This post is an amalgamation of two posts that first appeared on my website at the end of August.
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A couple of interesting things happened recently while I was writing.
First, the character I posted about previously has undergone her second name change in as many weeks. I received a lot of feedback from readers on StoriesOnline, with some really good suggestions for the type of name I was looking for. I settled on one that I’d been considering anyway and made the changes to my manuscript with find/replace.
But I still wasn’t happy with it.
Then, a week later, I happened to be listening to one of my Spotify playlists on the way into work, and a song came on that’s been on “heavy rotation” for me for the past few months. The track is a couple of years old now, but that’s not important. What is important is that the artist’s name resonated with me as fitting the character I’m having difficulty with.
And the name could be used as a short version of a longer name and that longer name has other short versions.
It just worked.
So, the character is on her third name of the process, and I’m 99% confident that this will be her final name.
The other thing that happened was that I found myself softening on this character’s plot arc.
When I conceived of her, I had a very clear plan for her purpose in the story. And had I gone through with it, she’d have been one of the least likeable characters in the series. But as I’ve said before, I’m more of a Pantser than a Planner when it comes to plotting. I write by the seat of my pants. I take the plot where the characters guide me even if, in the end, I get them where I want them to end up.
And that’s what’s happened her. I’ve already said that her original name didn’t suit her. And that’s because, as I’ve been writing her, I’ve sort of grown to love her and her personality. And I can’t make her out to be an unsympathetic character. I just can’t. In this case, she’s not going to end up where I had originally planned. She’s not going to do what I originally planned.
At least, not in the way I planned it.
I’m not particularly worried about that, if I’m honest. The way I’ve set her up and what’s she’s doing in this story will still lead to what I need to happen happening, it will just be in a different way.
And it might even make the story better—if I can execute it well, that is.
Moving on, let's speak about titles. I've always struggled with the titles of my novels and short stories, but I think I may have found the right titles for the next Paul Robertson book.
I recently joined a Discord server aimed at helping independently published authors grow their audience, and as part of the “initiation”, I was required to write a short introduction to myself. I began by mentioning that I’m approaching my fiftieth year on this blue and green globe we call home and the recent realisation that it means I’ve now been writing “smut” for almost thirty years and that it’s nearly twenty years since I sold my first piece for actual money.
And in all that time, the one thing I’ve always struggled with is coming up with titles for my work. In fact, I’m so bad at titles that when I was writing The Lies We Lead, I ran a competition on Facebook asking readers to make suggestions for the book’s title.
When I originally wrote A Good Man back in 2011—thirteen years ago now—I came up with what I thought was a clever title for the series. Tutelam Venit. Which, let’s be honest, is pretentious bollocks. I got to this because Paul’s story was going to be a Coming of Age story, so I put that phrase into Google Translate and asked it for the Latin and used what I got out. That was in 2011 though and it was a crap translation. A better translation now is “He came under protection”, which still sort of fits the story, but not really.
Anyway, I ditched the pretentious series name after A Tortured Soul came out. Now it’s just The Paul Robertson Saga, which is a much better name for it.
The titles for the three books in the series actually follow a definite pattern.
A Good Man
A Tortured Soul
A Wounded Heart
The pattern is clear.
A/an Adjective Noun
All three of these titles were planned from the beginning because the story was planned as a classic trilogy. But, of course, it didn’t turn out that way because as A Wounded Heart approached the same length as A Tortured Soul—already the longest book I’d ever written—I found I had a hell of a lot more story still to tell.
So, as you know, I resolved to write a fourth and possibly fifth book, which meant I had to come up with one or maybe two new titles. And for my own sanity, those titles had to fit the pattern of the other three.
Interestingly, I started a thread about this in a Reddit group for erotica authors and was told that the best titles are some variation of VERBed by the NOUN, which isn’t the pattern I’ve got for the Paul Robertson books, but you live and learn. I was also told that most readers don’t care about clever title patterns in series.
But I do, so I’m going to stick to the pattern, no matter what.
Unless I can’t think of anything. Which, for a long time, I couldn’t.
I did have a title. It was a good title, and it fit the final book in the series.
An Everlasting Love
The problem, of course, is that book four isn’t the final book. At least, it won’t be unless I can somehow shoehorn what’s left of the story I’ve got to tell, which I estimate may be as much as two hundred thousand words worth, into seventy-five thousand words.
Not happening.
So, I’ve had to change the title of this fourth book. I had hoped I could hang on to An Everlasting Love for the fifth book, but I don’t think my desire to stick to the pattern will let me. And that’s because the title of this fourth book is…
Wait for it…
A Healing Love
There you have it. The title of the fourth book in the Paul Robertson Saga. A Healing Love.
The reason it means I can’t keep An Everlasting Love as the final book’s title is that it will feel wrong to me to have two books with the same noun in the title. I’d like to keep the “Everlasting” part, but I’ll need to find something else that lasts forever rather than love.
Unless I can think of something else that is Healing for Paul other than love. Passion? An Affair? I don’t know. There’s no urgency; I need to finish writing the book first.