The Less You Think, The More You'll Solve

I have been in a major rut for the past month or so as it applies to my writing. Even though I have 3 books out (book 1, book 2, book 3), I'm still in a quandary on what to do next.

For example, I was doing a monster rewrite of a novella with the working title Creative Inaction and was making very good progress, when I decide to switch gears and work on something different. That something different was reworking book 2 because I had received the rights back to a few months ago. I knew I needed a new name and a new cover, and I wanted to make it an e-book only release. However, after spending a fruitless day trying to reformat it, I gave up and decided to have a professional do it. Since finances are squeezed tighter than a guv'ment official speaking the truth, it got put on the back burner (however, a resolution is imminent, so stay tuned).

So to refocus my brain on something else besides redoing book #2 and writing, I decided to do a little editing, or rather, note taking. I took out an old novella that I'd completed about a year ago called Blackness In The White Sand (note, it contains a link to a nasty excerpt on my adult blog) and began taking notes, mostly of the grammar variety (i.e. highlighting poor sentence structure). While I was still very impressed with what I wrote, I still had the very sticky problem of trying to come up with a brand new title (roughly 2 years running).
This past weekend, I decided to a little more editing/note taking, since I was still hip deep in this writing quandary of mine. So I grabbed all kinds of implements of destruction (2nd draft of this novella, pen, paper, soda) and made a beeline to the great outdoors. I took up residence in my usual spot, and proceeded to while away the minutes editing/note taking.

Roughly twenty minutes in, I came across a name typo, which was really strange, since roughly a year ago, I went through the entire manuscript and changed the name from Ashanti to Shadow. The typo name was Alezi. Not much of a name to think about at first glance, so I crossed it out and wrote the proper name. However, some several minutes later I got to thinking about the name, mostly how it sounded better than what I had. The more I thought about it, the more I became disenchanted with the current character name.

So I went to the synopsis (I had printed a copy of the synopsis) and wrote the name down as a possible substitute. Then I got to thinking about the name I used for the female MC in the 2nd novella (the one with the title problem), Nikia, and how it sounded better than either of the previous names. Then I got to thinking about how I originally wanted to make some kind of trilogy with my novellas, which in turn got me to thinking about a new title for Shadow's Vengeance.

Roughly two minutes later, my muse smacked me in the head with a proverbial 2 by 4, because she introduced at least three viable title variations based on the name Nikia, that would work extremely well for a trilogy. Thus, by not actually thinking about the long term problem at hand (a new title) and focusing on something else, I came up with a very solid solution to the problem.

Misdirection. It's a good thing.

(c) 2014 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved.