Wednesday, September 1, 2010

And my series title is...

The Iron Druid Chronicles. I got the official word today from my editor at Del Rey!

I love it! It sounds so badass! I have hopes that maybe a tiny dusting of its badassery will accrue to me, since I'm the author. ;)

I've waited a long time to know what the series would finally be called—almost a year. The original series title I'd queried with (and got the deal with) was ditched long ago: I'd called it The American Druid Series. But it quickly became apparent that it wasn't appropriate for several reasons:
1. My Druid is Irish—as in, he's really from Ireland. (That means he can never be President—is that a spoiler?)
2. It sounded like a vaguely patriotic title, and my Druid cares very little about the interests of any political entity, much less one that's only been around for 234 years. (He's 2,100 years old.)
3. The series goes far beyond the boundaries of America after the first couple of books.

What followed was a long journey through rivers of discarded ideas. This one's my favorite, offered whimsically by my Assistant Editor, Mike Braff: "Druid, where's my car?"

A large part of the problem was that "Druid" doesn't scan well with other words. It doesn't fall trippingly off the tongue, shall we say, when one is trying to formulate a phrase that's simple and memorable yet captures the essence of multiple books in a series. When we strayed into ideas that didn't have "Druid" in them, however, we ran into other issues—the titles sounded too sci-fi, or too mystery-ish, or sounded too close to other titles out there. "Iron Druid" came to me yesterday on the way home from the day job, and it was one of those facepalm moments, where you can't believe you hadn't thought of it earlier. Especially since I'd written that exact phrase on page six of Hounded. So I sent it off to the big house in NY, and they liked it, and now I imagine they'll do something logo-ish with it to make it look even cooler than it sounds.

I want a T-shirt that says The Iron Druid Chronicles on it. I want the mug. The sheet set. And the limited edition Monopoly® game (I get to be Oberon!).

As if that news weren't spiffy enough, Tricia (my editor) told me the typeset pages for HEXED are on the way! Woohoo! This is a very cool Wednesday.

4 comments:

  1. I've said it before, but you are right in that sweet spot that so many of us dream of getting to. Enjoy it. I can only hope I get there one day!

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  2. I think you should totally make Merch! or you know, after the series takes off, sell Merch-rights!

    That is definitely an AWESOME series name!

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  3. Oh, nice! It's so funny to hear you saying you want to emulate the cool you've created. That's like, deep, man.

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  4. Thanks you guys! Hope you get to be in this spot soon—I know you're all working hard on it! If I do get T-shirts made at some point, I'll send you three a freebie for being such loyal readers o' the blog and generally being awesome. So congrats—you've won a prize! I just have no idea when I'll be able to deliver it to you! ;)

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