{"id":12,"date":"2005-04-16T15:57:14","date_gmt":"2005-04-16T21:57:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.doniscasey.com\/?p=12"},"modified":"2005-04-16T15:57:14","modified_gmt":"2005-04-16T21:57:14","slug":"the-old-buzzard-had-it-coming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.doniscasey.com\/?p=12","title":{"rendered":"The Old Buzzard Had It Coming?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Where does one come up with these titles?  For the first book in my Alafair Tucker series, I went through several titles before I landed on <em>The Old Buzzard Had It Coming<\/em>.  Since the book takes place in Oklahoma in the dead of the winter of 1912, I first tried to find a title with the word &#8220;cold&#8221; in it, as in &#8220;cold blooded murder&#8221;.  For a long time, the working title was <em>Blood Run Cold<\/em>, but in the end, I decided that wasn&#8217;t ethnic enough, and changed it to <em>He Had It Coming<\/em>, since the murder victim is quite a horrible person. Then, one day my mother described a man who lived in her apartment complex as an &#8220;old buzzard&#8221;.  Aha!<\/p>\n<p>Now, I admit that <em>The Old Buzzard Had It Coming<\/em> is not the most melliflous title, nor does it flow trippingly off the tongue.  But it is eye-catching, and that&#8217;s the point.  In fact, someone described it to me as &#8220;like a kick in the gut.&#8221;  I&#8217;ve grown quite fond of it.<\/p>\n<p>Early on, my sister-in-law Dolores couldn&#8217;t quite remember how the title went and called it <em>The Old Coot Deserved What He Got<\/em>, which is pretty good, too.  In fact, we considered an entire series with similar titles: <em>The Miserable Son-of-a-Gun Got What Was Coming to Him<\/em>, <em>The Skunk Couldn&#8217;t Have Died Soon Enough<\/em>, and the like.  <\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m thinking about it.  However, as things stand, the second book in this series is  tentatively entitled <em>Cruel As Knives<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Where does one come up with these titles? For the first book in my Alafair Tucker series, I went through several titles before I landed on The Old Buzzard Had It Coming. Since the book takes place in Oklahoma in the dead of the winter of 1912, I first tried to find a title with [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writer-rant"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2H58s-c","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.doniscasey.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.doniscasey.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.doniscasey.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.doniscasey.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.doniscasey.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.doniscasey.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.doniscasey.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.doniscasey.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.doniscasey.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}