| | Titles - sent to try us ...I'm feeling quite pleased with myself at the moment having just
completed the first draft, and first and second edits of my second
book. (The first one is still out there being perused by the damn
publisher who asked to see it, and it's a daily struggle not to spend
too much wondering if that's a good thing or a bad thing)
This
book is the one that's been with me, I think, the longest ... I'm not
sure. It's been through several incarnations - ironically the subject
matter has no small connection with that as well - and even more
titles. The first title was long-winded and annoying, but it popped
into my head before I even started to write, and so I wrote the book
around the title which was "The Haunting Of Jonathan Riley." Lots of
problems with that: It's too much like something else, it was too long,
and when I got into the story I realised that Jonathan Riley was not
haunted at all, but playing host to something a bit unpleasant.
Briefly, as a child messing about somewhere he shouldn't underground,
he smashes a jar containing the treasured, and supposedly guarded,
remains of an ancient Cornish king with unfinished business to attend
to. Boy inhales dust in shock, boy becomes something you really don't
want to fuck about with. (As I said, briefly
...) I understand this subject matter is either something you can run
with or you can't, it's all a matter of taste. Not the point.
So
anyway. It changed a few times, had the working title of "The Heath"
for an awfully long time, set as it is on Bodmin Moor where I grew up.
Then one day when I opened the document to get down to it, I just
looked at the title and realised I was so incredibly sick of it that if
I wasn't careful I'd bin the whole project.
So, the search for a
new title began. Again. I'm notoriously shit at titles; either I come
up with them and nothing to put under them (ie: a story) or else the
story leaks out of my fingertips mega-fast and then I spend weeks
searching for something catchy to hang on it handle-wise. The two
rarely come together.
I played with several ideas and came up
with a couple, then had to ask Ms Google to please check I hadn't
nicked them. I had, of course. One was "Dust of Ages" which turned
out to be a song. Then I started with the word "ancient" to see what
slithered through my mind, and came up with "The Dust Of Ancients."
Ooh good, I thought, that sounds nifty! So I Googled it, and it came up with a whole page full.
Shit,
says I. Then I realised they were all the same thing, and that one
thing was a line from Geoffrey Of Monmouth's History Of The Kings Of
Britain. First published 1138. Abso-bloody-lutely perfect.
Even better was, when I read the whole excerpt, the line is: "The dust of ancients shall be restored."
I
have a notes document for each project, these usually run into several
thousands of words for a longer piece, and I just hammer away at it
when I've got a problem. It's always fun to read through and see how
the thought processes work and how the original idea evolved.
Very
often it's peppered with things like "fuck, this isn't working, I need
coffee/a nap/a miracle" etc. The notes document for this book totalled
39,262 words - the book is just over 107,000.
Here's the bit where I worked through the title problem (the most recent one)
I hate the title!!!! Gah! Go
back to something like the original? The haunting of Thomas Riley? But
that sounds like a ghost story and it’s not. Also sounds bit archaic
and it’s set now. So no.
There follows a lot of other notes and then this:
How about something like King’s Dust for the title? Strange, but keep thinking along those lines. Dust of The King? King to Dust? Dust Of Ages? Sounds familiar though ... Google it. It’s a song, but not a book title!!  So don’t rule it out. Dust Of The Ancient Dust Of Ages? The Dust Of Ancients – quote from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History Of The Kings Of Britain. Okay, so the new working title, is The Dust Of Ancients. It’ll probably stay that.
Now, if only the perfection of this little find could be taken as an omen. Dare I?
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