Why Rising?
With The Custod Chronicles book 3 to be announced soon, I thought it would be fun to go back and talk about the title choices for the series.
The series title was actually kind of a teenage mistake. That’s what made publishing this series such a challenge. I’ve been working on it since I was about 12-13 years old. And picking a title was hard. I knew what I wanted the series to be called, but I also knew that oftentimes, even if you pick a name for the series, unless it’s the name of the first book, it won’t stick with the readers.
So I decided to copy Harry Potter that made sure Harry Potter’s name was in the title of each book, so I made each book start with “The Custodian Chronicles”. In hindsight, I may have scraped that and just named the first book that then the other two books their own names, but that’s the beauty of art, is learning how to improve it as we create it and send it into the world. I wrote these as a child, so was kind of dumb and didn't realize the fact Custodians are normally people who clean up after school so that might confuse people about what the book was about, but at first I really wanted to make sure I kept the books as true to their original form when I wrote them in high school as possible. It was a dumb choice. So I updated itto Custod in place of Custodian.
And where did Custod come from? Custo is latin for defender, guard, caretaker. And I thought that would be a perfect last name for this defending, protecting, caretaking family and put a D at the end because I thought it sounded good. Well, my silly brain took too long to realized that making it a title such as Custodian made... well the word Custodian. But by then I couldn’t really change it, and in the end, I kind of like it. We think of Custodians has having to do the more dirty, miserable work to take care of a building. That reflected well what it was like to be a true Custod of an entire world.
But why Rising? It took me a long time to come to it, but I decided on Rising because I felt it encompassed the whole theme not just of this book or even this series, but of my writing career. I am a writer. I itch to write when I don’t for too long. If I wasn’t trying to make a living off of it, I’d write anyway. (Why I figured why not make a living out of it). This first book was the Rising of the fallen Custods. The Rising of the rebellion against Heklis. The Rising of a new fantasy world that grows out of it. It was the rising of the Phoenix.
Ready to learn more about the other titles? Use the links below to read more.