I’ve sometimes wondered if I made a mistake by calling my four-book fantasy series The Auralia Thread. Even people who have read the series, and who can remember the names of the individual novels, forget the series name. (Let’s not even talk about trying to teach people the term “tetralogy.”)
It could have been The Auralia Chronicles. Or The Auralia Saga. Or Tales of the Expanse. Or Beware of Beastmen. Or something hashtaggy and brand-ready like #ColorWorld.
But I called it The Auralia Thread for a reason. And I have a renewed satisfaction in that title thanks to this excerpt from The Faraway Nearby, by Rebecca Solnit, posted on her Facebook page this week:
A thread now most often means a line of conversation via e-mail or other electronic means, but thread must have been an even more compelling metaphor when most people witnessed or did the women’s work that is spinning. It is a mesmerizing art, the spindle revolving below the strong thread that the fingers twist out of the mass of fiber held on an arm or a distaff. The gesture turns the cloudy mass of fiber into lines with which the world can be tied together. Likewise the spinning wheel turns, cyclical time revolving to draw out the linear time of a thread. The verb to spin first meant just this act of making, then evolved to mean anything turning rapidly, and then it came to mean telling a tale. Strands a few inches long twine together into a thread or yarn that can go forever, like words becoming stories. …
Read the whole excerpt here.
The Auralia Thread. That’s my tetralogy’s name… and I’m sticking to it.