Ironic, that I can't think of a title
My muse is somewhat traumatised by my hacking and slashing of over 5000 words from a WIP last night, thus reducing it to quivering with fear that I'll take away its porn quality inspirational reading, or something equally heinous (like subjecting it to copious amounts of Hardy - muse has yet to forgive me for that whole 'Tess' debacle, though I maintain it was forced upon us by an unfeeling education system.)
But, it had to be done, muse!
It was for its own good!
The good Bunne (katiefoolery) was shaking her head at me as I managed to add 500 words while converting horrific run on sentences to something resembling prose.
WTF, muse? How did you manage to add words, when the intention was to slim things on down?
So, instead of the writerly equivalent of a diet, where we attempt to shed a few pounds by avoiding rich description and thesauri (always a source of hidden full fat words) and exercising the use of full stops and punctuatory sundries, we were forced into drastic liposuction-y surgery!
And recovery from that is a bitch!
As an aside, Firefox and its inline spellchecker believes I have coined a new word - alas, google has dashed my hopes of erudite expression. Punctuatory isn't in the dictionary... yet! But is nonetheless beloved by like-minded, wordmashing souls
So, while I spoon feed poor muse with syllabub and soothing promises of smut, I shall meme.
kellifer_fic is talking about the art of making titles
How do you come up with titles. Do they just pop into your head, do you use other resources? Do you hit thesaurus.com as much as me?
When I first began writing fic, I would title things after I'd written them, or at least when I had a handle on what the fic was going to be about.
"Five Minutes To Midnight" is a good example. This title comes from the concept of the Doomsday Clock, which is an analogy whereby the amount of "minutes til midnight" represents how close the human race is to catastrophic destruction. And... it was in the news while I was writing this apocafic-based scenario - the clock was moved forward to five minutes. It just seemed perfect, especially as the fic opens with a countdown scenario. :P
Most of my other fic was titled via the incredibly useful thesaurus.com - as I wanted the title to reflect the story, or I used a familiar idiomatic expression, such as "Here be Dragons", referring to the great unknown in old maps - just like the story in a way :P
"Spring Loaded Camming Device" is a direct pun (I love and adore puns), both with Cam's name and with the punch line of the story. A camming device is used in climbing, and is pretty much jammed into crevices in the same way that Cam manages to fall down one (albeit one of the large, gaping in the ground variety)
Nowadays I title before I begin - I have myself a .txt file where I collect anything and everything that I think might make a good title. And a perusal of my WIP folder uncovers the following:
"A Second Before Awakening" - Joe Faxon epic (from a poem)
"In The Sky's Deliberate Mirror" - pre-series Sam!fic (poem)
"Sink To The Abyssal Plain" - Teal'c fic (science textbook)
"Far In The Winnowed Past" - Moebius fic (poem)
"Beneath The Weight Of Dark"- Sam and Martouf by_hand fic (Sara Teasdale)
"On the Other Side of Rain" - apocafic (line from "Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell")
"Days Darker than Night" - Teal'c and Sam apocafic (line from "Red Ice" trilogy)
So I've become a little wordier, what with my new found love of snippet-like titles.
What's your favourite title of a story you've written?
"Ever Falling Dust" is where I began to title fics before I started them. This was my remix ficathon story (and incidentally, probably still my favourite ficathon to participate in, purely because of the writing challenge it gave me)
kormantic's original story had a picture that had been its basis of inspiration (handily linked!) and it was of these beautiful pierced metal lanterns, glowing from within. So I knew I wanted to work that in somehow. I started googling like a madwoman for anything and everything connected to lamps, lanterns, lights... (yay thesaurus.com)
Originally, I found an achingly beautiful quote from Virginia Woolf:
“But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? The entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world -- a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors.”
I spent a long time with this as a concept for the fic. It still tugs at me, and at some point I'll have to explore it further (because, how could I not!), but the problem was that it just wasn't meshing well with the concept of remixing. To have kept at this tangent would have made this story too far removed from the source. Incidentally, the many meta posts people made on remixing were incredibly useful - I realised that I had to look at the fic and reincorporate it into mine, take what was there and turn it about so that it still visible, as underlying bones but re-visioned.
