Stumbling Through Adulthood

I don't know how people find titles for their books. This remains a total mystery to me.

I have written three full length novels.

One is self-published on amazon, it has a title because a friend who read it suggested an excellent one.

Two are sitting on my harddrive unpublished because I cannot for the freaking life of me find a title for either of them, and no "Charles and Jaime" or "Melissa and Jonathan" isn't going to cut it.

I have no idea how to synthesize the feeling, the essence of either of these stories into a title, and as a result, I can't seem to move forward with either.

It's driving me nuts.

Contrast to when I was writing fanfiction: often I started with the title, or a phrase and wrote a story around that (phrase "Sirius Black has become a liability" led to _Liability_). I never had a problem, titles came easily, cementing themselves to the story without effort.

Not so much with these two novels. The first one (C&J) I'm not fussed about. It is older and needs some major revisions. The newer one, I want to move forward with. It's been read by three people, all three have been positive and one who doesn't know me beyond a twitter handle suggested I start thinking about 'querying', which I guess it when you try to get an agent... but I can't do that without a freaking title and I seem to be stuck on that. I've asked my sister -one of my three readers- and she's as titleless as I am.

Ugh. I'm frustrated. I need to come up with a plan and I'm not having any luck.

OMG, IDEA! I could upload my whole novel to ChatGPT/Bing and ask it to come up with a title.....

I should be getting my thesis together. Methods are written, all the data (except one bit that I'll do this morning, I forgot about it) has been processed and stats run. I still have the graphs to do, gah, but the data is there. My intro/literature search is outlined and I need to send it to my advisor to make sure I'm on the right track there.

So what am I doing? Aside from reading twitter and the horrors of the Trump presidency, I'm writing back story to a novel that I love but am not sure has the guts to ever be anything more than a personal pet project (read: I'm pretty sure it does not have the guts to be anything more than a personal pet project, but I want to be optimistic and say "I'm not sure it does" when "I am pretty sure it does not").

Anyhow, sharing here.

He’d snapped at Carrie. It wasn’t that he wanted to snap at her, but he’d asked her to do dump the ingredients into the slow cooker and turn it on, so that they’d have dinner that evening, and she hadn’t done it. He’d even left her a note on her lunchbox to remind her. Worse than just forgetting, she had taken the bowl of seasoned meat and veggies out of the fridge and transferred them to the cooker, but had not turned it on, and the food was now warm, and would have to be thrown away. His mother had screamed at him, of course. She always blamed him when dinner was not on the table and screamed that now there was nothing to eat and that they’d all have to go to bed without dinner. That wasn’t true, and he knew he could make some pasta with tomato sauce, but he was tired too and at a growing thirteen, he was hungry and he’d snapped at Carrie when she whined that it was just that she’d forgotten and really he should have done it himself, never mind that the reason he hadn’t was that he’d been up at 4am to help with unloading at the supermarket, to earn some small bit of money under the table. He’d worked that morning, gone home for a quick shower and to change for school. There had only been two slices of bread left and he’d used them to make her lunch and not eaten himself. That was when he’d left her the note, and asked her to start dinner while she was having breakfast, gone to school, and then to do some more work, weeding and lawn mowing after, and had just gotten home moments before her and their parents, it was 6pm. So he’d snapped at her when she demanded to know why dinner wasn’t ready, even though he knew she’d just come from the mall with friends and that she always got a snack there.


They’d been standing on either side of the kitchen table, the slow cooker behind him on the counter, his mother, father, and Carrie across the table, all angry with him. Again. It always ended that way, with them angry at him, no matter who was responsible for whatever infraction had been committed, who had caused whatever problem encountered.


His mother had told him to go to his room (only she’d cursed at him) and that they would go out to eat. He swallowed against his hunger pangs and decided he’d make himself spaghetti when they left.


But then Carrie who should have been triumphant at getting to go out to eat had lashed out at him, perhaps because she was angry that he’d snapped at her, it was such a rare occurrence. She’d called him Charles, and she and Jamie were the only ones who usually called him Charlie. She’d said that he was clearly not her brother, he didn’t even look like them. He didn’t know where that came from, except that the previous week he’d been explaining the weird genetics of cat coats to her, and some basic genetics had been part of his explanation?


He expected one or the other of his parents to scold her, but neither said anything, despite this being, to his 13 year old mind, an insult to both of them, but then he looked at them.


His dad, big and tall, with light brown eyes, and light reddish-brown hair. His mother, blue-eyed and still blonde. Carrie, a bit plump like their mother, with her blue eyes and light brown hair, almost blonde, and the smattering of freckles on her fair skin.


And then there was him. Dark brown almond shaped eyes with long dark lashes. Dark brown hair. Skin that tanned to a dark gold and rarely burned. His face thin, his build slender. He didn’t look like any of them, he never had.


He wanted one of them to say something, to tell Carrie that of course he was her brother, and what was she talking about? He wanted them to laugh and tell Carrie not be silly. He wanted his father to get angry and ask Carrie was she was implying, that their mother had cheated on him? But neither of them said anything, his mother just continued to glare at him, his father stared at the ground.


