their own fears and frustrations and resignations, because now I know this is just part of being a published writer. You learn to care most about what you can control, attach your ego to the things that matter. You learn that the superficialities are just that.
So nowadays I’m always a little bemused when I meet readers who tell me how much they love (or hate) the titles of my books, or when they get up in arms about the presence or absence of kingdoms and lovers. I like the titles too, because the books are selling. I’m also bemused to think back on myself as a younger writer, who spent hours agonizing over how many words should be in a fantasy series title. It could be worse, I think at those people, at my younger self. It could be “Penobscott”.
Welcome, folks from Blastr
Please mind your manners and wipe your feet before coming in.
Everyone else: sorry, but a couple of people (or one determined person with a lot of time on his hands) have not minded their manners re my last post. Apropos of which, the blog is on moderation — if you’ve commented here before successfully, your comments will be approved. If not, they’ll be held ’til I can get to them. Also, I’ve shut down commenting altogether on older posts — everything past 14 days old. Sorry, ’bout that. I’ll lift the moderation once the children get bored and go away.
Go#$%!$ Hollywood!
YOU CAN’T DO THAT. YOU CAN’T TELL A NUANCED, COMPLEX, INTERESTING STORY ABOUT BIGOTRY AND USE BIGOTRY TO DO IT. YOU WILL SHOOT YOUR OWN MESSAGE IN THE FOOT AND RUIN AN OTHERWISE EXCELLENT MOVIE. DOES THIS NOT OCCUR TO YOU? ARE YOU INCAPABLE OF THINKING FOR TWO MINUTES DURING THE SCRIPTWRITING? DO YOU JUST NOT SEE THAT SAYING “RACISM IS BAD” DOESN’T WORK IF YOU’RE PERPETUATING IT YOURSELF?! WHAT THE EVERLIVING HELL — ?!
::Stops. Takes deep, calming breath. Goes for bike ride, reads something, seeks the peace within herself, etc.::
Okay. Let’s try that again.
I went to see X-Men: First Class last night. I actually really, really liked the film — much better than the last two with their increasingly obsessive focus on Wolverine (probably my least favorite X-Man), and their increasingly muddled attempts to tell a good story vs just blowing shit up. I can blow shit up at home on my XBox; when I pay $13 to see a movie in the theater, I want something that engages more than just my adrenal glands. This film did that, with excellent acting on the part of its three male leads (including Kevin Bacon here), good dialogue, good pacing, all that. It was a genuinely good film. (I have some issues with the female leads’ acting, but that’s a rant for a different day.)
But. (Spoilers, and more profanity, from here forth.)
Continue reading ›
I’m a-doin’ the Write-A-Thon
I’ve never been to a Clarion. Or any six-week workshop. Never worked in the kind of career field that would permit it, and never had a fortuitous conjunction of money and unemployment in between careers. Still, I like the idea of the whole thing — creativity boot camp, total immersion in ideas and discipline with the isolation necessary to foster the imagination to its fullest. It’s something I get in smaller increments with my writing group, particularly when we go off on our annual retreat — but how cool is it to go on a massive, six-week-long retreat with guest instructors? ::wistful sigh::
Alas. At this point in my career I could probably still get something out of a Clarion, but it wouldn’t be fair for me to go. The whole point is to help aspiring writers improve themselves enough and make the professional connections that will help them break in — and while I’ve got a long way to go before I achieve my personal goals, the one I can safely say I’ve met is yep, done the breaking-in thing. So I couldn’t in good conscience take a seat from someone else who might use a Clarion workshop to springboard into a published career. (Not to mention, got no time anymore.)
But I can still support a venture I think so highly of — which is why, even though I am not a Clarionite, I’ll be participating in this year’s Clarion West Write-a-Thon.
