Howdy! I've recently been revising the chapter titles in my women's paranormal fiction, Soul Walker, and felt my process was worth sharing. For starters, my titles oft consist of puns, variations of idioms or popular phrases, rather than a straight-forward description of what to expect. To each their own though.

To find them, I make lists or word maps revolving around the chapter narrative, mood, and imagery. From those terms I puzzle over related idioms and common phrases, to see how they can be tweaked to hint at the content. In early drafts, I'm not afraid to leave a chapter untitled if I have no good ideas. Better to move on and come back to it in revisions, than to be bogged down.

For instance, an early chapter in Soul Walker focuses on Eva returning to her hometown, which until this newest draft, was Sabbath. Eva being in between jobs, engaged in research for a personal project, I called that chapter Sabbathical. Like Sabbatical. Get it? Well, one publisher didn't and thought it was an obvious typo, evidence of my lackluster editing. So, I set a hyphen in there, renaming the chapter Sabbath-ical, making the pun more apparent (I hope). But now the hometown is Lynnville and that chapter is Backpedal-Lynn.

With my young adult fantasy novel, Stem & Stone, I opted against chapter titles for a couple of reasons. Namely, my style of naming is meant to be comedic, and its a very serious book. Had I gone the chapter titling route, I would have had to be direct, which would have felt spoiler-adjacent to me.

I hope you found this helpful! Thanks for stopping by. I drop a new blog poste every Monday! Toodles!

Newsletter

Howdy! I'm nearly done editing my paranormal women's fiction novel, Soul Walker. I finished revising the body text last night. Once I'm done with the last couple of chapter titles in need of tweaking, I'll query it. Again. While it would have been nice to have been contracted for three books right out of the gate, I'm grateful Tea With Coffee Media (and everyone else) rejected it. The story was fine but now it's good.

I'm currently reading The Unbearable Lightness Of Being by Milan Kundera. It's a favorite novel of a friend, and from the title, I guessed it would offer themes of self empowerment like in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, or maybe The Alchemist. I'm 2/3 in and thus far the story is fast paced but there are low stakes and I'm not invested in a single character. The structure is unusual, in that the narrator comes off as a friend of the protagonists, while knowing personal details those characters would never have shared. Also, the story isn't just out of chronological order. It dwells on the same periods from multiple perspectives, which is popular for thrillers and higher stakes stories, but this isn't that.

I will woodburn this week, and perhaps watercolor as well. Next week I sell art at First Friday in downtown Bryan.

Thanks for stopping by! I drop a newsletter every Monday! Toodles!