The Best Titles...

Like cover art, or a quick scan through the television listings, a title can attract or repel; it can also, in as little as one word or two, tell you what the story's about. Think "Castaway" or "Dante's Inferno", "ER" or "In Cold Blood". Or even this blog...

When Susan and I first decided to adapt The Mad Hacker for television, we realized we would have to come up with a name that was perhaps a little less indicative of an axe murderer and more in keeping with a pair of adventurous twelve-year-old school girls.

Amber Mitchell and Liz Elliot had been best friends forever and were, shall we say, chips off their creators' blocks....

The plotline centred around the sabotage of their grade-eight computer projects. Rather progressive, we thought (and still do) given that we wrote the first draft of The Mad Hacker in 1985, using typewriters. Neither of us actually owned personal computers at the time. Our kids were in primary school; they had the access and we had the story.

Several years later...The Mad Hacker had sold over 75,000 copies in book form in Canada, New Zealand and Australia, Something's Fishy at Ash Lake, our second book featuring the girls and their friends at Ash Grove Junior High, had by then been sold to Scholastic Canada, and negotiations were underway with a Toronto production company.

We decided it was time to "rebrand" the series. Scholastic had billed the first two books as Ash Grove Junior High Mysteries but we wanted something new and a little less cumbersome. So we culled our collective memories as well as the current TV pages, listing show titles that worked, especially mysteries, right back to the early days of television.

Nine times out of 10, the most successful shows had titles which were either situation- specific or simply used the main character, or characters' names, to sell the show.

Our characters weren't that well-known but they were memorable, especially when they played off each other like that other famous pair of detectives: Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes. After all, Amber had been heard to address Liz as "my dear Elliot" more than once in both books.

So, Amber & Elliot it became.

We liked the cadence. We liked the way Liz's surname gave the team more weight. But most of all we liked the fact that it didn't sound, as "Amber and Liz" would have, like two little girls going to a birthday party.

Amber & Elliot didn't make it to the big time but we felt like we did – if only for a short time. And, among many lessons learned, we came to appreciate just how important titles can be whether it's art, music or literature.

Or, even a blog.

f & f, Anne

Show No Fear

How many times have you heard Hollywood use that line? It's like a magic talisman used for defeating bad guys, aliens and hostile adults.

Which is why Show No Fear has been replaying in my mind for months now. I have my graphs, charts, synopses and query letters ready to go. They are arranged neatly on the counter waiting, not to gather dust, but to be sent off to their future homes at publishers and book stores. But they are a little like the orphans in a lot of cheesy movies – they have watched other kids find a home, but the prospective parents always pass them by despite their best smile and the viewer knowledge that this one, this one, is the true gem. If only...

This, dear readers, is the real crunch for a writer, the difference between the person who is going to write “some day” and the writer who is fighting to be published. The completely schizophrenic certainty that the manuscript is the best ever written and obviously second-rate can get the most confident writer tied into knots of delays and indecision. To my mind, challenging a dream by sending it out into the world takes courage. Despite the assertion that it isn’t the writer’s worth being judged, but only that of the work, the real writer knows that a piece of her soul has been interwoven with those black letters on the white page. Who in her right mind would risk that level of destruction?

A writer will risk that. The silent courage to create in solitude is transformed into the determined courage needed to take on the world. How magical is that?

One life. One dream. Show all the fear you want – just go for it.


f & f
Susan