Friday, December 21, 2012

Chapter Titles

Wow... so I found this saved as a draft from almost a year ago.  I decided I'll finish it and post it now; hopefully it still makes sense.


Happy End of the World, everyone!

I always seem to have a lot of trouble coming up with chapter titles.  I've heard that you're supposed* to title books after you finish writing them and I know a lot of people have trouble with this -  but to be honest, I have a much harder time titling the individual chapters.

I feel like the chapter titles should all sort of fit together, or have a theme or something.  Sort of like those young adult novels where every book in the series is an adjective (Broken, Taken, Flowing, Smelly) and it would be weird to have one out of place.

The big issue I'm having with Quicksand at the moment is titling the chapters (/parts).  The narrative is so long and convoluted (and will eventually put into an even less linear order) that I think separating it into chapters is necessary - but then I'm not sure how, or if the chapter titles should somehow indicate which of the three plots that chapter is technically about.  I've even considered little icons to indicate this - suns and moons and stars or rabbits and foxes or... something.  I don't even know.

I had this same problem with Aigaion Girl, and I think I was only saved by the fact that I wrote it in first person, so I very lazily titled each section with the name of the narrator, then counted down the signs of the apocalypse and BAM!

Of course, there's a little part of me that wonders if titled chapters are things that belong in children's books and fantasy novels only.  I'm racking my brain and I can't think of where else I've seen them.  Of course, I'm in Slovakia at the moment and don't have any books I can run and check.



*whoever decided that...




Saturday, December 8, 2012

Whoops, completely forgot, it's December, so all posts should be accompanied by a creepy-ass piece of holiday art from the magical time of yesteryear. 

Poetry Revisited

Since I have the place to myself this weekend*, I've been having a lazy day and I thought I would narc around** a bit, so I was looking at my Fictionpress profile and some stuff that I published on there a while ago.  I thought for a laugh, I would look through my angst-ridden poems from days gone by and see how cringe-worthy they were.  To my complete and utter shock, they're not bad.  Actually, I would say they are good.  

I had pretty much given up on writing poetry because I assumed, without really thinking about it, that my several-year poetry "phase" had been generated by man-related emo-ness and that everything I wrote during that time was therefore crap.  Oddly, several of my old poems don't have anything to do with men - and now that I can look at them more objectively, I'm pretty happy with the ones that do as well.

So, I'm thinking, this idea that only hormonal teenagers write poetry anymore needs to go away.  We no longer live in a society that can support people as professional poets, but I think people still have thoughts and feelings that can best be expressed through the written word.... and I'm not saying that I am a wonderful poet - but if I hadn't let my insecurities get the better of me, maybe by now I could have been.

Still, I'm young.  I may get there yet.

*My fiance is elsewhere.  I am bored and I want him to come home.
**This is my new phrase, referring to lazily looking over one's own old writing, paintings, photos, etc. with no real goal or purpose in mind.