“I have an awesome title for you,” he said. “The Uncut Wood.”
I snickered at the joke of it, the layers of pun and innuendo. My partner Stevie loves to come up with outrageous plots and concepts for stories we both know I’ll never write.
I dismissed it.
But he was serious. “It’s the best title ever. You have to use it. People will love it.”
“The Bear Camp books are all going to have two-word titles. So it’d have to be just Uncut Wood.”
“No. It’s THE Uncut Wood.”
He was really insistent about it, like he’d channeled instructions from a higher power and couldn’t allow me to mess it up.
I tried to draw him into a more detailed brainstorming session—a ridiculous, unhelpful, but hilarious process. I used these conversations as inspiration for a scene in the second full-length book in the series. In Muscle Cub, Austin pitches Paul truly terrible book ideas, which I had a blast coming up with.
I digress.
I needed a story idea with a killer title.
I’d just finished writing Grumpy Bear. It was my first novel under this pen name, and nobody outside the listeners of my podcast had ever heard of me. I needed to write something else I could use to introduce readers to Bear Camp.
There was a huge multi-author MM romance giveaway in the works.
It was an opportunity to contribute a short story, and work alongside some fantastic authors in the genre. I could make it a prequel and find readers before my book launch. The timing was perfect.
But the theme was “Winter Wonderland.”
I was writing a series set at a clothing-optional campground in the summer.
Now, I love a creative writing assignment with constraints. It provides a frame of reference or a starting point. It actually makes it easier to discover a story than “write whatever you want.”
But what the hell happens at a gay naked campground in the freaking winter?
Stevie may have channeled the answer after all.
In real life, nearly everyone on staff becomes a lumberjack.
Even in the South, all the freezing and thawing causes a lot of trees and limbs to come down. Keeping the roads passable becomes an ongoing daily challenge.
To make that concept fun for the characters and the readers, I created the Jacolympics event.
(Search log-splitting competition videos on YouTube for eye candy and inspiration.)
A more important question remained:
Where’s the emotional depth in a story full of wood puns?
(There’s even a word for it.)
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Read the Bear Camp series by Slade James.