I see you. I know what books you are reading. And which books you have avoided reading. Perhaps you only read certain genre, particular themes, about characters much like yourself...or quite the opposite. Either way, I forgive you. It is not too late to pick up a copy of one of mine. The odds favor you enjoying them.
So after lazing through a dull and dreary holiday pause, I pondered the first blog post of this, the year of 2021, that of the Ox. I've been thinking of "years of" for several years and finally have brought out my novel of a similar name: YEAR OF THE TIGER which is set, as you may guess, in a year designated for tigers; in this case 1986...before computers, cell phones, social media, and TSA checkpoints and a pandemic. Although the first inkling of the complete story was composed in 1983, I waited to share it until I thought the world needed it as a profound distraction for the viral dilemma filling our lives in 2020. 
Which leads me to this blog's topic: How do I get the titles for my novels?
As 2020 turned surreptitiously into 2021, I realized that I have been at this writing effort for ten years. Sure, I wrote before, but it was not until 2011 that things began to improve exponentially. (You can read about this career arc in earlier blog posts.) I dared offer a "weaker" work to an untried publisher, willing to throw this story away if the deal fell through or I got burned by unscrupulous purveyors of publishing pomp. AFTER ILIUM is a contemporary tale of misdirected romance in the exotic setting of northwest Turkey and the ruins of ancient Troy. Troy also had the name Ilium. The 'after' part refers to what happens to our hero after he visits the site with his new, older lady friend. Much of the story is how he struggles to get back to her after they become separated. So...after Ilium.
(Click the link in the upper right corner of this blog page to get a copy of any of these books for yourself.)
At the same time, my offering for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award competition that year caught the eye of another small publisher and we tried to make a go of a career launch. A novel I had already written and submitted to the ABNA became our focus: A BEAUTIFUL CHILL. While working on a revision of this campus relationship novel, I also got another novel, AIKO, involved before the publisher dropped both books, and me, over creative differences. The title of the first novel refers to a phrase the heroine says, describing a feeling of loneliness or a melancholia which can only be alleviated by brief random encounters, such as with a professor on her campus. The second novel is, obviously, a Japanese girl's name, who is the center point of a story involving a man's search for the daughter he suddenly discovers he has. He goes to Japan to claim her but it is not an easy mission.
At that time I wanted to bring forth my magnum opus, a science fiction book revolving around interdimensional voyaging, an alternate universe, and the twisted reign of a pair of high school science nerds who find their way there. I called it THE DREAM LAND, later with volume two and three, The Dream Land trilogy. Originally titled simply Dreamland, I found a book in a bookstore one day about the Coney Island amusement park in New York City which had the same title. So I changed mine to The Dreamland. And wouldn't you know it? Another book already with that title, so another change to what it is today. The three volume epic is quite the tour de force of interdimensional intrigue with a lot of steampunk elements and a fatal comet, a personal favorite.
With the vampire craze reaching its peak, I became enamored with the medical side of the condition and swore to write a medically accurate story of transformation into a vampire. I titled my novel A DRY PATCH OF SKIN after the first noticeable symptom which marks our hero's descent into monstrous madness as he seeks a cure only to surrender to his family's curse. A couple books later, I had ideas for continuing the story, making it into a trilogy, so I sought matching titles for two books and came up with SUNRISE for volume 2 and SUNSET for volume 3. They fit: Sunrise tells about his rise and reintroduction into polite society. Sunset sets the theme for the downfall of his vampire empire.
Between volume 1 and the other two of the Stefan Szekely vampire trilogy, I wrote a novel based on the real childhood of someone I met online (a relative of a Facebook friend) whose experiences I believed would make a good story. Because the heroine's name meant "wolf" in her native language, we agreed on the title A GIRL CALLED WOLF - slightly different than our first choice A Girl Named Wolf which was already a nordic folk band's name. I crafted a novel from a list of her adventures gleaned from many interviews and added a fictitious conclusion sequence.
My colleagues at Myrddin Publishing have championed the fantasy genre so I boldly declared I would write a fantasy, too. In fact, I asserted, I would title it Epic Fantasy just to make clear what it was. I was further challenged to include dragons in the story. No problem. I made the title of my longest novel EPIC FANTASY *WITH DRAGONS - yes, with the asterisk, just to be a little tongue-in-cheek. While starting off in an easy manner, the tale of an unjustly exiled dragonslayer on a quest to find the dragons' breeding ground and kill them all to regain his position, I found myself exploring all kinds of big ideas and profound themes by the end of it. I declared when I had finished it that I would never write again because I had "said" everything I had to say in this tome. Then I returned to the vampire theme....
In summer 2019, I had an idea burst into my head that I had to write - and put aside what was trying to be the 4th book of the vampire trilogy. EXCHANGE was a contemporary drama revolving around a mass shooting and the surviving husband/father who must put his life back together while dealing with the arrival of a Chinese exchange student who doesn't know what has happened to her host family. You can guess where the title came from, and yet there are several kinds of "exchanges" that occur throughout the story, including a couple big twists as we rush to the final pages.
The Year of the Rat (2020) was not anything like what we wanted. I delayed launching Exchange until finally I decided to hit the button. People had plenty of time to read but it seemed few were, aside from the apocalyptic plague novels. I read a few of those myself; I even tried to start writing one. Instead, I worked on yet one more revision of my YEAR OF THE TIGER novel which I had kept putting off because other books poked me more. With not much going on and nobody buying books anyway, I did the only thing I could: I put it out there onto the bookshelves of the world. I will let you guess where the title of this book came from. Hint: all the action occurs during the year 1986.
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| The kitschy cover for my 2014 NaNoWriMo effort. |
Oh, I'll keep writing, but I may not get to the end of what I have left to work on during my idle days of retirement. Stay tuned for the amazing conclusion.
(C) Copyright 2010-2021 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog.
Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.
