Finding A Veil Sundered

For something that consists of a few words printed on a cover, naming a book or a series is a surprisingly difficult pain in the ass. The thing I'm writing now has gone through several names, several different incarnations, and enough changes that if you put the original 2014 version beside what exists today, I'm not sure you'd immediately recognise them as the same thing. And yet they are.

Too Many Names

The original book was Witch and Warrior, and the original series was The Chronicles of Sancatury. Witch and Warrior fast became Before I Sleep with Witch and Warrior being shuffled to the Book Two slot. Every time the concept changed, I tended to look at what came before and think I'd failed again. Becuase; Wrong story. Wrong approach. Wrong title. Start over. Try again. Get it right. It's incredibly easy to look at a hard drive full of old drafts and convince yourself that you've produced nothing except a remarkably well-organised collection of mistakes. Eventually, though, the series became A Veil Sundered. Something about that name simply clicked.

Finding the Story Underneath It

A Veil Sundered finally felt big enough to describe what I'd actually been building. This wasn't simply a story about Witches and Warriors anymore, although they're still central to it. It wasn't just about Sanctuary, and it wasn't really about the apocalypse either, even though destroying civilisation tends to draw a certain amount of attention. It was about the world behind the normal world. The things hidden from everyone. The people manipulating events without anyone knowing they exist. It was about what happens when that hidden structure starts coming apart and people who think they understand the forces they're playing with discover that they don't. Book One went through the same process and eventually became The Road Between Us. That title clicked too. Yes, Dustin and Christine are physically travelling. There is quite literally a road between places. But the important distance in the book isn't measured in miles. It's the distance between those two people when they begin and what happens as that distance changes. Once I saw that, I couldn't really imagine calling the book anything else.

Maybe It Wasn't Starting Over

The thing I've started to realise is that I wasn't really throwing everything away and starting from scratch each time. Characters survived from earlier versions. Ideas survived. Pieces of the world survived. Relationships changed shape but remained recognisable. Some ideas were pulled apart completely and rebuilt into something better, but the material came from somewhere. I was learning what the story was. That's probably a much more graceful description than the actual process deserves. Most of the time it involved swearing at a computer and wondering why I'd made something unnecessarily complicated years earlier. Still, I don't look at those abandoned versions quite the same way now. Maybe they weren't proof that I couldn't get the story right. Maybe they were how I learned what right looked like. Of course, I reserve the right to completely retract this statement the next time I open something I wrote in 2014 and discover an absolute horror show waiting for me.