Hi friends 🍵🌤
Well! This year has been something so far.
I won’t comment on it more, but I’m glad today ended without much incident for the US. My brain continues to feel like runny eggs jiggling about on a plate, and I need to preserve most of it for moving things forward at work, but I do feel more settled, and hopeful for America. (I say this, wearily eyeing the Philippines; I love my country, but I wish it were easier to hope things could also improve for us. On the other hand, it seems like people are way more disciplined about covid there.)
I’m on Twitter again these days (gah), so some of my writing/story-related thoughts end up there instead of here. In some ways it’s good because that tends to reach more people, but I don’t always get to go into the depth I’d like. I’m not sure how long I’ll stay on Twitter after the book comes out—my year tends to go better when I take breaks from it—but in the meantime, I did want to expand on the below thread with some behind-the-scenes title notes.
I won’t rehash it, but essentially my main title-ing techniques are as follows:
Use poetry!
Free-associate specific words—ask yourself what is in my story? or what is my story about? until you hit upon the sound + resonance you like.
Title as anchor: sometimes you’ll just receive it from the story gods. Treasure these blessings.
Bend a known thing, like a song title. (The entirety of Hurricane Heels does this, actually. But I won’t pretend that wasn’t mostly for fanfic vibes.)
Look at the text itself: your title might be lurking there.
🎧
So how were the titles in my collection constructed? Here are their stories in detail!
Good Girls (written 2013, published 2015)
This is a very simple title, and tbh I might have started drafting with this as a placeholder. It fit the theme/thesis of the story, and was also literal in terms of the setting (a youth reformation camp). Sometimes I worry it’s a little too on-the-nose, but I don’t really know what else I’d call this one. (Is on-the-nose bad for titles? Probably not, but you can see my desire for ambiguity on full display with this question.)
A Cup of Salt Tears (written 2013, published 2014)
This was the original title of this story as I was drafting it, but at the last minute, before I turned it in for Clarion, I changed this to What It Says On the Cucumber. My class was split, but most people thought that title was too comical for the story. There was a mystery to it that I liked, though, so even when I sent it off to Tor.com slush, that was what I called it (!).
My editor, after buying it, asked if I was amenable to a change, and suggested Kappa Kapparatta. I recommended this original title again, and luckily he accepted it. And thank goodness for that! Also, I will never not cry over Oscar Wilde.
Milagroso (written 2013, published 2015)
I explain this one in the thread. Looking at my notes for when I was drafting this, for the title, I wrote down: Gerald Manley Hopkins?!?! Ultimately I didn’t use any of his poems, but the fact that he’s a poet-priest shows the subconscious at work, I guess.
A Spell for Foolish Hearts (written 2018, original to the collection)
This is the story I affectionately think of as the closest to shipping fic I’ve managed in original fiction. I don’t have particular feelings towards this title, except it has a slight fanfic cadence for me, and there’s something cohesive about the simple construction: A [Noun] [Preposition] [Adjective] [Noun]. (I use the same thing for Canticle.) It fits, and while I don’t think it’s necessarily evocative, it does capture that this is primarily a love story.
Have You Heard the One About Anamaria Marquez? (written 2013, published 2014)
In my memory this was a gift-title, something that was just granted to me from the story gods. Except when I was digging through old story files I realized I had drafted it under the title Undark, from a poem by John Glendale:
And so they come back, those girls who painted
the watch dials luminous and died.
Rereading the story once it was done, I’m sure, showed me the alternative. It felt slightly risky because it’s very long, but I liked the way it connoted whispering, and ghost stories. By the time I submitted it to Clarion it already had its current title, except without the question mark, which I added when it was published in Nightmare.
Syringe (written 2014, original to the collection)
A single word title! It fits the story, but the reason behind this title is actually entirely personal. In 2004, my cousin Carlo was diagnosed with cancer at age four. I chatted with him once, a year or so later, and he said this word: syringe.
I remember being shaken, thinking, he shouldn’t know that word, what it means, what it’s for—not at that age.
