Lost (or Found) in Translation

So... The Avengers was frick'n awesome! (That's not really what this blog is about but seriously... HOLY CRAP that was a great movie)

To loosely tie the movie into the topic at hand, The Avengers is a movie where the comic book characters translated very well to the screen. It's a hard thing to do, to take something which looks good drawn and make it look equally awesome on the screen. Marvel has been doing a fantastic job with the jump from page to screen lately. Some things changed... Banner was trying to discover a super soldier serum rather than creating a Gamma Bomb. But it worked.

Getting back to that picture up there of the French cover for ReVamped by yours truly, though. One cool thing about translations is that they sometimes give you even more than you bargained for. Nick Fury, for example, is made so much cooler via Samuel L. Jackson's portrayal that, in the Ultimates universe at least, Nick Fury now even looks the same as his movie counterpart.

"Jeremy," you may be thinking, "you are talking about The Avengers again. Get to your point!"

Okay. I will. Sorry.

I haven't seen the French translation of ReVamped yet, but it has already given me something I've wanted for four books.

See... I've always had title issues. My first novel was supposed to be called WELCOME TO THE VOID, which is both the words printed on the T-shirt my male protagonist wears and an in-joke... It even welcomed the reader to Void City. That didn't work out for various reasons, but I still kept trying to work punny titles or even double meanings into the one word past tense titles we wound up using.

ReVamped: because the main character has to figure out how to get his body back and become a vampire again and also because his world is changing...

Crossed: because there is double-crossing and people are crossing the wrong people and because the big bad winds up facing down with the wrong character...

Burned: because several character get burned in every sense of the word...

Now, with the publication of Pour le Vampire et le Meilleur, I finally have my punny title. :)

It took one of my French speaking fans to explain the title to me, but when I got it... Man, you should have seen the grin on my face. In English, we have the phrase "For better or worse." The French version of that is "Pour le pire et pour le meilleur" or For the worse or for the better.

So the title of my book is basically: For Better or Vampire.

Finally. My punny title. :)

Maybe book five will wind up with a punny title in English (The One with the Dragon in It, maybe?), but I'm guessing it won't. Either way, book two does so I'm happy.

And speaking of happiness, if ya want check out free fiction that might make you grin, you can find mine at http://authoratlarge.com . I suggest starting with For Want of Chocolate, because it'sabout a newly turned vampire realizing she can no longer eat chocolate. Doing so somewhere other than right outside a Godiva Chocolatier might have been less traumatic, but nowhere near as humorous. :)