What’s In a Title?

Happy New Year!  I hope you all are acclimating well to 2019 so far.  I know we’re just getting started with a new year, but I am eager to start it off right, and in my world, that means we start it off with a new book!

My next release was born out of the time my family and I spent living in England in 2017/2018.  I am going to do some blogs on those details later, but for now, let’s just say it was a magical, golden time filled with adventure and romance, and I felt inspired every day.  I wrote a classically sweet and romantic novel while nestled in out little village looking out over the North Sea.  I couldn’t wait to share it with you all when I got home; however, I couldn’t even begin the publishing process because I didn’t have a title.

Titles are the worst for me.  Okay, actually they are the second worst after blurbs, but still I am terrible at them.  I haven’t titled even half of my books, instead waiting for friends to do the job for me.  So, I headed off to Indiana to visit friends Sarah and Andy, who have helped with this process in the past.  We did like we always do. We put the kids to bed, got out some wine, and I told them about the story:  Recently divorced American writer moves to her ancestral home in the hopes of hiding out and healing her wounds, but the whole village wants to be friendly and tries to fix her up with the only other lesbian they know, the town’s loveably understated British/Irish bartender.  Then I turned to my friends and said, “Go.”

What followed was an hour of the worst British puns and romantic cliches you can imagine. We ran through themes of hiding, of running away, of travel and homelands. And things only devolved from there.  At one point were were listening to ’80’s pop songs and scanning blurbs of Hallmark movies.  All we got was tipsy and this list of the least horrible ideas, most of which actually were pretty horrible for this book.

Heart’s Hideaway
British Beginnings
Hearts in Hiding
Longing for Home
Getaway Romance
British Begin Again
Worlds Apart
Crossing Borders
Escape to the Country
Borderline
Across the Pond
Run for the Border
Seaside Lover Holiday Village
Waiting for Love in All the Wrong Places

Weeks, even months later, we were back in in England, still tossing around the ideas and feeling the pressure of a deadline, when we decided to play the same game some of our British friends.  They came up with a similarly tragic list of randomly British things that had virtually nothing to do with the books, usually followed by requests to make them fit through some sort of rewrite.

Castle and Queen (there is a castle in the book)
Garden Party (nope, she does have an important garden, but hosts no parties there)
Tea Time
High Tea (they could get high and drink tea?)
Pub Quiz
London Calling (doesn’t fit and already taken)
The Royal Guard (just no)
Tea and Scones (there actually are assloads of scones in this book, but no)
Borderlands
Bonfires

The list went on and on, and I feared we’d never find a single, catchy, English thing in any way related to the actual book I’d written.  Then came breakfast,  a full English breakfast.

And no, I have no scenes in the book where my characters flirt over massive plates loaded down with all the good things that pass as acceptable breakfast foods in England.  I did, however, have some very interesting connections forming in my mind.  My main American character’s heritage is English. My other main character is half English, half Irish. They are in effect, both part-English, which is a fun play on the concepts of parts and a whole.  The village and region where they meet and fall in love (That’s not a spoiler. It’s a romance) is also quintessentially English.  The village sets about giving them a full English experience.  And finally, as Emma puts down roots of her own to mingle with those of her family tree, she becomes increasing at home and increasingly English.  The whole story takes a lot of parts, but the sum total works out to be a full English romance.

From there, I wrote a blurb, and Ann McMan designed the deliciously romantic cover. Then Bywater Books started the long process of getting Full English out to you!

 

After a publicly humiliating divorce, best-selling author Emma Volant runs away to hide in the seaside English village of Amberwick, where she doesn’t know another living soul. She wants nothing more than to surrender to her broken heart in private. However, when the locals discover their newest resident is world famous, they gather at the local pub and hatch a plan to draw Emma out of her self-imposed isolation, hoping her celebrity status will elevate the village’s reputation to something more than a holiday hotspot.

It doesn’t take long for them to try to rope their favorite bartender, Brogan, into the act. Born and raised in Amberwick, Brogan McKay has built a comfortable life by never overreaching. Part-time jobs and short-term flings have always been good enough for her, but when she meets her beautiful and wounded new neighbor, Brogan realizes Emma has the potential to wreck the carefully controlled expectations she uses to protect her heart. Despite their obvious attraction and growing friendship, both Emma and Brogan are in firm agreement that neither of them is in a position to look for love, but how long can they fight their fears and desires as the events and people around them all conspire to create a full English love story?