Final Preparations

I have been wrestling with one last significant thing with respect to the novel.

For the past eight months I have been writing the novel with the working title "Dreams Of A Love Indestructible". However I have grown increasingly concerned that this title is too "Mills and Boon" and not nearly as classy as say a "Notebook" or a "PS I Love You" (okay so maybe the latter of these two can be cast as gushy/lovey-dovey romance chic). Dreams Of A Love Indestructible does not readily roll off the tongue and, to me - as well as a few others I have run it by - it does sound a little questionable. I named it so because it is the dreams of two people that form a central motif in the story. They are more or less sharing something but they don't know it.

So in the past few days I have reconsidered the title whilst finalizing the remaining edits of the manuscript. I have written down a few ideas on the page, moved things around a bit to see how they fit. And in the process of doing so I kept hearing or seeing the word "Hambledown" in my mind. I don't know how it came to be there but I wrote it down regardless - and then an idea fomented.

During the early part of the writing process , in the copious amounts of notes I had written, I had brainstormed an idea where I would name a particular location in the novel Hambledown Road. I had no idea where this location was, only that it was going to be there somewhere. Then, further along in the writing process Hambledown Road become the location of the beach house where my two star crossed lovers first live together. For a time I worked to include it somewhere in the piece but for some reason it kept getting moved back or put to the side. But I really liked the name Hambledown.

While I was away on holiday on Kangaroo Island, I revisited the whole title issue and decided that "Dreams Of A Love Indestructible" was definitely too much and I could no longer move forward with it. So I gave Hambledown one last look in. I named the town where Denny and Sonya lived Stafford - and this was another aspect of the story that I was never fully happy with. I named it so because of a street I found in the seaside township of Tathra on NSW's south coast and from that I created the fictional village of Stafford on the south coast. I thought at the time "That'll do" but I was kinda "meh" at the same time.

So last week I asked myself the question "What if I renamed Stafford, Hambledown instead?"

Bingo.

Sometimes, in life things just fit in my mind. And this is just one of those. To me the title is a lot more succinct. It is wistful without being overly gushy and to me it sparks interest rather than hits you in the face with a potentially misleading gush fest. With the dream still very much a favored word for the title I have decided and by extension announce here for the first time that my novel will be hence forth known as

"The Hambledown Dream"

Now let me just hope that the same superstition convention that applies to the re-naming of boats doesn't apply here and this decision doesn't damn me to bad, bad luck...

DFA.