So Castor (which is no longer Castor, but I’m going to keep calling it that until I feel comfortable enough with the new title to use it) is finished in the sense that it is a complete book which you could read from start to finish if you so desired. But you wouldn’t want to, because it’s not really finished.

Now, this is one of those moments where you need to be careful if you’re a writer who is Talking About Writing, because it’s easy to come across as a conceited asshole. (Not that coming across as a conceited asshole is something I’m particularly bothered by, but I’d rather not do it by accident.) It’s just that non-writers have such a vastly wrong-headed view of what the writing process is like that it can be hard to explain it without sounding haughty and/or condescending.

So you sit down and write your book from start to finish, and then you type THE END and it’s done, right? Well no, because you still need to go back and remove all the typos and make it a bit more presentable. But then it’s done, right?

Nope! Now you need to bring that thematic undercurrent to the forefront. You know, the one you were only vaguely aware of before but everyone keeps telling you it’s great, so you’d better get on that if you don’t want people to think you can’t handle your themes like a pro. Oh, and that worldbuilding thing you thought was clear as day? Yeah, doesn’t make sense. Fix it. Fix it now.

If you think this sounds like a never-ending process, that’s because it is. A good friend of mine revised her book more than I thought strictly necessary before querying with it, and even then she still thought there were things she could change or improve upon even though the book was as professional and ‘finished’ as anything you’d see on bookstore shelves. At some point you just have to stop and send the damn thing out, but recognising that point could potentially be the difference between getting a book deal and getting an inbox full of rejection letters. (This, by the way, is one of the reasons why agents are so valuable. They’re often better at knowing when a book has reached maturity than the person who wrote it.)

I’ve had a slightly unusual progression with Castor (which is no longer Castor), because my ‘first draft’ was sort of like a second or third draft. As I’ve said before, I wrote it up to 50k words, stopped, rewrote most of the opening chapters and got to 90k words, deleted the entire ending, rewrote that, and now I have a complete-but-rough-as-hell book. The early feedback I’ve gotten seems to indicate that it’s actually more ‘ready’ than I thought, which still means that I’m looking at several weeks of intense revision before I’d feel comfortable sending it out to agents.

What’s surprised me most, though, is the sense of freedom you get sitting on a book-book as opposed to a pretend-book. I can do things with it now, things that don’t involve trying to increment the wordcount upwards by an average of 1,000/day. Just yesterday I was chatting with Phoebe, and she made a few off-handed remarks that instantly clarified a few thematic issues I’ve been turning over in my head for a while. (She also pointed out that the book looks weirdly as if it was inspired by something that it actually wasn’t inspired by at all. So yes, that apparently does happen.) The book is ‘finished’, but only in the sense that it’s got a lot of words in it.

There’s still a lot I need to do with it, and a lot more I could do with it, and that’s an exciting thought. I think  it could be pretty good! We’ll see.

This post brought to you by Simon & Garfunkel. Phoebe knows why.

So, Castor is finished and has been read by at least one beta reader. She liked it. This is a good thing.

However, she confirmed what I’ve long suspected: the title has got to go. It’s an okay title, I guess, but it’s also taking the easy way out. (See, the planet is called Castor, so…) I’ll need to change it.

That wouldn’t be too much of a problem, except for the fact that I’m apparently awful at coming up with titles. You’d think it would be easy, right? All I need to do is come up with something that’s a bit different, but not too different, and also evocative but not all airy and weird, and it should sound good to potential marketing types, and also it needs to be original. Oh, and it should have something to do with the story. I guess.

Title angst. It’s the worst.

At 01.30 this morning, I finished the current draft of Castor.

You are hereby authorised to commence celebrating.

I now have what might reasonably be called ‘a book’. It still needs a lot of work before it’s ready to go on the query-go-round, but it is a book and it is finished.

And now some pertinent fact and statistics, because I am a dork.

I wrote a kind of ‘prototype’ for Castor on 12 December 2010. This was solely for the purpose of the critique group I was in at the time – a sort of ‘proof of concept’, if you will. There are about three sentences of this still present in the ‘real’ Castor. The biggest differences between it and what I have now is that it was in third person and had two narrators.

