The Esker Road

I'm naming the Becca book The Esker Road, so there, it finally has a title after what, a year and a half? It has had many titles through its previous incarnations, but they were all terrible, so let's forget them.

At one point I had named Becca Saxony, but it kept on evoking medieval maps. 

Once upon a time this book was set on Mount Desert Island, with a J.K. Rowling type author (minus the HATE) up in a mansion on top of one of the inhabited peaks near the shore, with the teen heroine living in a nearly abandoned house built by her dad (now divorced and gone) with a funicular up the mountain from the town where she went to school and where her exhausted mom worked. And there were toddler quintuplets she had to babysit, I believe.

Anyway that might have to get written on its own one of these days. It's all part of the story about a girl avoiding reality by obsessing over a fictional world, see. 

Quintuplet toddlers that a teen took care of full time. I'd escape too.

ANYWAY the town of Esker is the center of the Eskerverse (right???) in which so many of these novels are set. 

I just read Jellicoe Road and oh boy is The Esker Road a cousin twice removed who nevertheless bears a strong resemblance. It's like if I Am the Cheese and Jellicoe Road and the Thrushcross books all spawned an offspring together. 

Amazing what I can write into a book that clearly comes from another book but that I've forgotten entirely. Like it's all in my brain, to the point that I had elements straight out of these books, but I didn't remember where they came from, or worse, that they even came from anywhere else.

So take that, authorial intentionality. Nyah. I told you it was nonsense. You can plan to drive from Maine to Los Angeles, or vice versa, but you can't plan what will happen along the way. 

Look, Maine. So Mainey!