Entitled

Which comes first? The story or the title?

Usually, it’s the story. Occasionally, it’s the title. When I wrote “Black and Blonde” in 2001, the characters came first, the story came from them, and the title came last. I liked it, though. And I liked the character of Ariel Black so much that I wanted to write with him again. Regrettably, he didn’t have the staying power to warrant a full length novel and I’ve never been hip on writing short stories.

In 2005, I decided to write an urban fantasy piece for a short fiction contest and lit up the Bat Signal in hope that a hero would show up to help. Black answered the call. The story came next, then the title: “Basic Black”. It won fifth place in the contest—woo hoo—and solidified my affection for a character who doesn’t win people easily to his side. Not that he cares. In fact, I highly doubt that he gives a rat’s rear end. I was self-publishing the first two volumes of “Fixed Fire” anyway, so I bid Black a second farewell.

Playing with words has been a hobby for my whole life. I like to mess with phrases and double entendres and all that jazz, so one day I was rolling some stuff around in my mind and snagged a beauty of a title: “Black in Back”.

This time, I called on him specifically. And he said, “Forget it.”

See what I mean about him not giving a $***?

Crap, I thought. Now what do I do?

Well, let it go, of course. Only I couldn’t. It dogged me for days, a clear indication that a story needed to be told, but if it wasn’t Black doing the telling, then who the heck was it? Whose voice could shoulder a title bearing his name? I pondered it for-what-seemed-like-ever. The sequence ran something like this:

Black in Back … Black in Back … Black—in—Back! Eureka! That’s it! He’s in it, but he’s not telling it, hence his status as “in back”! Augh! I’m a genius!

After that discovery, I got traction. It stalled a bunch of times because I got in the way, but over the long weekend, I stepped aside, threw Moist’s greatest hits onto the stereo, and let Tess do the talking. It’s her story; I just didn’t know it when the title first arrived. It’s not done yet, but when it is, I’ll probably post it here. Black was designed for the 21^st Century Poets’ forum anyway, so cyberspace, much as he dislikes it, is as much his turf as the seedy waterfront he calls home.

No, he’s not happy about it, but that’s the chance you take when you consort with mortals …