Gods know I’ve got enough to do: the final pass edit of The Broken Kingdoms, the second-pass revisions of the two Dreamblood books, and I’m working on an outline and test chapters for The New Book. So, you wanna encourage me? Maybe add a little positive pressure to produce more — and do a good thing for other people in the process? Sponsor me. My page is here, and I’ll let you know when the Write-a-Thon begins. Donations pay for things like keeping the workshop affordable for those who can pay, and providing scholarships for those who can’t. And Clarion West is particularly and explicitly committed to diversifying the SFF field — something that’s obviously near and dear to my heart.
So help me out, and help them out. I think it’s gonna be fun.
Some points of general interest.
This is not addressed to anyone in particular, though it is triggered by a comment or two — not necessarily negative ones, if you’re wondering, mostly just perplexing ones — that I’ve seen or heard in places, about me and mine. And me being the kind of girl who points at the giant stinking elephant in the room and says, Dear gods, what is that thing? — well, I felt the need to explain:
1. My editor did not know I was black when she bought my novel. She found out the first time we met in person — after she’d bought my book, when we had dinner in order to start getting to know each other and discuss the editing/marketing. I’m not actually sure she knew I was female until we spoke on the phone (to make plans for dinner), given that I use initials. She probably did, because my agent doesn’t try to use gender-neutral pronouns or anything, but I don’t know for certain because I never asked — I don’t care.
2. I also learned for the first time that she was a woman of color when we met for dinner. I certainly didn’t know she was (at the time*) the only editor of color in SF/Fdom — hell, I hadn’t realized there were any.
3. I do recall thinking, “Whassat, Greek?” when my agent told me my new editor’s name was Devi Pillai. That was about as much thought as I gave it, beyond WOO HOO WOO HOO WOO HOO and a bit of OMGWTFBBQ I’M GONNA BE PUBLISHED. (She’s not Greek.)
4. My agent submitted the book to something like six different editors, none of whom I’d met before. (I have met some of them since.) I don’t think any of them knew I was black. All the editors my agent submitted the book to were her choice — though we did discuss them — and I don’t know why she picked them. I don’t honestly care. I trust her judgment on stuff like this; that’s why she’s my agent.
5. I have, if you’re wondering, asked my agent not to share information about my race unless a potential publisher asks — not because I’m trying to hide it, but because I don’t want my race used to pigeonhole me (you may recall that I don’t like that). This doesn’t happen much in SFF as compared to other genres, but I just didn’t want to go there. It’s pretty much irrelevant now, but back when I was unpublished and not very public, it was helpful to me to know who asked, and who didn’t. (And also if you’re wondering, nobody’s asked thus far.)
6. Orbit did not buy my books after, or as a result of, RaceFail. Anybody who can count and read a calendar should be able to figure this out, but to make it clear — RaceFail was in early 2009. The Inheritance Trilogy sold in early 2008. Stuff in publishing takes a looooong time. If there is any publishing-related fallout from RaceFail that we can see and parse as such, it won’t start to appear until this year at the earliest, most likely next year or the year after. The changes I’ve seen thus far are more intrinsic and subtle.
Just in case anybody was wondering.
* The other that I know of is DongWon Song, also at Orbit, but he was hired after I contracted with them.
The obvious vs the oblique
You may have noticed that I’ve been a little quiet lately. Sorry! It’s the whole two-fulltime-jobs thing; doesn’t leave a lot of time for extras. So in the spirit of maximizing efficiency, this is a two-birds-with-one-stone post: I’m going to talk about writing, which I haven’t done here for awhile, and I’m also going to plug a new novel that rocked my socks off. The novel is Genevieve Valentine’s Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, which has already gotten some nice press. It deserves more.
When I first started out as a short story writer, I had a rough time of it. Some of it was just stubbornness on my part; change is hard. The rest, though, was that I kept making the novelist’s mistake: instead of writing short stories, I just I tried to write shorter long stories. Then, finally grasping that short stories are something different, I went to the opposite extreme. My next attempt was a story full of complex ideas and character interactions in a very strange setting — and no explanation of any of it. Explaining would’ve taken up too much space, I told myself at the time. I’d read several stories at that point which didn’t bother to explain things, so I thought that might be the trick of short story-writing: write it all in media res, toss in some technobabble or magicobabble, bam, done.
