Idea Garage Sale: Yet More Fun with Titles

The Turn of the Shrew.

Because I can't read Taming of the Shrew as anything but a celebration of spousal abuse and psychological torture. It's the only Shakespeare play I actively dislike. (To be fair, I've never seen a production of Merchant of Venice. How you feel about that one depends a lot on how Shylock is played.)

Anyway, the idea of Kate adapting her methods and gaslighting Petrucchio to get control of her own life - and money - back appeals to me. It is often forgotten that Petrucchio is explicitly interested in marrying her for her dowry because he's broke, which makes Kate's climactic speech about wives "owing" obedience to their hardworking breadwinning men so wincingly and obviously inappropriate I wonder how anybody can play it straight. I'm not sure exactly how the plot would roll, though. In order to make the title work best it would have to both borrow some of the tension and subtlety of James's psychological horror story and retain much of the bawdy, physical humor of an Elizabethan comedy.

It is a damn shame that getting a genius-level idea is so much easier than pulling off, or even knowing how to start, genius-level work.

Idea Garage Sale: Moar Fun with Titles

Sorry, y'all; been unreasonably tired all day. So have some titles looking around for stories to belong to.

Serenading Mrs. Crumplebottom.

Sticky Threads: A Memoir

All the Cool Kids go to Frank's

I Never Promised You a Beer Garden

Shotgun Divorce.

How I Screwed Up This Week, and Why It's Not My Fault.

Idea Garage Sale: Yet More Fun with Titles

The Belle Curve.
I'm thinking YA. Southern American high school. Weight issues, realistically handled. Or a transgirl. Or both.

The Songs of Unknown Birds.
Issues of identification in birdwatching analogously linked with mysteries of personal identity. Possibly concerned with an adoptee's adolescent crisis?

Hunting the Eidolon Duck.
An Eider Duck is a real duck. So an Eidolon Duck would be a phantom duck. And it just seems there ought to be - someplace - to go with that.

The Good Sprout.
Where the Bad Seed meets a good sport...

Givers, Takers, Movers, Shakers
A history of utopian communalism? Certainly a community-based narrative, not primarily concerned with a single protagonist.

Cry Me a River
A history of sarcasm. Must include one whole chapter distinguishing sarcasm from irony.

All's Well that Ends
A comedy centering on a disastrous high school production of a certain Shakespeare play.

Idea Garage Sale: More Fun with Titles

The Imperfect Gentleman. Is it an etiquette manual, a romance, a cozy mystery, an ironic and detached personal memoir, or a character study?

Harmed and Dangerous. Obviously, a revenge flick.

Brief Lies. Have I done this one before? I think it's the perfect title for a short story collection.

The Goddess of the Machine. Science fiction. Probably dystopian.

Tube Full of Cats. A social history of the internet.

Midnight at the House of Thieves. Sword and sorcery. Heavily influenced by the author's D&D game. And I mean old-school, not this 4E crap, whippersnappers!

Whippersnappers vs. Geezers, Film at Eleven. A rollicking comedy of the eternal generation gap. And don't try telling me the generation gap is a modern invention! There's a Sumerian tablet in which a parent is grousing about how kids today don't want to work hard and all his son ever does is hang out on the corner with his hoodlum friends.

Bootlegged Heart. A romance, set in 1920s middle America, or the modern knock-off designer label market, or a near-future science fiction milieu centering on e-piracy and the ramifications of intellectual property. Or all three, if you do a generational saga and pluralize the title.

Knight of the Living Dead. In which the zombies field a champion.

Escape from Loopland. Starts out like one of those bleak suburban mainstream novels full of alienated characters. I never read the things. But somebody must like them. You know, lots of adultery and drinking and so on. But then the protagonist decides to be daring and actually go downtown, get out of her damn car, and walk around, discovering a whole new, vibrant world like nothing she ever knew existed.

Idea Garage Sale: Fun with Titles

Sometimes you just sit and make lists of titles, you know?

You don't? Well, have some.

The Assimilated Man. I feel like I may have remembered rather than invented this one.
Storm Front. (And it's sequel, Storm Back? What about Storm Side?)
In Case I Forget.
Mountain Time.
The Bad Old Days.
Hot Potato, Bad Tomato. A Love Story. (Insomnia, what can I say?)
Of Course I Will, If You Want Me To.
Bad Love. And its sequel, Good Hate. All wrapped up in the final book of the trilogy, Neutral Indifference.
Neural Pathways through the Forest of the Mind.
A Field Guide to the Butterflies of Chernobyl.
Building a Better Mantrap.
Brunettes Have More Money.
The Torrid Latitudes.
Cruise Ship of Destiny.
The Flying Minuteman.
The Dogs of Peace.

