I was wrong

I was not wrong that titles are difficult.  I was wrong about what poem could help me out with the tale of the pan, Peter Dawe.  Then I was wrong again.

In my teens, when I held to the deep conviction that Francis Crawford of Lymond from Dorothy Dunnett’s Game of Kings was the most noble, most intelligent, and most handsome of men, I wanted to be like him.  He had a stock of poetry memorized* with a pithy quote for any occasion that required a pithy quote, whether snarky or droll.  He was a master of both.  I, therefore, worked hard on memorizing my grandfather’s book Four Centuries of Great Poetry. It was leather bound and allowed me to feel like I, too, lived large in the sixteenth century.  No, I didn’t memorize four hundred years of greatness, but I got about half a dozen poems under my belt, more or less.  One of them was Coleridge’s Kubla Khan.

It’s a great poem and can be repurposed for Buckaroo Bonzai discussions (although I don’t remember why) and for farewell parties (insert name of departing person, make other modifications as appropriate, and, voila, you’ve got a farewell poem).

I looked to it first when seeking titles for my new series.  The new series is set on Nwwwlf, just as the Waking Late books are.  Nwwwlf is a mostly hospitable planet.  Just don’t eat the food.  It’s a good thing that starships colonizing the galaxy ship out stocked full of seeds, embryos, livestock, frozen people, and primordial soup for terraforming, or the little colony of First Landing would have fallen prey to beri beri, peleagra, and madness worthy of the denizens of William Faulkner’s novels.

I modeled the valley of First Landing, with its encircling ring of mountains, after the city of Chiang Mai in northern Thailand where I spent three happy years of my childhood.  Fort Stampo, situated high above the valley of First Landing, sits as high as the temple on Doi Suthep does outside of Chiang Mai.  I still remember the haze and how much I could see in the valley below.

Chiang Mai is a real place.  First Landing is not, but it’s nice to ground the imaginary in the real to help translate, even if only for the writer.  It also gave me a large geographic bowl in which to shelter humanity’s overwhelmed terraforming efforts.  Usually, as we all know, the colonizing corporations find a large, barren rock world to terraform.   Then they need not displace an existing ecosystem.  Nwwwlf proved a more difficult task.

If I ever write stories set during Nwwwlf’s discovery, Kubla Khan provides some great lines from which to wrestle titles.  For instance,

So twice five miles of fertile ground

With walls and towers were girdled round;

And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,

Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

***

A savage place! as holy and enchanted

Obviously, Twice Five Miles could refer to the initial terraforming bit of land.  Fertile Ground could mark a story about a successful effort.  A Savage Place is a good name for a planet that’s the nutritional equivalent of a giant Twinkie.  (It has long pained me how anachronistic and inappropriate it would be to have Gilead call Nwwwlf a Twinkie.  So I am very pleased to be able to make the comparison here if not in the Waking Late books themselves.)

I was about to go with Girdled Round, which could refer to the mountains around the valley to be terraformed.  This first story about Peter contains the governor’s early maneuvering to try to gain more dominion over his people, particularly those west of the river.  So while Girdled Round could be comforting and enveloping, and reassure the human populace that all that lies within the mountain-guarded valley mimics home, it could also be threatening.

Threatening beckoned.  I was thinking of calling the sequel A Savage Place., and Peter’s saga in its entirety The Road to Serfdom.

Then, just as I was about to make myself annoyed later if I ever wrote about the founding of Nwwwlf, Helpful Reader Scott reminded me of the Kipling poem, The Sons of Martha.  By Jove, he had it!  First, Peter has many siblings.  Second, I just changed his mother’s name to Martha.  But, third, and of more substantive import, Helpful Reader Scott is right about the occupants of First Landing being or wanting to be the sons of Mary.  Mary’s sons, as Kipling notes, get taken care of by Martha’s sons.  It is Martha’s sons he describes here:

     Tally, transport, and deliver duly the Sons of Mary by land and main.

     But simple service simply given to his own kind in their common need.

There might be a little dark irony to that title, but that’s okay.

*By the way, what I only realized later was that as a teen I should have just looked around at my brother and his friends.  They all had massive amounts of song lyrics memorized–the Ramones, Dire Straits, others.  I bet all of Lymond’s poetry was modern for him.