Grief, illness, and loss figure a lot in this collection. Many of these stories, especially the earlier ones, were written to cope with the loss of Carlo and my maternal grandparents, which happened in a compressed time period. Adding Syringe to the book was an editorial choice that surprised me—it was one of the surplus stories I sent over just so they could see what else I had in my drawer—but I’m glad it’s found a home in this book.
Asphalt, River, Mother, Child (written 2018, published 2018)
My working title for this was Asphalt, River. Mother, Child was added when the story was done to round it out, and provoke more questions/echoes. Even after I’d put it together I wasn’t sure if this worked as a title—it had a catalogue feel, sharply staccato, that didn’t seem very title-ish. But my editors at Strange Horizons accepted it, so I trusted their judgement on the fact that it worked.
Hurricane Heels (We Go Down Dancing) (written 2014, published 2016)
I also explain this one in the thread! I love Hurricane Jane. I hear that opening bass in my head every time I look at these words. Also, a parenthesis in the title just makes my stupid little fandom heart happy.
Only Unclench Your Hand (written 2014, published 2016)
Another title where I’d forgotten what name I’d drafted it under. Apparently it was Hair Dark as Beetles. I love a good simile, but that’s…yeah. A little weird. (Perhaps I was actively trying to squick myself out, juxtaposing beetles with hair. Oof. Did you shudder like me just now?)
I guess I knew I wanted bugs and witchcraft, since this is my mambabarang story. Digging through my poetry files turned up this gem from Sylvia Plath:
Mother of beetles, only unclench your hand:
I'll fly through the candle's mouth like a singeless moth.
There are lots of other things in the poem that resonate with the text itself. I made this the title after drafting, but I probably read the poem before I ever knew I’d write this story. Either way, I appreciate these phrases: a doll’s body; if I am a little one I can do no harm; tiny and inert as a rice grain—echoes that’ll become apparent if you read the book.
How to Swallow the Moon (written 2018, published 2018)
My working title for this was How We Swallowed the Moon. I liked the drama and accuracy of the phrase, but the story ended up in second person instead of first. When the first draft was done I revised the title slightly to avoid that POV discrepancy.
All the Best of Dark and Bright (written 2011, published 2012)
This story features Maganda, the first woman according to some Philippine legends. Maganda literally translates to beautiful, so to come up with the title I looked up poems that touched on beauty. Lord Byron’s She Walks in Beauty hit a lot of the notes I wanted:
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
This story was unexpected, more pantser-y than usual, even for me. I couldn’t see the ending until I was literally writing it, so I wanted to find a title that matched the basic plot, but also held an open question—like the narrative itself.
Misty (written 2012, published 2013)
Another title covered by the thread. I will say that I can listen to covers of Misty ad infinitum. Here’s one by my ukulele teacher, Cynthia Lin; here’s another by Andie. Then, listen to Misty Blue by Dorothy Moore, which is just too good.
A Canticle for Lost Girls (written in 2020, new to the collection)
I’d been carrying around the seed of this story for a long time; in my mind I referred to it as “the retreat-house story,” but I’d taken a couple of false starts towards it and felt discouraged. When the word canticle came to me, as a possible title, it felt a bit like finding a way forward. I want to write Canticle! I would tell myself, feeling grumpy that I could not.
What broke this story open for me was two things: realizing I could do a braided narrative, with a present-tense involving the protagonist’s daughter; then finally landing on a first line, which the rest of the story cohered around:
Have you ever noticed yourself on your knees and thought Oh, I don’t like this?
I’m glad Canticle still fit when I finished the piece. Lost Girls, as I explain in the thread, feels a little too exacting, maybe. But taken with the rest of the TOC, I like that it has a kind of roundness with Good Girls as the opening story. In any case, it’s also a matter of I couldn’t come up with anything that fits better. Sometimes that’s the best one can do!
