for the fic meme: A and tratdgb!
A: How did you come up with the title to [insert fic]?
Oh my goodness. The River and the Deep Green Bend went through a bunch of different names while I was writing it. There was the working title, Booties On a Fucked Up Weasel, then during the course of writing it I went through a couple traditional song title/lyric names (including but not limited to Nudging the Ghost and I Wish I Was the Moon) but nothing felt right and as I was nearing the end I realized I wanted to give it a more title-y title.
The Dark Tower book that I was riffing most heavily on in the story was Wizard and Glass, so I kind of wanted to do something with a similar feel/theme/cadence and something that meant a lot of things at the same time because I’m a jerk and I think I’m clever. So I cycled through a bunch of options and finally settled on The River and the Deep Green Bend because:
1. The River equals the river obviously, which is just sort of THERE through the whole story, but also the River equals the 5 of them and their ka-tet (ahem...”little river”)
2. The Deep Green Bend because the story is about the 5 of them (the river) and the deep green bend of Maerlyn’s rainbow (the wizard glass) but also it’s about them traveling along an actual river and coming to a bend where there’s a town. Called Riverbend.
Basically I wanted the title to be a thing that made sense outside of the context of the story (bendy rivers and deep green water) but also to mean something else entirely by the time you finished. Again, because I’m a jerk and I think I’m clever. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