I started the first proper draft of Castor on 21 February 2011. It starts out roughly the same as what I have now, but then goes off the rails at the 20,000 word mark. (I mean that in every sense of the phrase; it wasn’t turning out particularly good, which is why I scrapped it at 50,000 words and started again.)

I unfortunately don’t know the date I started the latest version of Castor, because I did it on a different computer whose hard drive has since died. It was shortly after I canned the 21 February version, though. It is now 91,230 words long (I’ll be shrinking that pretty hard in the next few weeks).

In total I’ve written about 120,000 words towards this book, not including the sections of February-Castor and current-Castor that overlap.

There are several things I need to do with it immediately to make it coherent, including:

• Cut out a subplot that appears and then goes nowhere.
• Cut out another subplot that sort of comes and goes before fizzling out. (I kept telling myself it would be super important for the books’s ending; surprise, it wasn’t.) I might reintroduce this if my beta readers think it’s a good idea.
• Finish this one scene that just kind of stops because I got stuck on a particular part. Looking at it now, I have no idea what I thought was so intimidating about it.
• Clarify the themes. I have no idea what this actually entails, but everyone says you should do it. I am going to clarify the shit out of my themes.

That’s all right now. It seems perfectly doable, which is probably a good thing; I’d be worried if the task of revising seemed completely overwhelming already.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to continue enjoying my well-earned day off.

So I did a blog post a few days ago about titles. You might get the impression from that post that I care an awful lot about what other books are called, and that I must therefore care an awful lot about what my book is called. That’s only half true.

Castor has been called Castor since the day I started working on it. I’m pretty happy with that. Yes, it’s fairly obvious (the planet it’s set on is called Castor, making it a real ‘duh’ title) and not all that interesting, but it sounds good. It’s the kind of title that would make me take notice if I saw it printed along the cover of a book’s spine on a tightly-packed shelf.

And that’s why I do care about titles, in a way, because so often a book’s name and its cover-art can be the deciding factor in whether someone decides to buy it. (Or, since we live in the Internet Age, whether they decide to go on Goodreads and see what the rest of the planet thought of it.) You probably won’t be too surprised to discover that I’m not fond of a lot of YA titles, particularly those of a one-word adjective persuasion. I mean, let’s say you have a dystopian novel where people are sorted into different social classes based on their hair colour. The main character’s primarily conflict involves her uncertainty over whether this sorting process can fairly sort the population such that everybody is happy with the category into which they are sorted. What would you call a book like that? It seems like there’d be an obvious choice…it’s on the tip of my tongue…

I feel like this is particularly common in science fiction, which is one of those genres where your title is expected to give potential readers a pretty clear idea of what the book is about. Isn’t that what the synopsis is for, though? The best titles are almost like miniature works of literature in their own right: think of the delightfully agrammatical-only-not I Am Legend, or something like Flowers for Algernon. In the YA world, I’m particularly fond of Patrick Ness’ titles: The Knife of Never Letting Go is as weird as it is enticing.

These one-word ‘concept’ titles just don’t have the same kind of draw. Oh, it’s about people being sorted, and it’s called Sorted. That’s…um. Which isn’t to say that the whole ‘concept becomes title’ thing can’t work (see A Canticle for Leibowitz), just that you maybe shouldn’t be too obvious about it. I guess you could argue that Castor is too obvious, but it doesn’t feel that way to me. For one thing, the story isn’t this sweeping overview of an entire planet. It’s a very personal story about a character who isn’t in any way exceptional by the standards of the book’s world, which gives the title a kind of ironic grandiosity that I like. (Of course, ‘Castor’ is also the name of a Greek god and a real-life binary star whose existence I will continue to ignore until my dying day.)

What I’m ignoring in all of this is that authors often don’t get to decide what their book will be called. Instances of people being forced to use particular titles are relatively unusual as far as I know, but there are plenty of so-called ‘gatekeepers’ who can and often do veto an author’s first choice. So if you see a book with my name on it called Sorted in 2014 (or, uh, 2015), feel free to come back here and gloat…assuming this post hasn’t mysteriously disappeared, that is.