Dean Koontz says a title can be a starting point for a book, and I feel surrounded by good titles. The Delta Variant, for instance, could be a great thriller owing a lot to Outbreak, or The Hot Zone by Richard Preston. Then there’s Coma by Robin Cook. Cook read a bunch of thrillers and then wrote one. Another perfectly good approach. He studied bestsellers, figured out a bunch of techniques that writers use and wrote them on index cards. He says he used every one of them in Coma.
Buzzard’s Luck, a new incarnation of Dark Matter, has been reincarnated yet again and become Deguello, a totally great title that means “slit throat” or “beheading.” Perfect, really, and it allowed me finally to figure out who killed Harry North.
It hasn’t solved another central problem, however. Who is the protagonist? I am still struggling with that one. In spite of having quite a bit of it written, I can’t start putting it together in its next iteration until I know whose hand I want to be holding as I stumble through the story.
While I work on figuring that out, I’ve taken The Achilles Factor up again and made a tentative marketing plan to start sending it out for the second time. After fifteen rejections last year, I bought Writer’s Market and highlighted every agent whose blurb included both “suspense” and “thriller.” Yield: 95 prospects.
Since I sent it to most of the biggest most desirable houses last year, I thought I might retitle it and send it to them again. I’m still weighting that option, but meanwhile the new title is: The Doomsday Mistake.
Already taken were: The Doomsday Factor, The Doomsday Effect, The Doomsday Scenario, The Doomsday Reckoning, and The Doomsday Device.
Considered and not already taken but ultimately rejected were: The Doomsday Complication, the Edge of Doomsday, the Brink of Doomsday, The Doomsday Principle, The Doomsday Crisis, The Doomsday Dance, The Doomsday Man, The Doomsday Satellite, The Doomsday Emergency, and The Damocles File.
That last one snuck in there, along with Rocket Science, Dead in Space, How the Universe Works, Loose Nuke, Probability Theory, Chaos Theory, Chaos, The Cosmological Constant, Problems in Orbital Mechanics, Staying Alive, and Don’t Die.
The fate of The Doomsday Mistake remains to be seen. Getting ready to send it out again. I’ll let you know.
Eclectic Magpie 