Hey, It Works!

No, not the zipper (though I have now put in three in a row on the first try - it pays to do it again before you forget how); the Garage Sale!

Andrew May took the Mechanical Gorilla notion, merged it with the hoax Bigfoot killed on the side of the road, and produced a funny, pulpy tale of mad science, appropriately called The Mechanical Gorilla. Available in electronic format. Check it out.

I'm, like, a literary godmother, or aunt, or something.

My very favorite sentence, from sane-sounding scientist Dr. Azuma: "That would violate Cambridge Town Council's strict regulations vis-a-vis the utilization of combat robots in a peacetime urban environment." That's a whole lotta world-building, right there.

Ducks Discover America

When I was researching 11,000 Years Lost, specifically when I was looking into the floral and faunal assemblages of the period so my hunter/gatherers could be hunting and gathering, avoiding and encountering, the right range of living things, I saw a book on a top shelf called Ducks Discover America. Oh, boy! A natural history of ducks in the Western Hemisphere? How and when and why they evolved, migrated, emigrated, immigrated, mingled with Old World Ducks around the Arctic and Antarctic Circles, interacted with other species including humans - what could be better?

When I managed, with much labor, to elevate myself to the top shelf (short in a tall world; life is rough), that wasn't what it was. I don't remember what it was; only I had misread the title and it was no good to me at all.

But I wanted to read the book that belongs to that title. And my desire has not diminished.

Some ornithologist/paleontologist go write it, please.

I'll wait.

Not patiently, but I'll wait.

Idea Garage Sale: Everything But What I Want

Still no title inspiration for Len's story. I can think of titles that have no stories to go with them, though.

On the Other Hand, What the Heck's the Use?
70s problem novel, I think.

The Stars and the Gingerbread Man
I have no idea what genre, even, this would be, but c'mon, you'd pick it up just to find out, wouldn't you?

The Secret Mystery of the Hidden Clue.
To catch all the 10-year-olds walking up and down the aisle scanning for the words "Secret," "Mystery," "Hidden," and "Clue" in order to get their mystery fix.

Beginning, Anywhere
YA. This is a quote from Fort: "One measures a circle, beginning, anywhere."

Garden of Memory, River of Time
A Hole in the World
Lost Moonshine
A time travel trilogy, or they could also be Moody Blues albums. Speaking of which:

Psycho Delia.
Don't know anything about it, except the name of the central character. Possibly Delia is not the protagonist, but if not, she's the catalyst.

Brief Lies
Best title ever for a short story collection.

Lunch is Where You Find It: A Guide to Foraging

One Nation, Under the Bed
Is it a middle grade fantasy or a snarky YA contemporary?

A Storm in the Brain
It's Not What You Think You Want
Land Mind
Quit While You're Behind

Time to get ready for the game, anyway.

Idea Garage Sale: The Next SyFy Channel Original Movie

It's about a giant rampaging flying proboscidian and the title is:

Mammothra!

Plot? Have you seen any "SyFy Channel Original Movies?" They all have the same plot and the same handful of characters. The draw, such as there is, is the monster and its absurd CGI.

I can't take credit for this; it all goes at the feet of my husband Damon, who often throws out punning titles for me, whether there's a project to go with it or not. Switching Well is one of his - when I was talking about that book and puzzling over the mechanics of time travel, he suggest the wishing/switching well device.

Why, yes, I did have trouble sleeping after caffeinating, driving up to Austin and back, and attending the WTL conference yesterday. Thank you for asking. I think I'll crawl back into bed now that I've caught up on newsgroups and comics and things.

Idea Garage Sale: Time Gypsies

I want a good, reliable, low-impact method of time travel.

Yesterday I drove up to Belton to get my signed copy of Clovis Archeology, watch a presentation on big game hunting among the plains cultures, and schmooze other archeology fans. I was coming out of the restroom, planning to leave, when I saw a poster for the musical Hair, the cast recording of which happens to be in Moby's CD changer right now, and thus discovered that the West Gallery was hosting a display devoted to the year 1968. So I popped in and looked around.

I was all of 7 and living in small-town Iowa in 1968, so from one point of view I missed a lot of it. But of what year is this not true? If we have time we have no money, if we have money we no energy; our freedom is circumscribed in different ways at different times of our lives, and the opportunities of which we can realistically take advantage are limited by choice as well as distance, alertness, and responsibility. I wouldn't have worn a mini-skirt if I'd been old enough; but the postcards advertising the various gigs of musicians scattered about the displays made me sigh for chances that will never come again. Who knew Chuck Berry and Steve Miller ever played together? And it probably cost - what, five dollars? Less? - to get into the venue!

