Monday, February 20, 2023

The Case of the Missing Title

 A week or so back, I sat down to do a recording of my Lost & Found story "The Case of the Missing Bracelet," and when I opened the file, it was only half there.*  I spent a good long time scouring all my emails, my laptop files, and my blog entries (many of which I wrote as separate files when I had no internet, and included my daily writing at the end), but had no luck with it.  I did searches for "Will Choner," for "Beth," and for "Kenya," which is the name of the girl who hires our heroes to find her piece of jewelry.  But no luck.

In looking around, I found a section of "But Now I'm Found" that I hadn't known existed, and a section that seemed to be from an entirely different L&F story, but I assumed was from "Missing Bracelet."  I even sat down and wrote up a new couple of paragraphs that could serve as the start of the story, if I never found out 

Yesterday, in fact, I thought, "What if I never actually wrote the first part of the story?  What if I just started in the middle, at the point where he goes after the lost bracelet/wristlet**, because that's the most interesting part of the story (indeed, at the writers conference I went to last weekend, one of the panelists stressed that you want to start your story as close to the inciting incident as possible, and so, I thought, maybe I skipped that altogether).  But today was a holiday, and I was using my mom's computer, and I thought, I wonder if . . .

And sure enough, the first half of the story was there, saved on her desktop, but never anywhere else.  Which, I suppose, is good (only my own laziness prevents me from publishing it now), but I noticed something interesting: the title of the story on that file was "The Case of the Beauty's Bracelet."  Hmm.

Now I have a quandary: I think I like Beauty's Bracelet better than Missing Bracelet, but Big has already done a (pretty-excellent) cover for me:

Hmm.  What should I do?  And what do you think?

*In fact, the filename was Lost & Found Bracelet Story (second half).

**I'm not sure if those are the same thing or not.  I think it was a plotpoint in the story, but I can't really remember anymore.

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