Titles - UGH! + Columbus Day (And My Audible Wishlist #6)

Writing books that average 180,000 words (Expeditionary Force 13: Fallout is over 215,000 words!) is not easy, and writing a blurb description that gives the reader enough information to know what to expect but not enough to give away the plot is even more difficult. For me, the worst part of writing a book is choosing a title. The ideal title encapsulates, in a single word or short phrase, the basic concept of the story, again without giving away too much. For example: the second Star Wars movie was titled The Empire Strikes Back and not Vader Is My Daddy, which was a good decision.

I am happy with the titles of the existing ExForce and Mavericks books, although for each book, many potential titles were discarded along the way. The first book was going to have a more descriptive title like A Long Way from Home or some phrase with “invasion” in it. For a while, I regretted choosing Columbus Day as the title. Those two words don’t give the casual book browser any idea what the book is about, and I probably lost some sales because people shrugged and moved on. In the end, I chose Columbus Day because it described the basic concept that inspired me to write the book: that any aliens who traveled across interstellar space must be so advanced beyond our technology that we would have no chance to fight an invasion.

The title of my sci-fi book Aces is also good; I wouldn’t change it.

The titles of my Ascendant fantasy trilogy? I kind of hate Ascendant and (UGH) the second book, Transcendent. The third book, Deceptions, has a perfect title, so why couldn’t I think of something better for the first two books? Answer: I suck.

The titles of ExForce books are usually chosen before I begin writing; I develop title ideas when I’m creating the outline. So, what are the titles of Books 14 and 15? At this moment, I have no idea, and Book 14 is more than halfway written.

OK, it is not true that I have no ideas for titles—I just don’t have any ideas I don’t hate. Because Book15 is the final installment in the series (I know, it’s shocking), I tossed around crappy ideas like All Good Things or The End of All Things, but those have been done before. And I already used Armageddon, darn it.

My process for finding titles is to waste time by looking for words in an online thesaurus (which is not a type of dinosaur). When that doesn’t work, I bounce ideas off my wife. Sometimes she listens, but mostly she just gets an amused look on her face and tells me to keep working on it. So, how does a title pop into my head? I have no idea. It just happens, almost always when I am not trying to think of a title.

Clearly, I need to walk the dogs, or mow the lawn, or do anything other than stare at a blank title page. Cleaning the garage, sadly, is widely known to kill creativity, so that is not an option, darn it.

While you are waiting (for-EH-ver) for Expeditionary Force 13: Fallout to be released on December 7th, check out these titles:

Operation Brushfire by Rhett C. Bruno and James Wolanyk

Operation Brushfire is an alternate history mystery thriller about uncovering the truth behind a new world order. Written by Rhett C. Bruno and James Wolanyk and blah blah BLAH! Here’s what you need to know: it is narrated by Lou Diamond Phillips!

Magnitude (Book 1: Multiverse) by Dean M. Cole

And, picking up where his Dimension Space trilogy ended is Magnitude: Book 1 of Multiverse by Dean M. Cole (trust me, the M in his name is important). Of course, Magnitude is narrated by the incomparable R.C. Bray. (You could compare R.C. Bray to other voice actors, but it wouldn’t be fair to them.) That’s really all you need to know, right?

But wait! There’s more! When I finished listening to each of the books of the Dimension Space trilogy (Solitude, Multitude, and Amplitude), my response was “Where the heck is Dean going with this story?”

So, tune in for a rollicking adventure story, great narration, and to see how Dean will find more titles ending in “’tude!”

In the USA, the second Monday in October is the federal Columbus Day holiday, to commemorate Christopher Columbus “discovering” the Americas on October 12th, 1492. In the spirit of that day, I drove west from Vermont (certain I would soon be in China) since my wife was hungry for General Tso’s chicken. To my surprise, instead I discovered a wild, savage land the locals call “Ohio.” (I couldn’t quite understand their primitive grunts, but it sounded like “Ohio.”) Naturally, I pulled over at a Sheetz station and claimed the land, which I named “Craiglandia.” Some disgruntled locals protested that I didn’t “discover” anything because millions of them had been living there for years (but why?) However, I am sure most of the natives will be delighted when I bring to them the Gospel of Fluff, and they will see how their ignorance has doomed them to living in squalor. (The bathroom at the Sheetz station was out of paper towels.)

Anyway, I returned to Vermont, disappointed not to have found China but pleased that I had brought enlightenment to a people whose only joy in life is regularly beating Michigan in college football.

In recent years, Columbus Day has become controversial, and I think we can all agree that renaming the holiday ExForce Day would bring everyone together.

I know that would make me happy.