Propelled Toward the Inevitable

Plus, the forgotten official announcement of the new title

Aug 31, 2022

The latest from the garden. Despite our best efforts, we are actually getting a few things to eat this year! Photo by author.

Good Morning!

It’s come to the point where everything is coming together ahead of this one thing, which after nearly 3 years of anticipation, is finally almost here.

Last week I talked about getting up at 6 so I can work in silence. Well, now that school has started for my older two, even that isn’t good enough. As one kid has to get up and start getting ready at 6 and the other demands to be woken up at 6:30, I’ve shifted my waking up to 5. 😫🥱 Today, I got up at 4:30, in fact, because I’m leading a training for my day job at 8:00, and it’s a 2.5-hour drive to get there. (Also, a 2.5-hour drive back. Pray for me!) Tomorrow, I have to get up at 3:45 for a 4:00 ride to the airport and a 7:00 international flight. But guess what.

Then, I’ll be in England!

And, as a side benefit, hopefully my sleep schedule will already be somewhat shifted so the jet lag won’t feel so hard. (Of course, all this would feel easier if my child didn’t insist on waking up at 1am just because - but I’ve just gotten used to that by now. Sometimes, the next day, in the fog of lunch making and coffee drinking, I forget he was even up.)

This week has been busy and relaxing all at once. I finished a big project I’ve been working on all summer on Saturday, and knowing I’ll be away for several days at a time of transition, I decided not to do any writing this week (aside from my newsletter, because I did want to connect with you one last time before I return a new woman, busy schedule be damned).

Instead, I’m taking it easy, spending time with the kids, going on walks, cleaning up bedrooms and bathrooms and kitchens I’ve been neglecting during the crunch to get things done in the virtual world this summer.

This week, writing conference. Next week, new childcare five days per week! After that, the world is my oyster. Or that’s how I’m visualizing it, anyway. Except - do I even know what an oyster looks like? Never mind. I’m going to have a structure in place that will allow me to do all the things I want to do: work at my day job; write (I’m thinking I should start on a sequel to the novel, so when folks are finished reading the first one they will having something to add to their To-Be-Read piles?); and also exercise, which I’ve been doing very little of this summer in favor of ass-in-seat writing time.

Here’s to having it all (and it not evaporating in front of my eyes as is wont to happen).

New Title Who Dis

I was trying to keep the new title under wraps, because I wasn’t sure of it yet. It was one of the only serious results of a hilarious brainstorming session with a few of my friends, and I liked it enough to slap it on my entry to the competition I told you about last week. Well, since I made the short list (not the finals, but still SUPER COOL!), two things are now true: (a) I’m kinda stuck with the title, and (b) now the cat’s out of the bag. So, if you haven’t seen it yet, here it is (dun dun DUN!):

When We Were Mothers

You might remember that the old title is The Other Women. You might also remember I was never too attached to it. It was the first thing that came to mind when I was asked for a title to input into my writing software. At that point the book was just an outline - an outline which bears no resemblance to the manuscript as it stands today. The title works on a lot of levels. Except on the most important one: Genre.

When someone picks up a book, they use the title to give them an idea of what kind of book they’re about to read. The Other Women made me think of a dark romance, where [okay, I was going to insert a plot summary of The Other Women as a dark romance, but it’s 5:35 AM and that’s not a genre I typically read, so I will spare both of us].

This book, while it doesn’t fit squarely into any one genre, is definitely not a romance of any kind. Actually, fun fact: the first draft had 2 sex scenes in it that I took out because I didn’t want readers thinking it was a romance. I am marketing it as Women’s Fiction with a speculative thread. So I took to the internets to see what folks are titling their bestselling WF books these days. None of the titles are very descriptive. But they do carry with them a feeling. And that’s the feeling I hope When We Were Mothers captures.

I sent the most updated version of the manuscript to the agent who requested it back at the beginning of the year. She said she loved the title, that it was “fabulous and memorable.” So here’s hoping the details are all falling into place.