Shifting Writing Gears

Have I done a writing blog lately? I've gotten so random with everything except the LHMP and the LaForge diaries that I'd have to look in the blog roll to see.

My day-to-day writing project is still Floodtide. I'm continuing with the tradition that every book has a slightly different writing process. This one feels a bit like I've circled around back to my process for Daughter of Mystery in that I'm just sort of spilling story onto the page as it comes to me with only a bare outline to guide me.

It's not quite that unplanned, of course. I have a very detailed interleaved timeline for how Floodtide overlaps with Mother of Souls. A lot of the events and the who's-where-when structure is utterly fixed. And my generation of the first draft isn't always fitting that very well. There's going to be a lot of moving scenes around to get the chronology and pacing right when I have time to stop for breath. But at the moment, it feels like stopping for breath would break the flow.

I do need to break the flow, though. The short story (well, technically novelette by word count) about Jeanne and the French spy is at the final revisions stage, so I need to sort through the beta reader feedback and do my own re-read after letting it sit for a month and see what needs to be done. I also need a title for the story--something I'm not usually still stuck on at this point in the process. I was originally thinking of something like "Morning GIft" or "Great Gifts" or--because it fits in the context of the story to render it in French "Le Grand Cadeau" (except that kind of destroys any useful connection of the meaning to the story). But someone the first two don't have the right feel. The concept I'm going for is one that was mentioned in passing in The Mystic Marriage: the symbolic language of gifts to a lover and how they communicate one's intentions for the relationship.

Well, perhaps something will come to me by the time I'm done with revisions. What would you entitle a story about an unhappy young woman who unexpectedly finds her life turned around by an affair with an opera-singer/spy and a brush with treason?