My writing group at the time justly smacked me for inflicting the resulting mess on them. “Don’t be afraid to be obvious,” they said (among other choice things). And I realized they were right: I was leaving stuff out not because it improved the story, but because I was afraid. The plain fact of the matter was that I didn’t know what the hell I was doing as a short story writer, so I’d busted out the Handwavium in an effort to conceal my beginning-writer clumsiness and utter ignorance. It didn’t work. So I trunked the story and tried to write something else. Awhile later — after I’d had time to read more short stories, experiment with new techniques, basically grow up a little — I revised it, did a better job this time, and finally achieved my first short story publication.
This was an important and necessary lesson that I had to learn. But lately I’ve come to realize that the lesson was incomplete — or maybe I’m just finally experienced enough to grasp the subtext of don’t be afraid to be obvious. Sometimes it’s equally necessary to not be obvious, after all. Storytelling, like all communication, is sometimes as much about what’s not being said as what is. Consider a simple statement like, oh, “He went to the store.” Straightforward and clear, right? But imagine that the person saying it rolls her eyes, or bursts into tears as she says it. Or imagine that the apocalypse has come and gone and there are no more stores. Is it still straightforward and clear then?
This revelation struck me, again and again, as I read Genevieve Valentine’s Mechanique. On the surface it’s the straightforward tale of a mechanical circus in a postapocalyptic world. (Or as straightforward as that gets.) The Circus Tresaulti travels around a land locked in perpetual war, offering battle-weary, hardened survivors a few hours of escape and wonder as they watch tumblers and aerialists perform while wearing — ostensibly — fake clockwork prosthetics and other devices. The clockwork parts are real, of course. But there’s a wealth of unexplained story right there in the premise: why a circus? Why mechanical? Who created it, and what drives it to keep performing in a world so hopeless and broken-down? What is this war about, and why doesn’t it ever end? The story answers some of these questions immediately, others much later, and some of them go unanswered altogether. It quickly became clear to me that the unanswered questions are the most important of them — and the ones that least require an answer, by the end of the story.
For example. The circus is run by Boss: a mysterious woman who seems to have no other name, perhaps because no other name is relevant. She’s the boss; that’s what matters. But there’s a more subtle meaning to Boss’ lack of a name. Boss has mastered the skill of binding human flesh to metal in ways that should seem familiar to science fiction (or rather, cyberpunk) readers, although here it’s done for almost purely aesthetic purposes. The aerialists of the circus leap and whirl through the air better because they have hollow copper bones replacing their human bones. The strong man is all the more impressive because he has turbine engines in his back, powering his feats of strength. Only gradually does it become clear that the power which created them is as much magical as technological. It doesn’t make sense in any hard-SF way; no one should be able to survive having their skeleton replaced, especially not when the operation is performed without high-tech equipment and in unsanitary conditions. And clockwork doesn’t work that way. But it works because Boss is the boss — because she literally wills it to work, and because her will is what binds the circus together. And it works because “getting the bones” has unexpected side effects — like granting effective immortality to anyone so transformed. The reader may immediately leap to logical conclusions here: immortal, super-agile, super-strong cyborgs in a war-torn world = invincible super-soldiers. Someone else in the novel — the antagonist called only “the government man”, also unnamed because what matters is his power — leaps to this conclusion as well. He hunts down the circus, and Boss, in hopes of creating an army that can end the war for good, and usher in a new golden age (of his making, of course). But over the course of the story the government man, and the reader, learns that it isn’t the magic or the technology that makes the performers of the Circus Tresaulti so formidable. Their strength comes from their personalities, and the peculiar relationships that bind and divide them, far more than mere flesh, blood, and metal. This too is never stated explicitly, but because it’s the inevitable conclusion that the reader draws from the story, the point is that much more powerful when it finally sinks home.
