Hello
again, everyone. I’m not dead! Isn’t that super?
As you
can see from the image above, I’m back at work on a couple of things. Teh Novel
is in what I hope to God is the home stretch, and I’m back on Masks stuff. As to where I’ve been …
well, it’s long and complicated and I’m going to avoid discussing personal
stuff on this blog for a while, but oh the
stories I will tell when I finally stop avoiding. Hoo boy.
The part of all this that you need to
know is 1) I hope to get back to posting chapters before the month is out; 2) I’m
experimenting with a new art style that you may find intriguing; and 3) I need
your opinion on something I’m writing. Yes, yours. Yes, writing.
You
see, among the many, many things I am
not talking about from the past few months, one of the nastiest ones that’s
been holding up my progress on just about everything is that I’ve had to write
a ton of promotional stuff for Teh Novel, trying to get it sold, and that’s all
been hugely complicated by the fact that I haven’t got a title for it. The one
thing all the beta readers agree on is that my working title, which was never
much of a title anyway, is absolutely terrible. And I’m hitting the point where
I really need a title that works with the rest of the work in order to finish
the work.
But last month, I got a new library card.
I just moved to a new corner of the planet, you see, and there’s a splendid
library ten minutes’ drive from my new home. I mean gorgeous. Books as far as the eye can see, a bookshop and a coffee stall, the comfiest of comfy
chairs … I would live there if I could. I’ve lusted after a library card there
for years. And now that I live so close by, I have the perfect excuse to get my
seventh library card. (That’s cards for seven different library systems, not
seven individual cards—I’ve had way more than seven library cards over the
years, what with replacing worn-out ones and libraries getting new computer and
check-out systems.) So I filled out the forms, picked the design of card I
wanted (it’s got owls on it!), and proceeded to wander the shelves, gripping my
shiny new library card and drooling like a kid in a newly opened candy store.
And
one of the first books that caught my eye was this:
The Resurrection Kid: A Western Quartet. Something about that title just snagged
me. It was the first thing I picked up. It had been a few years since I’d read Westerns of any sort, let alone the
pulp reprints these turned out to be, but the title of the last story in this
collection—“A Gun for the Resurrection Kid”—sank its hook into my soul and
wouldn’t let go. You see, Teh Novel is very much concerned with resurrection,
and it has a sort of post-apocalyptic pseudo-Western setting. Think The Hunger Games meets Firefly. And so I began experimenting
with the word resurrection and all
its variations. And I came up with two possible titles.
So here’s my question, fellas and girls … would you read a post-apocalyptic YA
novel called either The Resurrectionist or
The Resurrectionist’s Song?
A
resurrectionist, for anyone who cares, is an old term for someone who digs up
fresh corpses from graveyards and sells them to medical schools. (This was back
in the days when there was a real shortage of cadavers, and not many legal ways
of getting them.) Resurrectionists play a minor but significant role in Charles
Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, among
other works of literature. The first time I read the term and realized what it
was, the poetry of it made me smile (pretty much the only time Dickens had that
effect on me). And while nobody in Teh Novel actually digs up a grave, there
are two characters who, for their own separate reasons, bring the dead back to
life. I wouldn’t expect the average bookstore browser to know what a
resurrectionist is, of course, but I hope the word would be intriguing as well
as unfamiliar.
So what do you think? If
you were a random reader, would you want to spend a few hours with a
resurrectionist, or hear a resurrectionist’s song? I look forward to the
comments.
And now, by way of an apology, here’s a little song just for you:
