Winner!
It’s official. I can now say that I am a NaNoWriMo winner and that feels awesome! Being able to write over 65,000 words in less than a month is an eye-opening experience for a writer who’s done it for the first time. What it tells me, as a writer, is that I can get those words out there so that the first draft is complete and editing can begin.
The next phase of NaNo is to edit the words in December with an eye to publishing in the spring. There’s still a lot of work to be done though. Just writing the first draft isn’t enough to have a novel ready to go. It needs to be rewritten in places, polished, some more research done, but I feel pretty confident about the book I’ve just completed.
New Project
At any rate, I am moving on and stepping away a little from both the October and NaNo novels to begin work on another two novels. The first is one I outlined years ago after a trip to Spain and I wanted to incorporate the beautiful Spanish setting as well as the trips to Morocco and Portugal into the story. It’s a suspense romance novel along the lines of the type that Mary Stewart wrote. I loved her books. If I am going to write romance, then I want it to be in the paranormal suspense romance or just plain suspense romance genres. So far, I don’t have a title, working or otherwise, for this novel so it is the Spanish story for now.
The second one is the one I first started to write about March of this year and didn’t get very far before the sci-fi fantasy one took over. So that story, which is the one that is moving forward right now, is a young adult urban fantasy called “Dew Dropping Hour” and is set in Ireland. Parts of the British Isles have always had a magical feel for me and the mythology of the islands have such enchantment that this is another planned series of books that really excites me. I believe, at this time, that the series will be three books, but it could go to four. It just depends on how it actually plays out while I’m writing it. The overall series is called “The Isles of Magic”.
Titles
For some reason, I have a really hard time coming up with titles for my books. I had a working title for the novel I am currently typing in from the hard copy that I had of it, but I don’t like it. It doesn’t really serve the book well, so I am hoping to get an inspiration somewhere along the line as I’m writing it.
Sometimes I find the title in song lyrics or poetry and sometimes they just pop up when I’m writing. For instance, the title of the YA, “Dew Dropping Hour” is from a poem by William Butler Yeats. But if something doesn’t present itself, it becomes a real struggle to find something that ties in, but doesn’t sound milquetoast.
Do you encounter a problem with coming up with good, enticing titles for your books or stories? Let me know.