IWSG - Title Woes

 

            Everything about my writing life feels clenched up in knots right now.  From the simplest things—like that I got new glasses last week only to find out that I couldn’t read in them, because while my optician kept saying “bifocals bifocals” he didn’t actually explain that the muscles in the eyes start working differently when you hit mid-forties, so now I’m having to get new lenses with progressive bifocal lenses so I’ll be able to read and see things in the distance with the same pair of glasses—to the much more complicated situation regarding the upcoming release of the lightly interactive version of the first novel in my series about three illegitimate children of the Greek heroes of the Trojan War.

            A few days ago, I posted a question about how to handle one of the behind-the-scenes details of the release (which did not get a useful answer in the least, I’m sorry to say) on one of the forums at itch.io, in which I stupidly said that I was going to be releasing “in a few weeks.”  Now, this was not any kind of formal announcement, and likely no one who saw it is in the slightest bit interested in what I’ll be releasing—and the few people who are interested in it absolutely had no way of seeing that post.

            But I still feel like I’m bound to honor that date if I can.  (Without, you know, going insane.)

            And so long as I don’t have to do too much editing on the current draft, I should be able to, since the programming involved is minimal.  (It would help if my beta reader had actually read the darn thing and given me feedback, but it’s pretty clear at this point that no matter what he claims, he’s not actually going to do so.  And I promised him last time I brought it up that it would in fact be the last time I brought it up, so there’s no helping that.)

            Honestly, at this point, I’m more worried about the title than anything else.  I don’t think there’s too much I can do to improve the text without detailed feedback from a reader, after all.

            But the title!  OMG, it’s terrible.

            I have prepared a title screen for the game:

             So, yeah, you can see how bad that title is.  (The graphic behind the title is fine, of course, being a photo from Wikimedia Commons of a (heavily reconstructed) Mycenaean fresco.)

            I mean, it’s not necessarily a bad title, as such, but it sort of promises a different novel than the reader would get.  And it doesn’t fit in with the rest of the titles in the series:

            Bonds of Blood and Water (formerly The Vessel of Athene, then briefly The Walls of Troy)

            The Golden God of Aiolia (formerly The Golden God of Thessaly, only it turns out that the name Thessaly is anachronistic)

            The Martial Maenads

            The Tablet of Destinies

            Warriors of Pontos

            The Golden Swan (formerly The Goddess of the Cabieri)

            The Awakening (though that’s kind of a spoilery title and should probably be changed)

             Hmm, you know, looking at those titles, I feel like I was trying to pick out titles that would have worked for story titles on the original Doctor Who.  (Well, the novels did start out with the intention of being a YA series, and the original Doctor Who was viewed by the BBC as “children’s programming” so that’s not necessarily a bad metric to use.)  Which only makes the current title for the first one even more wrong.

            I released the first chapter already on itch.io as The Cousins, which actually feels like the best title for the novel so far, but it’s also very underwhelming.  I feel like the title really ought to at least imply the setting (hence the second title I briefly gave it) or do something to indicate that this is not set in the historic Late Bronze Age, but the Greek Heroic Age, in which the gods were very much real and took part in events.

            The plot of the novel can be summed up thus:

            Cousins Atalanta and Ariadne are brought up as slaves on the island of Lesbos (having been fathered during a single night’s visit by Achilles and Odysseus respectively in the final months of the war, probably at most a week before Achilles’ death), and on learning that their master is thinking of separating them, they decide to escape together.  (This makes up the portion already released.)  Following their escape in disguise as boys, they make their way to the remains of the Greek camp outside Troy, where they find a ship has landed for the night; among the men on board was young Eurysakes, the son of Telamonian Aias, first cousin of Achilles, making Eurysakes Atalanta’s second cousin.  Eurysakes was actually waiting at Achilles’ grave, having been told by an oracle that he would there meet companions who would help him repair his father’s honor and help his shade rest in peace.  Atalanta is eager to travel with him and help in his mission, but Ariadne distrusts him in every way; in spite of Ariadne’s misgivings, they do accept a ride on Eurysakes’ ship the rest of the way to the partially-rebuilt Troy, where they are welcomed as guests by the new king, Korythos, the son of Alexander.  (This may sound odd, but guest-friendship was very important in the Late Bronze Age.  Also, in my version (unlike in the original myths), Eurysakes has been raised by his uncle, Teukros, whose mother was Hesione, sister of King Priam.  So Korythos and Teukros are also cousins.  There are a lot of cousins in this book.  Though Teukros is only talked about, never present until many books later in the series.  And Teukros is now a king in Cyprus, which was the major source of copper in the region in the LBA, which made it supremely rich and powerful, since everyone needed copper to make the bronze they needed for their weapons and armor, so that’s also a very large part of why Korythos is so eager to welcome Eurysakes as a guest.)  There’s a little friction at the court between Korythos and one of the other nobles, Ganymede, but mostly their initial time in town just serves to set up the presence of a virtual army of bandits operating on Mt. Ida and terrorizing the region.  The trio decide to set off to fight the bandits, and following their successful return, things become surprisingly weird and fraught with tension.  It’s hard to sum up the rest from there, but they have to stop a plot that threatens the gods themselves.  (Though I’m sorry to say that I really did not do a very good job at setting up that possibility earlier in the text, even in the rewrite.  I did try as best I could, but…the problem with secret cults is that they tend to keep their secrets, well, secret!)

            Aside from the general theme of kinship, there are also themes of descent from watery gods (mostly just the king’s descent from the local river gods, and Atalanta’s being the granddaughter of a Nereid), guest-friendship, and the tension between trust and deceit (particularly deceit in the sense of people claiming to be someone or something they’re not).  The Trojan temple to Athene eventually becomes a very important part of the story, but its importance isn’t revealed until late in the book, hence one of the reasons the first title was something of a spoiler and had to be rejected.

            Unfortunately, I can’t even look to the ancient works as a suggestion of how to title it, because they tended towards very simple titles, often either the name of the lead character or a name adapted from that lead’s name (eg Odyssey from Odysseus).  While I’m currently planning on calling the series “The Adventures of Atalanta and Ariadne” (which isn’t very fair, since Eurysakes is just as big a part of the series) since I can’t come up with anything better, I can’t really name this after its “lead” because there isn’t one:  it’s very much a shared lead for the three of them.  Well, no, in this particular case, it’s more like Atalanta and Ariadne sharing the lead; Eurysakes doesn’t get full shared lead until book two.  (All seven novels were written back in 2014, btw.  These are just rewrites/adaptations.)

            So I am completely and utterly befuddled as to how to proceed in terms of the work’s title. :(

 

            I welcome any and all suggestions…

    (BTW, did you know that Chrome's onboard spell-checker does not recognize the name Atalanta?  It recognizes Ariadne, but not Atalanta.  WTF?)