I picked that fic apart. And then I was ready to begin - with the same scene as Kormantic, but from another POV. Then I remembered a result I'd glanced over that was about 12 pages back in a google search. It was a Jimi Hendrix song: "Burning Of The Midnight Lamp"
The chorus:
And I continue
To burn the midnight lamp
Alone
Worked really well, because it sort of reflected Rodney in the original fic, toiling as Atlantis lurched toward a fiery death by re-entry.
But then...
It really doesn't, really doesn't bother me too much at all
It's just the ever falling dust
That makes it so hard for me to see
There it was, and it was PERFECT. Because it summed up what originally drew me to "McKay's Metaphysics" in the first place - the opening paragraph of the fic, which I'll quote here because it still resonates with me:
The wreckage of the false Atlantis built by the Asurans, built of the Asurans, had drifted in the space above the true city, shining like satellites in the night sky. Some of its wreckage fell into the planet's gravity well; shooting stars fell for days as the flotsam hit atmosphere and burned all the way down.
*cough* go and read it, yes *cough*
The falling debris... which was the 'ever falling dust' and that whole idea of 'dust thou art' and the fleeting nature of life, which is all metaphysical in itself.
So that's my long winded way of saying, this was my favourite title to arrive at, and once I had it the story just unfolded.
What about a title of something of mine? Has something made you go bzuh? What does that have to do with the story???
I'm going to go with The Long Pause Between" and "The Butterfly Tide" - because the beauty of the titles makes me want to read the fic.
"Incresco" is the one that delights me the most as a Latin geek, and because I knew the meaning of the word, it just made an already heart breaking fic even more so.
What's a favourite title of something you've read that isn't yours fandom wise?
I think that would be abyssinia4077's "Eroding Away the Mountains", because it's beautiful imagery for one, and manages to be a comment on the wider themes of the fic at the same time.
What's a favourite title of something you've read that isn't yours non-fandom wise? For me, it's definitely The Stand.
"The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam"
Somewhat cheating, because technically it isn't an English word. But we had this masterpiece that everyone should read at some point in their lives on our bookshelf and ever since I learned to read I just loved the way it kind of lilts off the tongue as you say it.
To me, it conjures up ideas of the Arabian nights and the lure of the far East.
ETA: And the fic is off to beta-land! Wheee!
But, it had to be done, muse!
It was for its own good!
The good Bunne (katiefoolery) was shaking her head at me as I managed to add 500 words while converting horrific run on sentences to something resembling prose.
WTF, muse? How did you manage to add words, when the intention was to slim things on down?
So, instead of the writerly equivalent of a diet, where we attempt to shed a few pounds by avoiding rich description and thesauri (always a source of hidden full fat words) and exercising the use of full stops and punctuatory sundries, we were forced into drastic liposuction-y surgery!
And recovery from that is a bitch!
As an aside, Firefox and its inline spellchecker believes I have coined a new word - alas, google has dashed my hopes of erudite expression. Punctuatory isn't in the dictionary... yet! But is nonetheless beloved by like-minded, wordmashing souls
So, while I spoon feed poor muse with syllabub and soothing promises of smut, I shall meme.
kellifer_fic is talking about the art of making titles
How do you come up with titles. Do they just pop into your head, do you use other resources? Do you hit thesaurus.com as much as me?
When I first began writing fic, I would title things after I'd written them, or at least when I had a handle on what the fic was going to be about.
