Titles Are Hard

My Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat book titles have a theme; every title references a vegan food, because one of the main characters is the world’s only(?) gay vegan werewolf. The title theming has caused some people to either ignore the books entirely or think they’re humorous… Sorry for the incorrect perception. The book titles were a collab between me and the original publisher. I kept them when I rereleased books 1-5, and then when I extended the series I felt like I had to stick with the theme. I’ve also gotten complaints that the titles have nothing at all to do with the books’ plots, which…yeah, fair.

Although I’ve struggled a little with the Real Werewolves titles, and had to get one title from the awesome Parker Williams (Tempeh for Two), for the most part I’ve been okay with those. Though my brain does insist on calling book 7 “Beware of Broccoli” instead of the actual title “Bring on the Broccoli.” (Beware of Broccoli might have been a better title, actually…)

The titles for my Ebb & Flow series, however, are a different issue entirely.

Ebb & Flow is a spinoff of Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat. I didn’t know that it was going to become a series. Ebb & Flow happened because one of the main characters, Quinn Boucher, pretty much stole the show in Real Werewolves 6, and after two reviewers specifically mentioned him in their reviews, I decided I needed to continue his story with his mate Malachi Powers.

The first book’s title, Ebb and Flow, was initially just a placeholder. I have a weird thing where I literally cannot start writing a book unless I have some kind of title, even if it isn’t the *final* title. The phrase “ebb and flow” popped into my head, so I went with it as a placeholder. But as I explored Quinn and Malachi’s relationship more, I realized it kind of fit.

Quinn is very young (22 years old). He left an abusive home at 18 to attend university with the plan to become a doctor. At 21, a night out at a bar became the most traumatic night of his life when the guy he picked up assaulted him, changed him to a werewolf, and, along with the guy’s pack’s Beta, held Quinn captive for nearly a month. After escaping, Quinn started building a new life with the pack that took him in and especially that pack’s Beta, who became Quinn’s partner…until 5 months later, when the pack Quinn’s attacker belonged to ambushed Quinn’s new pack, killing five of them including the Alpha and Quinn’s partner the Beta. Which Quinn witnessed. Despite all of that trauma, and despite living with severe PTSD including nightmares and flashbacks, Quinn tries to maintain a “sunny” outlook. He’s caring, strong, intelligent, and shines a light on the good in others. He’s the “Flow” of “Ebb and Flow.”

Malachi, on the other hand, is 130 years old. That is not a typo. He grew up as the bookish, socially awkward, antisocial son of one of the most prominent families in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. (The family is VERY loosely based upon–and named after–my late grandmother’s family, which was a prominent family in Lunenburg. In my headcanon, Malachi is my great-uncle.) Got engaged to a young woman he met at university even though he felt no attraction to her at all–and she knew it–because it was what his father expected him to do.

His fiancee was killed, and Malachi changed, during a sudden attack by a werewolf. The attacker’s pack took Malachi in… until Malachi killed his attacker for what he’d done. At that point, Malachi decided he had no interest in being part of a pack and fled to the summer cottage his parents, who had since passed away, had left him. He winterized the cottage and lived there alone other than the two years he lived with two human men, Jonathan and Roger, who became his romantic partners. (Their story is in the novella Hooch and Howls, which I designated a prequel to Ebb and Flow after *writing* Ebb and Flow. Hooch’s original writing/publication predates Ebb by over a decade.)

After Malachi sent his humans away, he decided he just wanted to be alone. And he was, for nearly a century, other than occasionally visiting his childhood friend Silas Creighton, who had coincidentally also been changed to a werewolf and is now the Anax (national ruler) of all werewolves in Canada… until Malachi met Quinn and recognized him as his fated mate. Which did not please Malachi in the slightest, not least because Quinn is over a hundred years younger. Malachi is stubborn, a self-described “curmudgeon,” and was ready to be done with his too-long life until Quinn came along. But he loves Quinn deeply and would literally do anything to protect the younger man. Malachi is the “Ebb” of the title.

When Ebb and Flow the book became a series, I decided to just title the series after the book…except I used & instead of “and” to provide some visual differentiation. (Ebb and Flow is the book; Ebb & Flow is the series.) And I decided that since “Ebb and Flow” and “Hooch and Howls” follow the same pattern–“something and something”–the rest of the titles in the series would too.

Which is where the titling problem comes in. Book 2 of the series ended up being titled Future and Past, but that wasn’t the original title when I started writing it. It took a few tries to come up with it. It works, though; Quinn is “Future” and Malachi is “Past,” but also, their relationship is the future for both of them, and Quinn confronts some previously repressed memories of his past. The second *prequel* novella, Heart and Home, was pretty easy to title; that’s Quinn’s prequel, detailing his escape from his captors and the first several weeks of his life with his partner Kinney, and the title just made sense. Book 3 of the series, Storm and Shelter, wasn’t too difficult either, especially since there’s a literal storm in the story and the two spend time alone together in Malachi’s cottage preparatory to Quinn moving there. Quinn, with his “noisy brain” and trauma, is “Storm”; Malachi, who is steady and stable and basically Quinn’s anchor, is “Shelter.”

I’m now writing book 4… and over three-quarters of the way through the first draft, I still don’t know what the damn title is. The placeholder is “Beyond and Within,” but that has NOTHING to do with the story or with Quinn and Malachi.

In this one, Quinn and Malachi travel from Nova Scotia to Quinn’s home province of Manitoba–which also happens to be the province to which Malachi sent his human lovers a hundred years ago. Quinn wants to make sure the younger siblings he left behind when he went to university are all right; his parents forbade him from contact with them, and after he was changed, he was barred from contact with any humans who knew him before he was a werewolf, because that’s the werewolf law in my books’ universe. Quinn also wants to meet with the current Alpha of the pack that’s primarily responsible for his trauma, the pack to which his attacker and captors, as well as the ambushers who killed the pack Quinn joined, belonged. Malachi is reluctant to go; he’s terrified of planes, for one thing, and driving from Nova Scotia to Manitoba isn’t exactly feasible, but also, it’s where he sent his human lovers, and that’s bringing up memories he doesn’t want to deal with. But he refuses to let Quinn go alone.

Ultimately, the two of them find out a secret about the allegedly banished former Alpha of the pack that essentially destroyed Quinn’s life…and they find out a secret about Malachi’s human lovers. (Quinn also gets some closure with his siblings.)

The more I’ve written, the more I’ve recognized that “Beyond and Within” is even less apropos as a title than I believed at first… But nothing else is coming to me. If I hadn’t already used “Future and Past,” that would be a good title for this one, but since I have used it, I need something else. I’ll be wrapping up the first draft within the next few days, and I really, really would like to have an ACTUAL title before I type “the end.”

(This is an EXTREMELY clumsily photoshopped picture of the stock photo models I use to represent Malachi and Quinn.)