Inspired by the John Gardner Art of Fiction exercise, "Write a long sentence," here is my latest post, a single sentence story, Now I Have a Title. (Am I ever going to shut up about John Gardner and the Art of Fiction? No, probably not.)

Now I Have a Title

In my previous post, I summarized my idea of what my novel would be about, and having selected the font in my word processor, I am almost ready to begin writing ... almost ... but not quite, as I need to settle on a title for my work, although I know that I don't need a title at this point; "Untitled" or "Fiction" should do just fine for now; however, I am going to go ahead and develop a working title: Effusion Engine, perhaps, (from the original short story that this novel would be based on), which I like because effusion engine sounds cool with the alliterative Es and the soft 'sion' and 'gine' slant rhyme, and it would correspond to the Jerusalem in the Blake poem named—quite naturally—Jerusalem, which leads me to consider the current title of the short story, "The Jerusalem Engine," which doesn't sound quite as nice as effusion Engine, but it does have the 'J' in Jerusalem and soft 'G' in engine, and I think that it sounds a lot (I sometimes reminisce about one day when I was working in my office [my first job as a technical writer/marketing desktop publisher], and a sales person came in and asked me what was the difference between alot and a lot to which I replied that alot is not a word) cooler; Or if I keep one of the original story characters, the lesbian detective named Fisher, maybe I can go for the ironic with "Fisher of Men" or a postmodern retelling with "Fisher of Womyn", since I had an idea that at some point of the story Fisher would be crucified on the Tree of Mystery like Peachy Carnehan in "The Man Who Would Be King".

After reckless consideration, I now have a working title: "The Jerusalem Engine".

July Novel Writing Month Postscript

In the upper right corner of the home page, you can see a word count tracking my novel progress. Later this week, I hope to add a link to a graph of my copious verbiage output. On the left side of the home page, I have added another widget, Title of the Day, providing random titles for that next blockbuster novel.