Title Hell

Naming the sequel to my novel set in The Bad Place

Consider the headline at the top of this blog post. It’s “Title Hell.” But maybe it should be “Titles about Hell?” Or “The Hell of Choosing Titles?” Or just “To Hell with Titles”?

The sequel to Shaken Loose, my fantasy novel set in an unraveling Christian Hell, is currently at the publisher being edited. For the past few years, I’ve referred to it simply as “book two” or “the sequel,” but last month the literary equivalent of labor and delivery got underway. So it needed a name.

I’d put this off because nothing obvious popped into mind. Shaken Loose was Shaken Loose from the very start; the title arrived simultaneously with the premise of souls being “shaken loose” from eternal immersion in Hellfire. I pitched and sold the book with that title; I never had to put any thought into it.

But the sequel was different. There was no comparably obvious phrase for book 2.

Titles I did NOT consider for Book Two. (I’ve read three of these. Can you guess which ones?)

Convergent? Connected? Centripetal?

For a long time, I looked for a title that would build on the metaphor of physical movement in the first book’s title. In the first book, characters were “shaken loose” not just from Hellfire but from the assumptions and ruts of their earthly lives. They were unmoored—isolated from everyone they loved and everything they knew. In book two, that movement reverses and they increasingly build human connections. If the first book represented centrifugal force and people being hurled away from their past lives, the second book would be centripetal force and people being drawn together.

But that got me nowhere. All I could think of was the title of a famous Flannery O’Connor short story, “Everything that Rises Must Converge.” I made lists of words like convergence, connection, and adhesion that suggested the opposite of being shaken loose. None of them were catchy or evocative or precise; none would entice someone to pick up the book.

After: Life?

Finally I found something I liked—the title After: Life. I’m not revealing any spoilers if I say that the sequel opens with my protagonist Annie alive again, having returned to Earth at the end of Shaken Loose. So After: Life works on multiple levels. Both books are about the afterlife. Book two is also about what happens to Annie after Hell, which is life. (Thus the colon.) I also liked that the title was two words, like the first book.

So I started titling my working drafts After: Life, as opposed to “Book Two.” I had my daughter Becca use it in the cover design she was developing, both of us knowing it wasn’t final.

Then a couple of weeks ago I ran it by my publisher. Who nixed it.

For completely legitimate reasons. There are about two zillion books with the word “afterlife” in the title, including the best-selling Life After Life by Kate Atkinson, Afterlife by Julia Alvarez, Afterlives by Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnak and many, many, many non-fiction books claiming to describe what happens after death. In addition there’s the terrific dark comedy TV series Afterlife with Ricky Gervais, a Liam Neeson thriller, a Ghostbusters sequel….

Book titles aren’t copyrighted, so writers are free to re-use them. (Case in point: my father-in-law Ted Schuchat published a non-fiction book about public libraries in 1985, called The Library Book. Thirty-three years later, in 2018, New Yorker writer Susan Orlean published a book about public libraries called… The Library Book.)

So After: Life would have been fine legally as a title. But—and this was my editor’s very reasonable point—no one would ever have found my little book in an online search, buried way below all those many more famous Afterlives.

So it was After After: Life for me. Back to the drawing board, otherwise known as Title Hell.

The bad, the worse, and the goofy

I read through my entire manuscript again, looking for apt phrases. Nothing. I pored over my thesaurus seeking words expressing ideas like afterlife, convergence, fire, rebirth, second chances etc. I considered quotes from Dante and Milton. I really wanted to use a line from Imagine by John Lennon, which was one of the theme songs in my head as I wrote both books. (Guess which line.) But unlike book titles, song lyrics are copyrighted, getting permission to use them can be very expensive, and the line is fuzzy as to how many words one can use before infringing copyright. Too precarious: I dropped that idea.

I had lots of bad ideas (After the Abyss). I had titles that sounded good but made no sense (Firebreak). I had goofy titles (Fire Escape) and ones that were too common (From the Ashes) and ones that were too obscure. (I still like Bright World, which refers to the final lines of Dante’s Inferno—“My guide and I came on that hidden road to make our way back into the bright world”—but few people would recognize that phrase and my editor felt it didn’t link directly enough to the first book.)

A little help from my friends (more Lennon lyrics!)

Desperate, I emailed friends who had read drafts of the book. My former Chronicle colleague Carolyn Said suggested Thrown Free. That particular title didn’t work for me but the idea of “free” lodged in the dark corners of my brain. And then days later it resurfaced and I thought of Shaken Free.

I added it to my short list reluctantly. It’s common for fantasy series to have recurring words in their titles. For instance, last week Sarah Maas had two fantasy books in the top ten of the New York Times Bestseller List with titles of House of Earth & Blood and House of Flame & Shadow.  But I tend to think of myself as a “literary” novelist or a general fiction writer—not someone who writes fantasy series. And “literary” novels don’t usually have repeating titles.

I explained this to my husband Sam over breakfast. And he said, “Your goal is to get readers. Not just literary readers. Any readers.”

He was right. Whether or not I think of myself as a fantasy-series writer, Shaken Loose is a series. (Albeit a short two-book series.) So why not embrace that?

I ran it past my publisher, who gave it a thumbs up. And as I sat with it more, my reluctance dissipated. Shaken Loose and Shaken Free: the titles clearly say that the two books are siblings, something that the cover design will reinforce. They’ll look terrific next to each other on a web page or bookshelf. I’ve found no other books named Shaken Free, so it won’t be lost in the crowd during a Google search. And the “free” concept speaks to Annie’s return to life as well as other aspects of the plot.

So there we have it. The title is Shaken Free!

The tentative publication date is early 2025.

And the headline for this blog post should perhaps be changed so it reads Shaken Free from Title Hell… with a Little Help from my Friends.

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P.S. In the first graphic, the three Hell titles that I’ve read are Heroes from Hell, Hell Bent, and Hell of a Book. They have virtually nothing in common.