A Natural History of Dragons: Giveaway the First

Disabled

Just laid this out piecemeal on Twitter; here it is in less truncated form.

I’m chewing over potential titles for the second book of Isabella’s memoirs. I want it to sound Victorian and travelogue-ish, and/or to potentially echo something having to do with sub-Saharan Africa (which is the region I’m taking as my model for this installment). My tongue-in-cheek placeholder is “Mrs. Camherst, I Presume,” but that’s not great as a title, hence looking for a replacement.

Right now I’m charmed by a pattern that showed up in Victorian travel-writing, exemplified by “Along the River Limpopo, With Gun and Camera.” The whole thing is unwieldy, but maybe a “With X and Y” phrase? If I can find suitable nouns to plug into it. (And if I can shut up the part of my brain that says I already have one published book whose title begins with With.) Or, y’know, something else.

Anyway, all that rambling is just to give you an idea of the flavor I’m looking for. The actual point of this post is to say that for the next week, I am opening the floor to title suggestions. In between now and noon PST on Monday, e-mail me, leave comments here, or post to Twitter with the hashtag #ANHODgiveaway. I can’t promise I’ll take any of the suggestions as a permanent winner, but I will pick someone as a contest winner, and send them one of these advance copies of A Natural History of Dragons.

If you don’t have any suggestions, don’t worry! I have four ARCs to give away, which means there will be three other opportunities to snag one. In the meanwhile, let the suggesting begin!

0 Responses to “A Natural History of Dragons: Giveaway the First”

  1. desperance

    There actually is a Victorian volume in the Lit & Phil, the memoir of a gentleman barber, called I Shaved the Crowned Heads of Europe. Which is why I wrote “I Shaved Half-Emperor Cyrrhenius” et seq. I know exactly where you stand, and will think on it.

    Meanwhile, I wish there were a mountaineering memoir by a lady alpiniste, called With Petticoats and Pick. Then it could have a sequel called With Corsets and Crimpons.

    • Marie Brennan

      Hee! There will be Himalaya-scale mountaineering in the final book of the series, if Tor picks it up; however, it will probably also need a grander title than With Petticoats and Pick.

      Still, somebody needs to write that book.

    • Anonymous

      With pince nez and Baedeker ?

  2. bookblather

    Are there any special tools for dragon-measuring? Like horses have their own special measuring sticks in hands.

  3. leatherdykeuk

    Of Iridescence and Austerity

  4. starlady38

    Four Months Among Dragons, With Sketchbook and Stereoscope

  5. akashiver

    Quickly scanning my travel books for other possible models: “Roughing it in the Jungle;” “The Useful Female Dragon Hunter;” “A Curiosity of Dragons;” “A year among the Volcanoes, With Weight and Measure;” “With Net and Notebook;” “Across the Dark Continent, with a Dragon.”

  6. Anonymous

    title ideas

    In case my comment doesn’t mirror from goodreads:
    How about “The Black Nile” or “By Way of the Black Nile”? (old Victorian name for the Niger river, one of the main routes used to try to map the heart of Africa.)

    And you can never go wrong with a Kubla Khan reference..
    how about “Paradise at once and ever”

Comments are closed.