Sure, I'd visit the Pleistocene and Civil War Texas and, if possible, warn certain people of certain things; but I'd also see in their prime the artists I missed, or never got to see till age began to take an audible toll - Aretha Franklin when she could dance "Dr. Feelgood" without losing her breath, Gordon Lightfoot before the years stripped layers from his voice, the Supremes before Diana Ross took off, Buddy Holly (speaking of warnings; but he wouldn't listen to me, why should he?). I might or might not go to Woodstock, but the question with the Beatles is not Whether but Which Performance?

That's probably why the title "Time Gypsies" appeals to me. I envision a society of people with caravans that travel the time roads; tied to earth but not to the solar cycle. They would interact with hundreds of different time periods during their own lifetimes; not freely, no, but their opportunities and regrets would be different from those of us tied to linear time. Children would be given names inspired by the particular period they were born in. My protagonists would be male/female twins named Mac and PC; PC would tell people her name was short for Pamela Christine or Prudence Charity or whatever, as appropriate to when she was at the moment. They would vacation on beaches not yet approached by homo erectus as it spread across the globe; do menial labor in Babylon in exchange for small coins that could be traded for a period of luxury in 20th century New York; possibly they would collect unfortunates lost in the cracks of history. Maybe not all the Jews who vanished without a trace in Europe from 1933 to 1945 went into the furnace; maybe Virginia Dare was rescued from whatever fate befell Roanoke colony.

As a vehicle for wish fulfillment, this premise is a gold mine. As a viable novel, not so much. There'd have to be a sizable community of these people, at least 200; or they'd have to recruit new genetic material from around the timeline to prevent inbreeding. Their vehicles and other tech would have to be able to blend in with any time period. They'd have to carry a wide variety of outfits (interdimensional closet space); and they'd have to have a reason for being who and what they were. What is their economic base? What life goals does this lifestyle serve? Most of all, what do Mac and PC want, that this lifestyle doesn't provide?

I could go a number of ways on this. I absolutely refuse to have one of those time travel set-ups in which history is "supposed" to happen a certain way and the people who can move in time manipulate the fabric to put it "right." History, the way I experience it, is a vast complex interaction of physical laws, contingency, accident, and free will. The notion that one track of history is "right" (ours; with all its genocides, petty stupid wars, industrial pollution, unsustainable agriculture, and so on) but can be messed up and corrected by small actions of individuals is self-contradictory at best, morally revolting at worst.

Maybe the Time Gypsies are parasites leeching off the energy and innovation of linear time; and Mac and PC are the ones who realize that something's wrong with that paradigm, that it's unsustainable. Maybe one of them gets stranded because the time roads can be ridden but not steered, or they learn that some underlying principle of their tech is wrong and this has bad effects on - somebody. Maybe there's two sets of Time Gypsies with opposing goals, and their conflict plays out in the fields of linear time, to everyone's detriment.

I don't know. None of it seems to work somehow. But if I ever see a book with this title, I will pick it up. 'Cause it's a great title!

Idea Garage Sale: The Secret Staircase

One of my first drawer manuscripts was titledThe Secret Staircase. I was ten, I think. I wrote "The Secret Staircase" on the top line of the paper, skipped a line, wrote "Chapter One," and started introducing my characters. They were Claire (12,) Maud (10 and the protagonist), and Mavis (8). They lived in the mid-nineteenth century in a classic Queen Anne house and I spent several chapters describing how they lived without ever figuring out where the secret staircase was, why it was in that house, or what the plot would be.

I thought about using the title again, about 20 years later, and made a serious attempt to think about how to make it work with my limitations and talents as a writer. As an adult I prefer to set stories in places I know well, so I needed a reason for a secret staircase in one of San Antonio's historic houses, and a reason for it to be key to the plot. Our historic houses aren't generally as big as all that (the one I live in now is about typical, at 2,000 square feet) unless originally built as hotels, boarding houses, or apartments. I decided that when the house was converted to apartments in the mid-twentieth century the narrow back staircase used by the servants was sealed off. The girls in the apartments at its foot and head would discover it and find a way to go backward and forward in time using it. That was when I first became interested in Reconstruction as a time period; but I never got the spark that turned the mechanical operation of putting a plot together into a book. The only characters with faces and voices were two people in the past: the ex-slave cook-housekeeper, and her son, a State Policeman under Congressional Reconstruction. Even they were distant, on the far side of a sea of research.

So I let it be. I may tell their story someday. I'm finding that, though not nearly the open untapped field the Pleistocene is, Reconstruction cries out for a different sort of treatment than it's generally had in fiction. And The Secret Staircase is a good title. But I may not ever be able to use it and anyway, titles can't be copyrighted. So take it if you need it.