Writing Update: That book with a terrible title

Admittedly that doesn’t narrow things down any. For the most part I can’t come up with decent titles for my novels. I come up with working titles that…well, work. For now. Until I can think of something better. Which I seldom do. This is why I need an editor.

Anyway, I’ve been re-reading the novel I finished toward the end of last year, ostensibly titled “The Married Minstrel,” prior to doing revisions. It’s an interesting exercise. The manuscript is better than I remember, but still pretty rough in spots. There are some definite near-brushes with competence, and there are places that clunk louder than a Transformer battle and will take some significant work to revise into something readable.

But all in all I’m pleased with how well it holds up. I’m also pleased to realize I have some ideas on how to make it better and fill in some gaps. It’s not missing much, but I think there were some obvious points I could have “punched it up” a bit and didn’t.

The more I think about it, the more I realize the manuscript, oddly enough, reads like something written in one-hour segments over the course of a year. The style is a bit choppy, and doesn’t flow as well as I’d like. There are scenes that flow really well, and some that scudder along like I had to drag a VW Bug with its parking brake set.

As soon as I finish my read-through I intend to go back and get under the hood so to speak. It’ll probably take a while, but it’s something I need to learn how to do. So far my revisions go to extremes. I either throw most of it out and rewrite it from scratch or I do little more than copy-edit. I need to get in the practice of mid-level editing, where I rework what needs reworked, clean up what’s still a little messy, but mostly leave things intact. Once I get that skill in my toolbox I’ll be a fair bit closer to being where I need to be.

But I still can’t figure out a better title.