Party On!

The Release Week par-tay continues! Make sure to pick up your copy of Jillian Cantor's The September Sisters and Tracy Madison's A Taste of Magic! I'm still waiting for mine...(Amazon, I'm looking at YOU. Again.) but I SO cannot wait to dive into these awesome books!

If you haven't ordered your copies yet, what are you waiting for? Click over to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Borders or any other online retailer and order them!

I'll wait...

OK. Ready?

It's so much fun celebrating my fellow Novel Girls and their releases. It's kind of like how I imagine my release week will be...minus the nerves and shaking hands!

For my interview question, I tried to come up with a good "stumper." Which wasn't that hard because this subject was particularly difficult for me. My question is: If you had to come up with an alternate title for your book, what would it be?

Jillian: Funny you should ask about an alternate title, Maureen, because The September Sisters actually sort of is an alternate title already, or at least, alternate to the one I originally came up with. The original title was Even to the Edge – it’s a line from the Shakespeare Sonnet I wrote about a few weeks back, in which it says about love. “. . .it bears out, even to the edge of doom.”
I’m pretty terrible with titles, and I agonized over this one for a long time after I wrote the book. I settled on Even to the Edge sometime in early 2004 just before I started sending the book out to agents for the first time. I didn’t necessarily love the title, but it stuck. And it stayed this way, all through the submission process, until the book was sold.

One of the first things my editor said to me was that she thought we should come up with a new, catchier title. I agreed with her, but at the same time, it was hard to think of the book any other way – as if I’d given my child one name at birth, and then when he was four years old decided to change it.

So the title brainstorming session was on. My editor came up with Hearts of Stone (referring to that necklace you see on the front cover) which we both liked but didn’t love. I sent my editor a list of maybe 20 possibilities, one of which was The September Sisters. She liked that one, and also suggested that the book could be called The Thing With Feathers, after the line in the Emily Dickinson poem “Hope,” “Hope is the thing with feathers.” My editor said she always thought of Abby like that little bird in the poem, fluttering around, trying to keep her head up. I loved that image and also really liked that title, until I realized that there was already another book called Hope after the same poem. So then we both agreed that The September Sisters was the best choice.

At first I had trouble thinking of the book with this title, but now it seems so perfect that I can’t imagine it any other way!

Tracy: Actually, A Taste of Magic is not my original title, so choosing an alternate title is easy, as I'd just fall back on my original! When I began writing the book, this title came to me immediately, which rarely happens. It is: A Spoonful of Sugar...A Pinch of Magic, and it really describes the book perfectly, since Elizabeth is a baker and bakes her wishes into cupcakes, brownies, and other yummy stuff.

We ended up not using it because of its length, but I still love it!

Thanks guys! Sounds like Crazy Title Fun Was Had By All.

Don't forget to leave lots of comments for a chance to win a signed copy of either The September Sisters or A Taste of Magic! You want one, you know you do!