Titles. All the writers i know hate them.

A title wants to:

• stand out – make your story, poem or book the one someone will turn to first from a list
• be memorable – so readers can recommend your work after it’s wowed them!
• be relevant, of course
• perhaps touch on more than one aspect of the piece, say a literal and a figurative reference
• not give away the ending
• … and yet hint at irresistible content

Half the trouble is that once the piece is written, you (if you’re like me) kind of lose interest, or maybe i mean the creative surge that brought the piece into being rarely sticks around for the thinking up of a title.

So i was interested in Hilary Dixon’s method, which she explains in an interview in the October 2009 issue of Writing Magazine:

I must admit that finding [the title of my first novel] nearly drove me nuts! In the end, I wrote lots of words connected with the novel on a blackboard in my kitchen, where they caught my eye a thousand times a day. After a while, the words seemed to group and cluster, patterns emerged, and one day When Rooks Speak of Love was there.

When i have something long enough to justify that much effort (do i mean effort? time?) waiting for its title, i’ll try this.

Write every day? Never skip a day? Never ever? – Well…

“Every now and then go away, have a little relaxation, for when you come back to your work your judgment will be surer. Go some distance away because then the work appears smaller, and more of it can be taken in at a glance, and a lack of harmony and proportion is more readily seen.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

Can’t get my head around this

October before last, a local boy was killed at the top of our road when a car went into the back of his moped. The road was closed for a few hours. There was a bouquet on that corner and it was replenished for several weeks. His grave in the churchyard just up from here still brims with fresh flowers every day, without fail.

On the first anniversary of his death, i heard that ‘youths’ had thrown stones and mud at the front of his parents’ house, the front door and windows. Chance, i supposed, that it was done on that particular day.

The same happened this month, on the same date.

Really i don’t know how to react. Maybe the death was more than an accident; maybe someone has reason to hate the family. The novel-plotter in my head tries out scenarios that would make sense of this, and even they peter out, false starts. And in the real world, this non-fiction world, i can’t imagine how a person decides, and plans, and goes out expressly, to heap more anguish on top of the misery of people already hurting so much.

And another real-life bloggy thing

Not a resolution, but still a change in thinking: I started with the idea that tagging brings traffic, so i got into the habit of thinking up as many tags as i possibly could for each post.

I am reformed. I now see that i was over-tagging.

OK, perhaps it was justifiable to attach an ‘HG Wells’ tag to my post about an essay that won me acclaim in my schooldays – since it was an essay inspired by HG Wells. Perhaps it was even not too silly to tag with ‘Twitter’ the one about forgetting to tweet, even though it was really about the success that i forgot to tweet and not about the tweeting.

But i really can’t defend tagging the one about the worth of genre fiction with ‘Holst’. If anyone arrived there by searching on that term, they’d be disappointed to find nothing about Holst at all except a throwaway mention of his music as being for the unthinking. Unthinking? That’s what i was.

Using this Vigilance theme emphasises a post’s tags – and emphasises to me how many i use. (Wish it made the Comments link as obvious in an individual blogpost as it does on the blog’s home page; i’ll have to learn CSS editing.) So, i apologise. I apologise to my earlier blogposts for upstaging them with such a cohort of tags. From now on i’ll tag as sparingly as i can.

It wasn’t pulling all that much traffic in this direction, anyway.

Resolutions that weren’t worth making after all

I resolved to avoid blogging about blogging, when I started out, for the same reason as I avoid writing poems about writing poems.

I was even determined to avoid using the first person. So many blogs become very me, me, me – and the Travel Hopefully Blog has never been about what goes on in my life in any as-it-happens memoir sense. Even Stephen Fry’s Twitter feed turns me off because it is a catalogue of what’s going on day to day. When it’s people I’ve never seen, the writing has to be better than excellent to keep me interested.

So I was determined not to impose that on you and push readers away with it.

And yet you’ll notice rather a lot of ‘I’ in this blogpost today. Yep, I’ve changed my mind. The reasons are fivefold.

1. In the blogosphere, the character of the individual is part of the deal. Whether they’re about photography, grammar, marketing, crafts, wildlife, or parenting (especially parenting), most of the best blogs let the real person who’s authoring them show through.

Instead of everyday events I decided to write about anything that brought itself to my attention. When it interests me, I offer it here to find out if it interests you. Hence the Travel Hopefully Blog has veered between crochet, poetry, the weather, insects, golems (amusing that golems have been the most searched-for topic)…

2. Well, blogging also interests me. And I interest me. Not what I had for breakfast or what make of jeans I wear or whether I have toothache, but the twisty path of self-discovery. I’m adding these into the jumble of mumblings and will do my best not to let them bore you.
3. My online presence has sometimes been very irregular, and when that happens I feel the need to explain. Maybe I don’t need to but indulge me, I’d feel better explaining.
4. I declared a Bill Hussey review as if it was imminent, but you’ll have to wait because I can’t find it. Without using the first person how could I excuse that?
5. It’s become increasingly difficult to stick to my original intention.

So there you go. I’m coming out as a human being who lives on Earth. I’ve even put a photo on my Who? Page.

At the same time I’m announcing a new alias for my elder son. ‘Tigger’ for the little one is still apt and confuses no one, but commenting on parenting blogs here and there I’ve found that, when I mention his big brother, ‘Marvin’ is being taken as his real name. As if I would name a child of mine Marvin. His original aka was chosen for its brain-the-size-of-a-planet overtones. Can’t call him Eeyore – that used to be someone else’s nickname, many moons ago. Therefore, from now on he is Tall.

So… welcome to the new-look Travel Hopefully Blog! :0)