I’m not doing the story justice, frankly. Mechanique is a layered tapestry, rich and knotted, full of characters who aren’t likable but whom the reader nevertheless loves, and settings and themes that are horrific but nevertheless beautiful. I can’t even define the story’s genre, because it feels more like a glancing reflection rather than a specific nailing of any one: steampunk but futuristic, cyberpunk but curiously Victorian, weirder than New Weird, a not-quite dystopia, beautifully baroque horror. For me, Mechanique is also an object lesson in the power of oblique storytelling. I’ve played with a few of these techniques — Yeine’s unnamed grandmother, for example, in The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. She’s unnamed (“Beba” is just a term for grandmother, like “Baba” in Russian and “Obaasan” in Japanese) because what matters is that she’s Yeine’s grandmother, and because she represents the Darren lineage and legacy that Yeine has striven all her life to fit. But I don’t think I did as good a job as Valentine has with her unnamed characters. By leaving them unnamed, she has reduced them to nothing more than a role or a cipher for some higher idea (in “the government man’s” case, he is Authority — all the things that governments do for, and to, their people). But she’s also managed to keep these nameless characters three-dimensional and human, somehow. It’s a skill I have yet to master. But that’s OK, because in this novel I get to watch a master at work.
Go check out Mechanique.
In FRANCE
Using all caps because it’s FRANCE and holy crap FRANCE I’m in FRANCE how ’bout some FRANCE with those FRENCH fries? (Which for some reason here are called “amusing fries”. I fail to see the joke.)
Anyway, am here for the Imaginales festival in a town called Epinal in eastern FRANCE. I’m posting photos and updates on the trip over on my Facebook page for those who can see it (I friend everybody that doesn’t appear to be a spammer, if you’re wondering, so it’s OK if you don’t know me personally).
That’s it. Just wanted to let you know I’m in FRANCE.
No Nebula this year
I didn’t win, alas. That said, if I gotta lose, losing to Connie Willis is the way to go, lemme tell you. And I had a great time at Nebula Weekend, though I was only there for Saturday and Sunday (it started Thursday). I have pictures, but they came out very dark for some reason, so I won’t post them. (If anyone was there and has better pics, please send them to me!)
And while I’m aware that “it’s an honor to be nominated” is a cliche, that really is the case here. The other authors in the Best Novel category were no shakes, and I know and/or am friends with several of them, so there was really no way I could be disappointed. And given that this was my first novel, and I’ve got lots more in me, well — there’s always next year.
So for the winners: congratulations! And my fellow nominees who didn’t win, I’m thrilled and humbled to be among you. Let’s all celebrate!
…and then it hits me.
I’ve been nominated or shortlisted for (or won) nine major awards. Nine. Awards. Nine.
- The Hugo (Nominee)
- The Tiptree (Shortlist)
- The Prix Imaginales (Nominee)
- Gemmell Morningstar Award (Finalist)
- Locus Awards (Finalist)
- Nebula Award (Nominee)
- Goodreads Readers’ Choice Awards (Nominee)
- Romantic Times Book Reviews Award, Fantasy (Winner!)
- Crawford Award (Shortlist)
::bogglety:: I kinda don’t know what to think about this. I’m astounded. Awed. Humbled. A little scared. A lot giddy. (And the Virgo in me keeps wanting it to be ten, just to make it a nice round number.) It’s an honor to be nominated for even one of these things, but all of them? Holy guacamole.
I’m leaving tomorrow for the Nebula Awards weekend down in DC, which is already in full progress — but since I’m off to Imaginales after that, I’ve got to husband my vacation days carefully, so only doing an overnighter. The ceremony is tomorrow evening, and I don’t think they’re doing an online simulcast this year (which they did in NYC last year, and which I attended), so I’d recommend watching Twitter for a play-by-play on who’s winning what.
But looking at the list above, I think I’ll have a hard time being disappointed if I lose tomorrow. I mean, ’cause… wow. (Also ’cause the other nominees are kickass folks, and I love many of their works and voted for them myself.) So anyway, wish us all luck!