"Five Minutes To Midnight" is a good example. This title comes from the concept of the Doomsday Clock, which is an analogy whereby the amount of "minutes til midnight" represents how close the human race is to catastrophic destruction. And... it was in the news while I was writing this apocafic-based scenario - the clock was moved forward to five minutes. It just seemed perfect, especially as the fic opens with a countdown scenario. :P
Most of my other fic was titled via the incredibly useful thesaurus.com - as I wanted the title to reflect the story, or I used a familiar idiomatic expression, such as "Here be Dragons", referring to the great unknown in old maps - just like the story in a way :P
"Spring Loaded Camming Device" is a direct pun (I love and adore puns), both with Cam's name and with the punch line of the story. A camming device is used in climbing, and is pretty much jammed into crevices in the same way that Cam manages to fall down one (albeit one of the large, gaping in the ground variety)
Nowadays I title before I begin - I have myself a .txt file where I collect anything and everything that I think might make a good title. And a perusal of my WIP folder uncovers the following:
"A Second Before Awakening" - Joe Faxon epic (from a poem)
"In The Sky's Deliberate Mirror" - pre-series Sam!fic (poem)
"Sink To The Abyssal Plain" - Teal'c fic (science textbook)
"Far In The Winnowed Past" - Moebius fic (poem)
"Beneath The Weight Of Dark"- Sam and Martouf by_hand fic (Sara Teasdale)
"On the Other Side of Rain" - apocafic (line from "Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell")
"Days Darker than Night" - Teal'c and Sam apocafic (line from "Red Ice" trilogy)
So I've become a little wordier, what with my new found love of snippet-like titles.
What's your favourite title of a story you've written?
"Ever Falling Dust" is where I began to title fics before I started them. This was my remix ficathon story (and incidentally, probably still my favourite ficathon to participate in, purely because of the writing challenge it gave me)
kormantic's original story had a picture that had been its basis of inspiration (handily linked!) and it was of these beautiful pierced metal lanterns, glowing from within. So I knew I wanted to work that in somehow. I started googling like a madwoman for anything and everything connected to lamps, lanterns, lights... (yay thesaurus.com)
Originally, I found an achingly beautiful quote from Virginia Woolf:
“But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? The entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world -- a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors.”
I spent a long time with this as a concept for the fic. It still tugs at me, and at some point I'll have to explore it further (because, how could I not!), but the problem was that it just wasn't meshing well with the concept of remixing. To have kept at this tangent would have made this story too far removed from the source. Incidentally, the many meta posts people made on remixing were incredibly useful - I realised that I had to look at the fic and reincorporate it into mine, take what was there and turn it about so that it still visible, as underlying bones but re-visioned.
I picked that fic apart. And then I was ready to begin - with the same scene as Kormantic, but from another POV. Then I remembered a result I'd glanced over that was about 12 pages back in a google search. It was a Jimi Hendrix song: "Burning Of The Midnight Lamp"
The chorus:
And I continue
To burn the midnight lamp
Alone
Worked really well, because it sort of reflected Rodney in the original fic, toiling as Atlantis lurched toward a fiery death by re-entry.
But then...
It really doesn't, really doesn't bother me too much at all
It's just the ever falling dust
That makes it so hard for me to see
There it was, and it was PERFECT. Because it summed up what originally drew me to "McKay's Metaphysics" in the first place - the opening paragraph of the fic, which I'll quote here because it still resonates with me:
The wreckage of the false Atlantis built by the Asurans, built of the Asurans, had drifted in the space above the true city, shining like satellites in the night sky. Some of its wreckage fell into the planet's gravity well; shooting stars fell for days as the flotsam hit atmosphere and burned all the way down.
*cough* go and read it, yes *cough*
The falling debris... which was the 'ever falling dust' and that whole idea of 'dust thou art' and the fleeting nature of life, which is all metaphysical in itself.
So that's my long winded way of saying, this was my favourite title to arrive at, and once I had it the story just unfolded.
What about a title of something of mine? Has something made you go bzuh? What does that have to do with the story???
I'm going to go with The Long Pause Between" and "The Butterfly Tide" - because the beauty of the titles makes me want to read the fic.
"Incresco" is the one that delights me the most as a Latin geek, and because I knew the meaning of the word, it just made an already heart breaking fic even more so.
What's a favourite title of something you've read that isn't yours fandom wise?
I think that would be abyssinia4077's "Eroding Away the Mountains", because it's beautiful imagery for one, and manages to be a comment on the wider themes of the fic at the same time.
What's a favourite title of something you've read that isn't yours non-fandom wise? For me, it's definitely The Stand.
"The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam"
Somewhat cheating, because technically it isn't an English word. But we had this masterpiece that everyone should read at some point in their lives on our bookshelf and ever since I learned to read I just loved the way it kind of lilts off the tongue as you say it.
To me, it conjures up ideas of the Arabian nights and the lure of the far East.
ETA: And the fic is off to beta-land! Wheee!