BOOK TITLES

THE RIDGELINE BETWEEN READER AND WRITER

I have been working on my novel, Bay Lands, for many years, on and off. Originally, I titled it Sempervirens after Sequoia sempervirens, the giant redwood trees of the California Coast. The image of Sempervirens captured something essential about my story – how, in the course of our small lives, human destruction of these alpha trees irreparably damaged our own prospects. The otherworld calm and life force that giant redwood forests once exuded cannot be regrown, and this still matters. As one of my characters in Bay Lands reflects:

…. when he started chopping, he suspected but didn’t want to know how the whacks of his axe would reverberate. The light would change, the soil would alter, different plants would grow, water courses would veer, the climate would turn drier without the redwood leaves capturing the fog and turning it into rain.

The coastal mountains south of San Francisco were cleared of great forests of giant redwoods in less than a quarter century in the mid-19^th Century. (Logging companies profited from the fledgling city’s propensity to burn – six times in 18 months from 1849 to 1851.) Today on the San Francisco Peninsula, we live with the results of unrestricted resource extraction, a theme woven throughout my novel.

And yet, as in my novel, there can be adaptation and redemption. We now enjoy second-growth forests, not so grand and timeless as the ancestor ecosystem, but good for us in many ways. These new woodlands sprouted around the trunks of the chopped-down giants, in patterns whimsically called ‘fairy rings.’ This new growth sprouts from remarkably powerful, intertwined root systems that underlie much of the ecosystem. That ecosystem, remnant of an earlier natural world, still supports our way of life, hard though that is to acknowledge as we zip across our paved-over lands. Hence, Sempervirens, ever-living, the power of good to reassert itself even after evil has been done.

At some point, after many form-letter rejections by agents who never read past my pitch letter (this was pre-AI; it’s all an algorithm now), I guessed that “Sempervirens” required too much intellectual work by publishing gatekeepers, much less potential readers. So, I changed the title to Bay Lands, which evokes even more (see my next post), and – bonus – uses only English.

Bay Lands evokes something even more essential to my novel. It is the actual land under my characters’ feet. It drives their passions to control their worlds. A reckless robber baron shaves down entire hills in San Francisco and dumps the dirt in the bay so that he can have a direct commercial route from the harbor to land he’s bought on the cheap on the other side of where Rincon Hill once rose. Other schemers want a deep-water port south on the bay, so they seek to control ranchos that front the bay. The railroad monopoly, too, wants bay lands on either side of its tracks. And wealthy nobs want the bay lands for their “country” retreats. Descendents of ranch owners are just as tenacious in holding onto bay land that they regard as their legacy property. And the native peoples remaining around the bay also regard these lands as their ancestral home. Drama ensues.

The publisher suggested that “Bay Lands” does not connote enough story context to pull in readers. I’m hoping great cover design will convey scope and depth. Marketing may trump literary integrity. We shall see.