He turned silently and went to his room. He lay down on his bed, on his stomach. He heard them leaving for dinner, and he just stayed there, not bothering to go to eat.
Some long ago boyfriend? He’d seen his birth certificate, he’d found it one day in a pile of papers. His father was listed, as, well, his father, and his mother as his mother. He knew that technically, he was theirs… but?


He wasn’t like them, he never had been, in so many ways. He was an introvert in a family of extroverts, a quiet self-contained boy to their boisterous gregariousness. Their idea of fun was a bbq with their trailer park neighbors, Carrie running around with the kids, his parents drinking and smoking with the adults, while he’d much rather be outdoors, in the woods, camping with Jamie. Of course there were other reasons for that preference, and Charles blushed in the darkness, but even without that, it remained that he was not like them.


He’d always known how different he felt from his family, but hadn’t known how deeply he needed to belong to them. He cried for a while. He would have gone out to see Jamie, even though has mother had told not to dare leave the trailer, but he knew poor Jamie was out that evening, stuck sitting through an evening of Bible Study with Miss Beryl. Eventually he fell asleep, tears still wet in his eyelashes.


He woke disoriented, to a hand on his shoulder. His father. He stayed still, not knowing what his father wanted. The hand stayed, and eventually Charles wriggled and flipped over. His dad sat down on the bed next to him. Charles couldn’t really see his dad’s face, just his silhouette backlit in the light from the hallway. He didn’t think his dad was looking at him when he started speaking.


“I had a younger brother, Johnny. He died when we were kids, drowned in the lake near our house. He was a good kid.”


Charles hadn’t known this. His father’s voice was very quiet, un-inflected, and somehow Charles knew it was to hide his emotion.


“We were real close. He was just a year younger than me, and we were like you and Jamie, always together, always outdoors, riding our bikes, or swimming or playing hockey on the lake in the winter.”


Not quite like him and Jamie, but he understood what his father was saying. Close brothers.


“When your mom was pregnant with you, we decided that we’d have juniors. A boy would be Robert Charles and a girl Marie Charlene, because your mom would have liked to be Marie rather than Mary.” His dad chuckled. “We even figured we’d call you Bobby, rather than Charles or Chuck, and a girl Marie.”


That hadn’t worked. He was John Charles, called Charles, and Carrie was Laura Caroline. His parents were Chuck and Charlene. Then suddenly he realized. John Charles. Johnny. He blinked.


His dad continued speaking. “When you were born, we called you Bobby but when you were a few days old, still in the hospital, I looked at you. You had dark hair and eyes, and… you looked like Johnny. I see him in you more and more as you grow up. He was 10 when he died, but he would have been tall and skinny like you, you both have those slanty eyes, and your hair flops down on your forehead just the way his did.”


He heard his dad swallow.


“So I told your mom that we’d have to call you John Charles, like Johnny. She said that was fine, she had been hoping for a girl, so she didn’t really care.”


He added, inconsequentially. “I was Robert Charles, for my mom’s dad. He was John Charles for my dad’s dad. That’s why we both had Charles as a middle name.”


He sighed. “I thought we’d call you Johnny, but in the end I couldn’t. Johnny was… Johnny. You were Charles.”


He reached out and squeezed Charles’s shoulder, a very rare gesture of affection. Before he left he placed a small square on Charles’s bedside table.


He paused at the door. “I brought you some food. There’s a burrito in the fridge if you want it.”

Charles heard him walk down the hallway and go into his room. He turned on his bedside lamp and picked up the photograph. Two grinning boys posing with their bikes, one very clearly his stocky, sturdy dad, and the other… small and lithe, and dark, with a smile that Charles recognized as his own, and shock of hair, too long, almost hiding one eye. His uncle.


Years later, the first time he was listed as an author on a paper, his PhD advisor asked him what name he wanted to use, since his publications would follow him around his whole career. Charles Edwards? Charles had shaken his head, and said he’d use J. Charles Edwards. Nobody ever called him John or used that name, but he treasured that small connection to his unknown uncle, and the memory of a rare moment of kindness and understanding from his father.

I'm going public with one of my New Year's Resolutions. Well, they're actually not Resolutions with a big R. They're really resolutions, or habits, or small projects.

I make about 10 a year, and start each one at the beginning of a month. I don't do anything for November or December, since those months are stressful enough, and if I need more than one month for a resolution or a project, I had those two extra months as slop.

The painting project was last August's resolution. Stopping biting my nails was... a year or so ago. NaNoWriMo. Trying Once-A-Month cooking. Things like that.

Anyhow, March was supposed to have been a project: getting the methodology set up and starting on the Get Negatives Scanned project. But because of some technical difficulties, it is going go be pushed back.

I usually pick a project/resolution/habit I want to work on at the end of the month, spend the last week of the month getting things in place if needed and then move on.

I suppose one could say I do have one Resolution with a Big R: making ten small ones each year and working on them.

So March having been scrapped, I cast around for a new idea. And decided that I was going to do the final push to finish my pseudo-novel.

I'm pretty close. I just need to tie it up. I changed the ending entirely a while back, in my head, and I need to sit down and write. I've done some writing recently but it doesn't feel directed.

Normally, I don't talk much about my little projects... but this one I am. Because I need and want the accountability of having said: By the end of March, I want to have this novel done, or a very good excuse not to have it done, heh.

Bug me, ok?