Howdy Muchachos!

So this is the latest post on the blog, but for those of you who didn’t know, I moved from Wix to WordPress, so it’s been a bit of an adjustment to get things rolling again.

Recently, I was asked by a reader:  

“How do you come up with the titles for your books?”  

This question pops up enough I figured I’d make it the topic for this week’s post.

So, how do I come up with the titles for my books?

The answer for me is quite simple: I don’t find the title, the title finds me.  I am one of those writers that like to plot their stories out in advance, to make a roadmap of sorts, so I know where I’m going. That works well enough for the story, but the title is a different animal.

I like to let the title come to me. Like Stephen King says in On Writing, when talking about people who unearth the story as I go, I let the title appear to me after I’ve written the book. Sometimes, the placeholder title that I just randomly make up at the beginning of the project is the one that becomes permanent, but most of the time, by the two-thirds point in the book, I figure out what I want to call it.  

There’s a certain mystery in the process, not unlike reading a new book for the first time.  In that way,  I never know if I’ve got a T-Rex or a turd as I go unearthing things.

For my first big book, Alea Jacta Est, I wanted something different (boy did I find that).  In Latin, alea jacta est means “the die is cast”.  Kind of a ‘point of no return’,  so to speak.  It’s what Julius Caesar said when he was ready to cross the Rubicon — at the time the river marked the boundary of Rome (the city) itself.  To cross the Rubicon at the head of an army meant you were intent on conquering Rome and that was considered an act of high treason against the republic — punishable by death.  It’s the ultimate “all-in” moment.

I likened that to the moment faced by Erik Larsson (the main character of Alea Jacta Est for those who haven’t yet read the story) when he realized that if the community didn’t band together and start organizing, they would all either starve or be driven from their homes or even killed.

Do or die, baby.

Leaving that aside, I had taken 4 years of Latin back in my school days and I’ve always admired the Romans (we are, in terms of Western Civilization, the direct heirs of Rome), and wanted to use a Latin phrase for the title.  Put it all together, and Alea Jacta Est was born.

Apache Dawn, what turned out to be my flagship series, is a bit of a different story.  The title was originally conceived as Oath of Office. But towards the end of the book I realized that the Oath part mostly applied to the President (one of the point of view characters in the story).  All well and good, except that by the end of the revision process, said President and his plotline created the background story, the undercurrent of tension that is applied to the other POV characters.

So if Oath of Office didn’t apply to the majority of the POV characters (only one — the President) what do I do then?  Well, I realized that a certain code phrase used by the military in the story to denote…uh…hmmm…how to say this without giving away a pretty big spoiler….?

Okay.  Apache Dawn is a military brevity code I made up.  That code either has a direct or rather serious impact on every character in the story (and the spin-off stories I’ve already started daydreaming about, heh heh).  Plus, I kinda liked how it sounded.  By the time I had finished the first draft, I at last realized that Apache Dawn was the title had to be the title of the book.

Hey, at least it’s not Latin!  I can’t tell you how many people have asked me what alea jacta est means over the past few years!

Anyway, you can see now that I don’t just reach up into the air and pull a name out of the sky.  I try to have the title reflect something major in the book, albeit with subtlety.  And more often than not, it just hits me, out of the blue.

Other titles were easier: Solar Storm, for instance was about a solar storm, so I went with it. And Elixr Plague, well, it’s the thing that starts the zombie apocalypse.

Anyway I hope this gives you a little behind the scenes taste of how I pick titles for my books. Until next time, keep your heads down and your powder dry my friends, for we live in interesting times!