(Originally posted on LiveJournal)
I’ve been nose-to-grindstone the last couple of weeks, working on getting the manuscript of The Scribbler’s Guide to the Land of Myth (plug, plug!) ready for BookSurge to do their magic on it. So, working on my fantasy novel has been simmering quietly on a back burner. And it’ll wait a bit longer. I’m almost done with the spell-check on The Guide, and then I need to beef up an outline for another project. But, I’m hoping in a few days to get back to it.
Still… in the back of my mind, I’ve been mulling over a minor problem. What shall I call my created world? Tolkien called his “Middle-earth”, but mine… isn’t “middle” anything.
Now… this might seem like an odd sort of problem: does it really matter? Well, it does to me. Because once I finish The Ring of Adonel, I want to get on with a few other stories — The Siege of Iren and The Drowning of Jernathien in particular (don’t know if those will be the final names, but they are two of the BIGGER stories waiting on me). So, I wanted some sort of umbrella title for these books. Like “The Chronicles of Narnia”. Except that Narnia is just one country within Lewis’ created world, and my stories don’t all take place in one similar country. In one sense, it’s all about the potential marketing. “The latest volume in the Chronicles of XXX!” And I’m planning to set up a domain for the fantasy titles. (I’m ambitious, if nothing else.) But I’m not planning a series, like the Harry Potter or Artemis Fowl books. So, no calling it by a character’s name either.
So, I’ve been mulling it over. I even prowled through what I call the “idea notebook”, looking at the lists of names, terms and words that struck my fancy, which might be woven into my work. But nothing was leaping off the page, proclaiming “Here I am!”
Then last night, I was making the trek from my work in Culver City all the way through Hollywood toward the Burbank area, for a meeting. On surface streets. So I had time to think of various things.
And suddenly, this word popped into my head.
Arveniem.
I liked the sound of it. The feel of it. But I had no idea (at that moment) whether it was something I’d heard, read or otherwise absorbed from the world around me, or whether it was something spontaneously generated in that instant.
It seems to be the latter.
Arveniem. The Created World.
I think I found what I was looking for – or it found me.
Comments
margdean56 – Jan. 5th, 2009
I like the sound of it, but it does seem to echo Tolkien’s “Arvernien”.
scribblerworks – Jan. 5th, 2009
Interesting!
I admit, I’m not that up on all of Tolkien’s names. So the name of Earendil’s residence (I had to look it up!) was certainly not in present memory. That may account for the sense of familiarity that came with “Arveniem” presented itself.
Well… too late to change now: it’s implanted itself and insisted it IS the “correct name”. Heh
UPDATE SINCE THE ORIGINAL POST:
The Scribbler’s Guide, of course, has now been published and is readily available.
The Drowning of Jernathien – although still only at a conceptual stage, has gained the title of The Treasures of Darkness and will very likely be the next novel I tackle once I finally do complete The Ring of Adonel.
And, of course, I opted to make the Arveniem site just part of the ScribblerWorks domain, instead of a domain all its own. For one thing, it means I don’t have to track maintaining an additional domain name.
