Working titles and concept evolution
The book that is now The Citizen of Eastport has gone through a few different working titles over the five years I've been writing it. At the beginning, I knew I had these three central characters with their entangled history and conflicting worldviews, and I knew I wanted to put them in a fairly gritty sci-fi setting with lots of intrigue and warring powers. In the initial concept it was going to be three women, and the story was going to be set on a space station. Thus my first working title, very typical for me: space lesbians.
(Other working titles I have had in the hopper during this time: murder lesbians. lesbian horror. And, for a change, sword girl court girl. Those two are sisters and their respective love interests are men – everyone's still queer though. Point is, you can see I do not put a lot of creativity into my initial working titles.)
Almost immediately I ran into a snag when one of my trio refused to be locked into a single gender. Updating the working title was not really a priority so for a while there I was just calling it space uhhh lesbians-ish. I spent a long time worldbuilding the space station where the story would be set – it has a name, several schematics, and a fleshed-out political situation with different factions and ideologies. Absolutely none of that is in the book now; maybe I'll repurpose it someday for a different story.
(Around this time also is when I was using one of my favorite failed comp concepts: it's like Casablanca if Rick was a butch and Ilsa and Laszlo were combined into one person and Captain Renault was a fey nonbinary love interest to both of them. The one person I shared this with went "huh?" so I haven't tried to push that idea further.)
Then came one of the biggest story shifts: I decided I needed to be on the ground, not in space. This was an intuitive decision so I can't say much about the rationale, but as I was thinking about scenes, thinking about key locations and points of action, and leaning harder into the noir feel I wanted the story to have, a space station just did not sit right. The setting of a story brings its own questions and tensions, and while I love the ones that come with a space station (Babylon 5 is one of my all-time favorite stories), they weren't right for this book. I needed a city. I needed earth underfoot and sky above. I still wanted the story to be set in the future, but the main hub of action had to be a city on Earth.
At least that solved my working title problem. For the following year, the header in my project doc is: not space not lesbians. Easy peasy.
Like the space station, like Casablanca, my city had to be a hub of trade and travel. I love a port city, I love the idea of a place that is in direct contact with many different cultures and has to maintain at least mildly agreeable relations with all of them. A place that is sustained by the people and goods that move through it, but that manages a fair bit of autonomy simply by being essential to too many different powers. Of course, the more port cities there are, the more diluted this power is, so I decided there should be just a few spaceport cities per continent, and my story's would be the easternmost in the Americas. Thus: Eastport.
(This time the minimal creativity in the name was deliberate. I didn't want anything flashy or glamorous. I wanted to keep it grounded and simple, and I wanted it to sound like something that would fit into the throwback noirish environment just as well as in the future where it's actually set.)
As amusing as not space not lesbians was to me personally, I did start to feel like I wanted a working title that required a little less backstory. I wish I remembered how I first thought of calling it rock paper scissors, but once I'd thought of it it was an easy choice. Each of my main trio maps to one of those elements (once the book is out you can guess which is which – I don't think it will be difficult), and I liked the concept of stacked vulnerabilities, each of them having a weakness that one of the others is particularly able to touch. In the story really it goes both directions, with each of them vulnerable to each of the others in different ways, but this is a working title so no need to fuss over details. Rock paper scissors is the name in my project sheet from 2023 onward, and my Scrivener doc is still titled 'RPS Book One' even though the book now has its own for-real grownup title.
How I came up with the actual title, The Citizen of Eastport, is a story I might tell after the book comes out.