Lunatic Fringe

Tales of the Pack was conceived as a series.  Like the Sookie Stackhouse series, Darkly Dreaming Dexter,  and a slough of other novels, each is designed to stand on its own while contributing to a larger overall story that will unfold over a series of books.

The working title of this first book has been “The Pack.”  It began as a pun on the idea of “packing“* in the queer community and also the tendency of many queer women to run in tight packs of friends.  I acknowledge that it wasn’t a very sexy stand-alone title.  So, I settled on a title for the series “Tales of the Pack,” yet another, but far more obvious, pun.   But the book still needed a standalone title.

I should mention that I am a total title-phile.  I have a file on my computer that is just a list of titles I’d like to use someday.  Yet, I was running into a wall when trying to title this book.  I think it’s for couple of reasons- 1) I don’t want to sound cliche- this being a book about the supernatural, there are a lot of awful cliches that litter the market.  2) My last name is Moon.  Writing a werewolf novel, I was pretty conscious about my last name being on the cover of the book and how either redundant or weird it would look with another “moon-like” word on the title.

After a fair amount of deliberation I arrived at a title I like quite a lot:  LUNATIC FRINGE.    I’ve always had an affinity for the word “lunatic.”  It’s moon-related enough to make sense thematically, and it’s an aesthetically beautiful word.  Lunatic Fringe refers to radical dissenters, which describes the Pack perfectly.  I was planning on saving the title for book 2 when one of the characters takes the Pack in a new, more radical direction.  But it’s a bad practice to save best or favorite stuff for later, because, as much as I love writing these books, it’s foolish to omit good stuff from a book with the intention to use it later.

So, Houston, we have a title.  Tales of the Pack: Lunatic Fringe.   Get ready to look for it at a bookstore near you- unless my publisher changes it, that is.

* Interestingly, I had a hard time finding links for the term “packing” that were part of lesbian or queer women’s websites.