I’ve never been pleased with “Revolving Door”. It was a working title I came up with in 2012 based on a metaphor that I used to describe the structure of its multiverse back when the story didn’t exist yet. The title doesn’t refer to anything in the story, and it hasn’t done it any favours in terms of attracting reader interest or making it searchable.
I simply never changed it, because I could not find it in me to contrive a new title that fully encapsulated all it was about. But now, as my backlog inches towards the end of the story, I think it is time.
What would my ideal title be? A proper title to this story, I felt, had to at least allude the multiversal scope and many converging stories. But I also wanted it to be reminiscent of the original title, with an allusion to revolution, turning, spinning, and perhaps openings and passageways. If it had to be metaphorical, I wanted it to reference a metaphor that is actually used in the story (there isn’t a single mention or even allusion to revolving doors).
Sometimes, I joked that the title “The Worlds Revolving” (in reference to a theme in the soundtrack of DELTARUNE) would check these boxes, but in all honesty, that is only half a joke: I would have perhaps taken that title if it didn’t sound like a ripoff.
However, having had the title Revolving Door for 13 years, I have formed an ironclad attachment to it, and it took a lot of effort to craft a new one that felt representative enough of the story for me to happily make the switch.
So, the title I’ve decided to go with, after months of rumination, is:
The Spindles of Spacetime
In addition to that, I’ve also decided to add a subtitle (a trick borrowed from the world of academia). That subtitle is already informally used as one in many places! So, the full title is:
The Spindles of Spacetime: A Tale of Twelve Worlds
This is the second hardest I’ve ever thought about the choice of a name. My thought process was as follows.
My ideal title would:
- Allude to the motif of threads and knots, which is much more relevant and apt than a spinning door
- Retain that sense of rotation from the original title
- Not be too prosaic about the idea of the multiverse, but allude to it
- Optionally, gesture at the idea of a wheel’s axle as an axis mundi, which is another crucial motif in the story
From there I came up with a shortlist of possibilities (you can vaguely see my thought process below). Honestly, I still like a lot of these titles a lot, and it is not out of the question to title the individual volumes after these.
- A Loom of Worlds / The Cosmogonic Loom – explicit connection to yarn but it loses the sense of rotation
- The World-Spinners – the connection to yarn is implicit and it’s easy to misread this as being to do with the earth’s rotation
- The World-Yarning – The sense of “yarning” here might be a regional to Australia and might have a culturally specific meaning that I’m not attuned enough to use
- The Axis Machine / The World Spindle – a specific important thing in the story
- The Spindles of Infinity
At first, I chased the metaphor of the spinning wheel for weeks, but then I eventually considered the humble spindle, which is present in a lot of mythology and folklore (the Moirae spinning the threads of fate, Plato’s Spindle of Necessity from a tale that is, like this novel, about memory and forgetting and living different lives). On the latter point, I like the cadence of “Spindle of Necessity” too much to not riff on it.
“Spacetime” was what I came to after going through a hundred synonyms for reality, the universe, stories, and so on. It has a nice alliteration with “Spindle”, and that is what sold me on it.
“The Spindles of Spacetime” checks all my boxes, with the bonus of alluding to the fact that there are several axes mundi in the story! Orobelle, the axis machine, John Mercer’s sun tower, the wormhole portal, and so on.
The truth is, I am not 100% decided on this title either. Maybe I need to give it time to settle in, get accustomed to how it rolls off my tongue. If a better version of the title suddenly hits me next month, I may change it yet again. But I think it’s safe to say I’m not going back to Revolving Door, now that I have so many objectively better options.
So what happens to “Revolving Door”? Well, some characters in the story still rely on the revolving door metaphor for the structure of reality (particularly Hong Yi), and I think I do too. It still has the core elements of planes, an axle, and rotation. But so do wind turbines. And mill wheels. And so on.
Administratively speaking, the story will remain at rd.circlejourney.net for now. I may eventually migrate it to a new URL, but mirror it to rd.circlejourney.net so people don’t lose track of it.
I suppose the new acronym for the title would be TSoS? Oh that’s really funny.
I will start by having all title areas display the old and new titles with a slash, and eventually (perhaps in 3 months’ time) I’ll make the shift completely.