🤫
What of the collection’s actual title? Some of my friends know I agonized over finding something that would fit all the different stories. In fact, when I was brainstorming titles, I was working with a pretty different TOC in mind. I glad this one held up even after we shuffled the stories!
A common tactic when naming a story collection is choosing from existing titles in the TOC. Have You Heard the One About Anamaria Marquez was a contender that my editors liked. I was hesitant about it, mostly because it’s a horror story, and I felt like the collection was more dark fantasy than horror, so it would be a bit misleading. Also, while Anamaria Marquez is a very Filipino name (one of my best friends belatedly told me “LOL, that’s my mom’s name” after I’d written it), it’s also a Latino name. I wasn’t sure I wanted that potential (and understandable, given our shared colonial history) confusion.
An Ocean the Color of Bruises was another title I liked. This story I thought better represented the overall collection. Plus, it has words that touch on water and injury, which…recur throughout the book, and in my writing in general. It’s vivid while still leaving space for the reader, and to me at least, it calls to mind the archipelago. But I think it would have limited options for the cover, and ultimately this story didn’t make the cut.
I also felt like How to Swallow the Moon could work, and was pretty all-encompassing. It was too mythic, maybe, to represent most of the stories; but it was evocative and interesting. Also, the construction was a little odd, which I liked.
Still, I really wanted to see if I couldn’t come up with something better, so on a cold afternoon in March, I took a notebook and Emily Skaja’s Brute and went down to the Charles River to find a title. Brute seemed like a good collection to find a title from. It was concerned with rage, grief, “feminine virtue and sin.” The cover had a wolf, and a person’s hand delicately touching its tongue.
In the end, I didn’t find the exact title in those poems, but it put me in mind of schoolgirl chants and schoolyard games, so Never Have I Ever got added to my list of potential titles. Just for fun, here are some others that I sent to my editors to choose from:
Keep Fast Hold of Hands (from this Emily Dickinson letter)
You Can’t Go Home Again
Our Bodies Break Light
the blood may be fake but the bleeding’s not (I am still trying to sell a story with an all-lowercase title; don’t look at me like that)
Strange Girls, Sweet Monsters
A Graceful Wreckage
The Dissolving of Girls and Monsters
If the Dark Opens Sweetly
I offered twenty options in total. Note that we didn’t have the cover at this point, though I’d sent some artists I liked over to Gavin and Kelly for consideration. I like to think most of these fit the (beautiful!) cover we ended up with, so again maybe that’s the subconscious at work, and I’m deeply grateful we all ended up on the same page.
🌼
If you struggle with titles, I hope some of the above was useful for you! Between writing poetry, fanfic, and short fiction, I’ve had to…title a lot of things, over the years. The tradeoff of course is that I still have no idea how to write long things. But I’m learning that, too, slowly-and-painfully, but surely!
News and things
My book comes out February 23, which is just over a month from today (!!!). We had to push it back slightly due to pandemic-related delays, but it’s still coming out next month. That means my runny-eggs-brain-feeling is intensifying on the regular—but I’m also deeply excited! I’m grateful to everyone who is currently reading or anticipating, as below:
R.O. Kwon included me in her list of 43 Books by Women of Color to Read in 2021
Margaret Kingsbury of Buzzfeed added it to her list of 21 Fantasy Books to Get Excited About This Winter
It was also recommended on SFF Yeah! podcast’s Most Anticipated Stand-Alones of 2021.
Short story collections don’t usually get the same coverage as novels, even for debuts, so to be included in anything at all makes me very happy. You can still pre-order a copy; OR you can join this Goodreads giveaway for one of two ARCs! (Unfortunately, the Goodreads contest is limited to the US only.)
In the interim, you can catch most timely updates on Twitter, but I’ll also be emailing anything of particular interest re: the book. Til next time! :)
Thanks as always for reading! I hope 2021 has already been going better for you than last year. The title of this post was another option for my collection that wasn’t picked; I really did come up with a lot of them! If you liked this post, feel free to share it with others, or sign up if you haven’t yet.