Joely Sue Burkhart

PBW has a great blog entry on the importance of branding.  I know it’s crucial for good business.  It’s a major thing we’re always working on at the EDJ too, and any successful business needs a recognizable brand that attracts potential customers and retains existing ones.  I know all that.

But I’ve been banging my head on the wall trying to come up with an appropriate brand for Beautiful Death.

As much as I love this story, it’s so different from the Blood stories.  Similar, and I think anyone who reads me will recognize my voice in both.  However, they’re very different.  Different themes, different mythologies, different genres.  I can safely call BD “romance” where I can’t the Blood series.  But where I see the great epic of Shannari’s neverending battle against Shadow–down through literally generations–I can’t see far beyond Isabella’s story in Beautiful Death.

Yes, there are vampires in Beautiful Death–but the story isn’t about vampires.  It’s about myths and monsters–mostly human ones.  Charon and Hercules certainly aren’t vampires.  So it doesn’t make sense to focus on that aspect at all.

The world is established, with great potential for growth and expansion.  I can take any Greek or Roman myth or historical event/person (like Philip II of Macedonia) and warp it for inspiration.  (Beautiful Death touches on Zeus, Hades, Thanatos, Charon, Hera–but Hades does NOT end up with Persephone.)  I know the next book would be Charon’s.  But what, exactly, his character arc and overall story goal would be, I have no idea.  I know significant world events yet to happen, with potential villains crawling out of the woodwork, but I never decided whether the series as a whole would have a unifying theme.  (I think it should.)  It doesn’t have a tag line (and it should).  The series itself doesn’t have a name (and I think it should).

Needless to say, I’ve wracked my brain for hours and scribbled all sorts of ridiculous notes, and I’ve still got nadda.  Either what I come up with would never make sense to anyone but me and like three people, or it’s already used (as in a band name, or the website domain is already taken) or it’s cheesy.

I’ve looked at Greek roots and suffixes.  mythos, neo, mopho

I’ve played with famous classical and mythological battles.  Gigantomachy, Thermoplyae

The name of the futuristic “world” is New Olympia — but Hades is an alien and most of the future conflict aspects are coming from other aliens.  The stories may not even be set IN New Olympia, but on Macedon or further.  So that doesn’t make sense to concentrate on, either. (And the website is taken, anyway.) 

I especially liked a personal brand name of neomythic or neomythos but one is a band and the other website already exists. 

I also thought of Mythomorphoses, a play on Ovid’s Metaphorphoses, for the Beautiful Death series name.  Website is taken, and Sis wasn’t sure if people would have a clue about what it meant.

She thought I should look at the viral/pandemic aspect.  That gave me pandemythic or panmythos, which I decided would be a stupid Pan hoofed creature frollicking around with a flute.

I know Rome wasn’t built in a day.  But I was so obsessed with this brand thing that I didn’t get my 1K done tonight. 

Beautiful Death is *close* to right, but it’s still not there.  The opening still doesn’t resonate fully for me.  I know I’ve tweaked it a hundred times, but I feel deep down in the quiet part of my heart that it’s still not right.  So no more queries until the opening sings and I have a better understanding of what I want to say with that world in general.

One of my favorite shows, Hell’s Kitchen with Gordon Ramsay, is back!  We watched the premiere of season 3 last night and were not disappointed.  We haunt the BBC channel for Gordon’s Kitchen Nightmares, but it’s only on like once a month or so.  We didn’t care for his “F Word” show, although I’d watch it if I couldn’t find anything else on.

But Hell’s Kitchen is Ramsay at his worst, and I love it. 

My favorite contestant so far is Julia, the short order cook.  All of the others were so mean to her.  They wouldn’t let her do anything in the kitchen.  They ridiculed her because of her job at the Waffle House.  While they proceeded to stink up the entire kitchen.  Finally, they let her cook the quail eggs so they could get some appetizers out of the kitchen (after over an hour!), and she did great.

If there’s any justice in the world, Julia will win it all.

Of course, this is reality TV so who knows what will happen.  But some day, I’d dearly love to write such a character, from the Waffle House to her very own world-class kitchen in Vegas. 

On the writing front, I got my 1K last night in TFW, finished the dream sequence from hell, and started the long, hard ride to the Wall.