Making the journey from hobby writer to pro involves learning new lessons, and making various choices. Some choices, such as choosing to sacrifice large swathes of my social life for my nascent writing career, are major. Others, such as how to refer to my books in print, aren’t. However, this is still a choice I feel the need to justify.
The convention, which I have been following on this blog, is to capitalise one’s titles – so PRINCIPLES OF ANGELS. But though I’ve been doing this for months it still looks too vulgar, too in-your-face. Obviously I want the meme that is my story to get into people’s consciousness, but not in a hit-them-over-the-head-until-they-give-in way. After all, I’m not American. So, though I’ll continue using that convention when dealing with my agent, editor and other publishing pros (and I don’t think I can be bothered to change my ‘Novels’ page just yet) there’ll be no more of that loud stuff on this blog.
In emails I had started using the lazy approach of initial letters: so PoA for Principles of Angels, and, for Consorts of Heaven, CoH. Then we come to Guardians of Paradise. Hmm. No, perhaps not.
So, italics it is. Look at that previous paragraph to see why: they’re elegant, they stand out, but I don’t feel like I’m shouting in anyone’s earhole.
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