Wrestling With Brevity, Relevance, and Wit

In finding or dreaming up a title for Novel #2, I’ve been stumped for quite a while. Here’s my off-the-cuff take on my as-yet unresolved title frustration:

 Whether it’s a newspaper article headline, magazine article title, or title for a short story, novel or movie script, we all strive to please the goddesses Brevity, Relevance, and Wit.

During my months-long tag-team wrestling match with these three- they take turns, I just keep being thrown to the mat by one after the other – I’ve come away with dozens of bruised bad ideas.

I’m tempted mightily by Brevity: McBee as the title for Novel #2. That’s it. Just McBee, the last name of my main character, my reluctant good man. Then I think of Travis McGee, who went by McGee, and who stands tall among the ‘60’s anti-heroes of detective fiction. I can’t go there. McGee’s maker, John D. McDonald, would simply rise from his grave and snatch me up like a ragdoll and shake me. McDonald can create McGee, and McBride can create McBee, but McBride can’t steal the one-word McGee icon and slap it on a wannabe. I get that. I can’t go there. No way, Jose.

So consider what Relevance has to offer: Novel #2 is a Civil War story with a sub-plot of romance and intrigue. Or, more likely, it’s a story of romance and intrigue taking place during the Civil War in Virginia.

 I can think of war novel titles all day long: Hold Not Back is Old Testament Biblical, sounds warlike and gritty to me, and is actually connected to a historical artifact relevant to the war tale. It fits nicely, but none of my writer circle friends or my wife got it. So Hold Not Back is Held Yet Back, but not yet buried.

After a glass or two of wine I can also think of titles for historical romances, but I’m not even going to start tossing out titles oozing with swords, lust and lace and such. Pretty soon it would it reach the Men In Tights level, and I don’t want Mel Brooks on my butt either.

Suffice it to say, I haven’t been able to tie the two threads together, giving equal play to both the war and the romantic intrigue, without laughing out loud.

That brings me to the witch queen Wit, who has a sexy offspring, Alliteration, who terribly tempts and twists my title ideas. (Sorry, but that sort of silliness suckers me in every time.)  McBee’s Bloody Boots is typical of the result I get after Alliteration’s addictive attentions.

The primary woman character is named Faith, so I’ve been fighting the urge to waiver under Wit’s wily ways (Oops, sorry, again) and play on Faith’s name as a favored moral condition. McBee’s Faith was the first obvious and stupid thought. Tempting Faith came next, but was also obvious and stupid, and mischaracterizes the lovely lady and the plot. There’re more, but that’s enough to get the idea.

So here I am, wrapping up the manuscript and writing emails to a graphic artist who specializes in book covers for indie authors like me, and moping for want of a title to pass along to her.

Got any good ideas?

Did We Win the War, Granny Beth?

I know I wrote that my next blog entry would be about finding a title for Book #2, but consider this a “post of opportunity”  I couldn’t let slip away.

My sister related this modern story to me a few nights ago while we were at her house in Tyler, Texas.

Beth is one of my sister’s long-time friends who just retired and moved back to Tyler. Within a few weeks of moving into their Tyler house, Beth kept four of her grandchildren for a week, such being a summer tradition in many southern families. These four little grandsons are the offspring of two of the four or five children in Beth and Ben’s blended family, their marriage being the second for both of them.

Just before the grandsons arrived for their summer visit, Beth had unpacked some boxes recently liberated from a storage facility where they had been since Beth married Ben shortly after she found her nest empty. Beth opened one box and found it was full of her son’s old toys. On top were Star Wars toys from the 1980’s. Happy to have found entertainment for the grandkids, she set the box aside.

On the first day that the boys needed a new diversion, Beth brought out the big cardboard storage box, and the two pairs of brothers dug in. The Star Wars figures and vehicles were a treasure trove to the four cousins. They all knew the Star Wars movies and play began as they kept pulling more toys from the big box.  Soon enough, a smaller box near the bottom of the storage carton was pulled out.

Unlike the Star Wars storm troopers and figures of Luke Skywalker, Princess Leah, and R2D2, the younger pair of grandsons, maybe ages 4 and 6, didn’t recognize the blue and gray figures in the bottom box. A conversation ensued between the younger brothers and Granny Beth as they examined the toys in the last box, while their older cousins flew Star Wars space ships around the room.

“Granny Beth, what are these?”

“Those are Civil War soldiers.”

“Oh. Was the Civil War a real war or a movie war?”

“It was real. The Civil War was fought a long time ago when the Confederate states, the South, tried to break away from the United States and make their own country. The Yankee soldiers wore blue uniforms and the Southern soldiers wore gray.

 “Oh. Which side were we on?”

Pause while Beth considered her answer. “Well, we live in Texas, so we were part of the Confederacy, the gray soldiers.”

“Oh. So we were the good guys.”

“Well…it wasn’t like Star Wars where one side was good and the other side was bad.”

“Oh. Did we win?”

Another pause for adult reflection. “Uhhh…we lost, but we’re glad we did.”

“We’re glad we lost?” asked the little boy.

“Yea,” interjected his first cousin, older by a few years and having been introduced to the Civil War in his fourth grade school class. “Because if we had won, you’d be a slave,” he said nonchalantly as he swooped Hans Solo’s space ship in an attack on his little brother’s toy.

“Oh, OK,” the younger cousin answered, having no idea what that meant.

The younger two boys who asked all the questions are the bi-racial sons of Beth’s white daughter and black son-in-law. Their cousins have two white parents.

Granny Beth quickly decided that it was time for Stars Wars play to replace the Civil War history lesson, so she slipped the blue and gray plastic toy soldiers back into their box and handed figurines of Darth Vader and Wookie to her younger pair of grandsons.

Play continued, as the lure of the toys from a make-believe cinema war they knew, easily pulled the four cousins back from a confusing new real war from the past.

Several major characters in my Book #2 are based on historical persons. One is a half-white twenty-year old slave named Levi who is taken to war to serve as the body-servant of the main character, who is an infantry captain in the Confederate army.

If Granny Beth had a hard time in 2014 sorting out how to explain to her bi-racial grandson about slavery, the southern culture of 1862 did not. “One drop of black blood” was all it took to be denied any Anglo heritage. In real life, and in Book #2, Levi was born to a black mother, herself a slave, so her bi-racial son was a slave from birth, while his white father became an invisible man.

That was a disgusting reality of race relations in America 150 years ago, but is great grist for novels of about that difficult decade. One of many hopes I have for Book #2 is that I treated that particular malaise with a proper perspective.

Look next week for a post about the search for the right title for Book #2.