You see, nearly nine years ago, I’d done just that-made the best of a bad situation-though I didn’t realize it at the time. Our minds are indescribably complex engines, and mine had chosen to have a last laugh. What didn’t register, at the time, was the irony. to then mean the habitual state in which one make the best of a bad situation? That would describe my protagonist, Annabelle Aster, to the tee. What if I coopted the term, combining melancholy with the phrase if life gives you lemons. Unfortunately, that didn’t gel with my novel’s themes, but a delicious possibility began to percolate around in my head. According to the dictionary, it was a synonym for melancholy. That’s when I stumbled across the term lemoncholy, and knew that I’d landed on something special. Eventually, I stumbled across an online dictionary for Victorian slang, and, with nothing better to do, decided to putter around inside. And let me tell you what, there were a lot of those. To that end, I included the term Victorian in each word combination. As half of my novel is set in the year 1895, the only thing I knew for certain was that I wanted the title to evoke a turn-of-the-century vibe. To be honest, after a week and an endless series of, “that’s good, but no thanks”, responses from my publishing house, I was grasping at straws. You know you must be desperate when you find yourself Googling random word combinations in the hope that a book title will magically make itself known to you.
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