Monday, June 16, 2014

The Dreams You Made in the Dirt, and other titles.

My Love's Landscapes story, The Dreams You Made in the Dirt, is here! 

Well, it's currently here to read at Goodreads

And soon it will be available for download here at the MM Romance Group



Anyway, it's out now, so I thought I'd tell you guys a thing about the event. They ask you for the title right at the beginning. Horrifying! 

Not horrifying enough? Let me retype that in bold caps: THEY ASK YOU FOR THE TITLE RIGHT AT THE BEGINNING. 

I hate titles. I'm really, really bad with them. 

Really bad. 

Just ask J.A. Rock. When our working title for When All the World Sleeps didn't pan out, I swear it took us longer to come up with a title than it did to actually finish writing the book. I can't possibly come up with a title before a book is written. 

Here are some working titles I have on my computer: 

The Demon One. Creative, right? 
Bodygaurd. Yes, spelled like that and everything. 
And, my personal favourite, which I swear is real:  Crap. I was supposed to be working on something else and got totally distracted by a shiny new idea instead. This one's a sequel for Another Man's Treasure, BTW.

But one day, sometime last month, I was working really hard at my writing playing games on my phone when the phrase hit me out of nowhere: the dreams you made in the dirt.

What's it mean? No idea. But it seemed like the sort of thing I could use as a title. Just had to wedge it in there somewhere and make it seem organic. So this little thing happened between Aiden and his mum, when Aiden was a kid:


He remembered her hosing off his filthy legs before letting him back into the house. 

“Look at you!”



“Are you mad?”



“Why would I be mad?”



“I’m covered in mud.”



“Are you sure that’s mud? I thought you were covered in the dreams you made in the dirt.”


After that, sometimes Aiden would look at the black lines of dirt under his nails and smile.



So I like to think I'm getting better with titles. I'm certainly getting more creative. First book? Tribute. Second: The Island. Now I have actual phrases! Truly, this are the promised times. 

1 comment:

J.A. Rock said...

Love the title. And the story. You should probably pretend you know what the title means and give readers secretive smiles if they ask.

And we're keeping that title for the AMT sequel, right?