Of titles and learning to write again.

I hate coming up with titles. I'm not good at it, and it's easy to end up with something corny. Fae - The Wild Hunt more or less named itself. For that matter, so did Fae - The Realm of Twilight. This this third book though, this one is giving me problems.

In a burst of pure genius I thought I'd do a poll and see what you guys (by which I mean the internet in general) thought of the three options I was working with. Maybe I'd get lucky and get a clear sign. It could happen couldn't it? No. It couldn't. As you can see from the results below, not only didn't it happen but they are almost worthless.

On the face of it, it looks like the first option is every so slightly edging the rest. That said, though it got more votes than either of the others, you could read it that 60% of those that voted didn't want it. About the only thing the poll did tell me was that option two was a non-starter. So basically the poll has been about as much use as a chocolate teapot. On that basis then I'm going to say "the heck with it" and go with option three as the working title.

I started work on book three of The Riven Wyrde Saga a little more than a month ago now and it's been hard going. I had the same problem when I finished book one, I took too long of a break and pretty much forgot how to write. There is nothing particularly hard about writing itself. You sit and type until you hit the length you were looking for and then you'e done. The trouble comes when you want to write something of any quality that people might actually want to read because then you've got to reread and polish and edit.

My method has always been to get the thing written and then go back and try and make it good. The trouble is I've grown to be very critical of myself over the last year. I've had real problems resisting the urge to just delete the whole damn page and start over, but we're getting there.

I have two things that I really struggle with when writing. Okay that's not true, I have several things I struggle with. These range from keeping the caffeine intake at the optimal level to have me bouncy enough to pump the words out, but not so jacked up that I am actually hanging from the ceiling, to keeping the small people (kids, not faeries) alive, happy, not on fire, and killing each other reasonably quietly while I'm trying to write.

By the end of Fae - The Realm of Twilight I was producing about 40'000 word a month. Some writers (mentioning no names *cough* Tim Marquitz *cough*) will brag on social media about banging out over eight thousand words in a day. Me, I can't do that. Four thousand is about my max and that's going to need a LOT of going over.

It usually takes me about twenty minutes of writing to get into a zone where I can produce something good. It has a feel to it. If you're anything like me and you read fantasy as a kid you'll remember that moment when Garion first used sorcery in David Eddings' Belgariad or when the dragon died in Raymond E Feist's Magician, leaving Tomas the valheru's armour. Moments when you step out of the story just long enough to think, "damn, that is cool!" before throwing yourself back in, deeper than before. It's that feeling that I aim for when I'm writing. Once I get close to that then I know I've hit the zone and I'm going to get some good stuff down.

I've hit that a few times now so I think we're getting there and if you check back here or on Facebook in the coming months then you might find a snippet or two, if you're into that kind of self-inflicted torture.

Fae - The Sins of the Wyrde should be out sometime this autumn