When SEETHINGS Finally Found Its Name

I found this old post in my writing archive. The manuscript was finished, the cover was almost done, and I was ready to tell people the book was available. I still couldn’t quite believe I had something to announce.

I remember an earlier version of me with a Post-it note stuck to the computer screen. Stormfront was written on it. I wanted a thunderstorm in the novel, but I didn’t yet know what would happen beneath it. The first draft followed the weather. The next ones started following a marriage. What began as a storm story acquired a chill inside the house, and Cold Climates took its turn on the note.

Writing was only part of the job. I kept moving scenes, cutting passages I had grown attached to, and wondering whether I had made it better or merely different. I’ve written about that question in how many times a novel manuscript should be rewritten. At the time, there was no tidy answer. I kept going until I could see what the story was asking me to do.

The titles changed with those edits. One was so long it nearly did the synopsis’s work for me: Pink Tears In The Hot Rain And The Cold Stench Of Death. I put it on a loose-leaf manuscript in a four-ring binder and handed it to beta readers. I wanted their thoughts, even if they laughed at its name. Later I printed cover mock-ups with different titles laid over the same lightning image. Friends, family, book club members and strangers saw them. I asked which one would make them stop and look twice. That process is in my post about the titles I tried before publishing.

Then came In The Bed Inside Me. I let it sit for a year while I finished the edits. Seeing those words on a screen, on my desk and in emails taught me something a quick vote couldn’t: I had to live with the name, and it had to live with the book. This is what I wrote when I finally changed it. The limited-time offer mentioned below belongs to the original announcement.

SEETHINGS: Unveiling the New Title

It’s been a long time coming but here it is: SEETHINGS. Fresh looking, isn’t it? You probably wonder two things: 1)What happened to the old title ‘In The Bed Inside Me,’ and 2) It looks ready. Where can I order a copy?

Yes, SEETHINGS is ready to download and read. I’ve provided a link below this post if you want to know where to get it. And it’s free for a limited time. (Perhaps some reviewers would like to help me get some runs on the board?:)) As for the previous title, I didn’t feel it sat as well as I first thought.

After watching the book wear the hypothetical title for a year (while I made the last edits on it), displayed in various places on my computer and desk and typing it into emails and such, I didn’t feel it look right. I had several other titles to choose from; anyone playing the home game would know some of them. SEETHINGS was a late arrival and settled onto the front cover better than anything tried before it. I especially liked the hint of an underlying evil tone it gives. Combined with the dark cover and female graphic, I think it’s a more accurate face to the book’s personality.

-M

Reading those words now, I can hear the relief in them. The name no longer argued with the story. SEETHINGS could belong to the storm, but it could also belong to what simmered in the narrative. It allowed the darkness to remain partly hidden. A reader might see the weather first and discover the rest only when it was too late to look away.

I enjoyed making the cover almost as much as finding the title. I tried photographs and graphics, watched one word disappear against a background, and watched another suddenly pull the whole image together. Some of my early proofs used lightning; the final design went darker and gave the female figure room to make a different promise. I still think about how cover colour speaks before the first page. A cover is the moment a private story starts facing some strangers.

Publishing it myself was another kind of thrill. I had to make decisions an author can otherwise hand to someone else: the files, the formats, the place readers would find it, and what the book would say about itself before anyone opened it. I wrote more about choosing to self-publish. I was nervous, of course. But I liked having the last word on the title and cover, and I loved the moment the book stopped being a stack of revisions on my desk.

That first announcement wasn’t the end of the work. Years later I went back to SEETHINGS and made it darker and tighter. It has also grown into a psychological thriller trilogy. I couldn’t see any of that from the desk where I was testing titles. I only knew I’d written the story, listened to the readers who helped me test it, found a cover that felt right, and finally pressed publish.

Perhaps that’s why I kept this little announcement in my archives. It holds the part of writing that seldom fits into a launch photograph: all the crossed-out names, the edits after the edits, the nerves, and the peculiar pleasure of seeing a book become itself.

–Michael (Dark Fiction. Author of SEETHINGS (the first book), free for a limited time)