MMX, X-VII.
Magniloquence I: Slight Introductions & Musing on Titles
This is another attempt at keeping an online journal. Its existence is mostly to encourage me into writing more often, I suppose, but it’s also a convenient avenue of sharing some of what I’m working on at the time — should you be inclined to care for some odd reason.
I’m a would-be writer of weird fiction. I’m currently working on a novella (that may someday grow up to be a novel) dealing mostly with the later years of the American Spiritualism movement. This is the novella’s working title:
or
The House of Cards Alight:
A written personal testimony of the psychical delving into the
mysterious circumstances surrounding the deaths of
my beloved aunt,†Mourning Litchfield-Valentine,
and eleven other men and women.
By †Phillips Litchfield
1882
⁂
Freely translated from French into English from the original manuscript by Jehanne M. Marr
I have an odd relationship with titles. For quite awhile, it was a terrible, abusive relationship, and I preferred “Untitled” to any alternative — which I admit, is a lazy approach. I don’t believe I was ever satisfied with using “Untitled”, but I still think it’s better than the majority of titles. Eventually I started picking out small things such as the protagonist’s name or any one-word, simple concept from the story. Still rather boring, but better than “Untitled” and these titles never took away from the story.
Titles I hate, and that I feel take away from the story, are the titles that lead to moments where I’m looking for significance within the text in places that I wouldn’t normally were it not for the fact that the “cryptic monocle” triggers an instinct to investigate after reading the title: “I Assure You, The Cryptic Monocle is Very Significant in this Short-Story”. (Side note: I would probably still like any story that involves a cryptic monocle).
I stuck with the simple and pointless titles for awhile until I wrote a short-story by the name of:
An excerpt from Brief Glimpses into the Lives of the Unknown,
the latest work of renowned author and historian of the obscure, Dr. Chancey Squires.
It was a strange story sparked from adding a footnote to a few rough lines of prose that developed into a faux-scholarly persona (and thirty-eight more footnotes in the small span of five pages). Whether it deserved a grand title (that can be argued) or I was just caught up in the pretentious nonsense of it all, the story ended up with a title thirty-three words long. And to me, it was a satisfying title.
Some of the feel to “Roderick…” has creeped into the novella project, as well as my continuing fondness for characters and personas removed from the story proper, and perhaps that’s why I have another paragraph title (that dwarfs “Roderick…”s title by twenty-three or twenty-four words depending on if you count the asterism), but, I suppose, I won’t really know until I see what titles I attach to stories in the future.
I didn’t intend to write this initial entry on titles, but I think it’s actually rather fitting as the first thing to be seen on here. This little internet-diary’s title is “X-VII”, which would fall into my title schemes after the “Untitled” phase and before the paragraph phase. The number comes from today’s date, the day Edgar Allen Poe died. I could claim I’m using it for a greater meaning, but I’m not — so I won’t. It was going to be the day of his death (X-VII) or his birth (I-XIX) and I’m more inclined towards October.
X-VII doesn’t interfere, gives a small nod to an idol, and looks pretty. It’s not a paragraph of pretense, but it fits much more easily into your browser’s address bar.
D.
