Quoth the Writers' Group, "Leeth-ee"
I spent months building book 9 around a word I’d never heard spoken out loud. That was... a mistake.
I don't know how young I was when I first read Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven and encountered the word nepenthe for the first time, but I do remember when I first heard it performed. The year was 1990. Rollerblades were dominating the zeitgeist, Barbarella was in heavy rotation on the Home Box Office channel, and the very first Treehouse of Horror episode debuted on The Simpsons. In this episode, Bart and Lisa trade scary stories in the treehouse while Homer cowers outside. Lisa, ever the erudite scholar, reads The Raven.
That was when I learned two things. First, I wanted James Earl Jones to narrate every moment of my life. And second, the word nepenthe had a long ee sound on the end. Not nih-PENTH, but nih-PEN-thee. Of course, the poem isn't lacking in its collection of obscure words with odd pronunciations. Surcease, obeisance, mien? Come on.
Nepenthe, in particular, has followed me around ever since, mostly because I went and named a book after it. After the debacle with Xronixle (even the reviews asked how to pronounce it), I made sure every bit of marketing for House of Nepenthe told readers exactly how to say the title of the book they were about to plunk down twenty bucks for. All this is to say that the last thing I wanted was another title nobody could pronounce.
And then I started writing book 9. It shares a similar theme about forgetting, so I went searching for another word in the same vein as nepenthe to use as a working title.
I settled on lethe.
You're smart. You know where this is going.
From Nepenthe to Lethe
These words share a theme but not origin or mythology.
Nepenthe comes from Homer's Odyssey, where Helen slips a drug into the wine at Menelaus’s palace so no one will grieve for Odysseus. The word breaks down into ne (not) and penthos (grief), and the idea is that you get to keep your memories while losing the sorrow attached to them. Ken Barnes was not so lucky. He kept every one of his memories in House of Nepenthe, along with every ounce of grief that came with them.
Lethe is one of the rivers of the underworld, and the dead drink from it to forget their lives entirely. It has a greater scope than nepenthe: you don't just lose the sorrow, but the actual memories as well. This worked well with book 9, as one of the characters is stricken with amnesia.
When it comes to creating through-lines for my standalone books, I thought choosing another obscure word would create a kind of subconscious pairing. Ooh, nepenthe and lethe; this guy must have read at least two books!
With that plan in place, I set off to write my next book.
Meet Roman Lethe
Book 9 takes place in Austin, Texas, in 2046, in what I'm calling the city's "Unofficial Third Downtown," the Domain. It looks just like the Domain here in 2026, except all the buildings are skyscrapers and the Q2 stadium has been turned into a detention center for "non-organic immigrants" and their sympathizers.
The area is also on the way out, just like its predecessors. That's what allowed Token Rich Gringo Roman Lethe to buy one of the residential towers, a 79-floor needle that was originally christened The Bohemia but now bears his name as Lethe Tower.
With a character named Lethe and a tower named Lethe, it was a simple choice to use Tower of Lethe as a working title for book 9. It fit the House of Nepenthe format and fit my previous choices of using places as titles of my books.
The problem, of course, is that the voice in my brain kept saying nih-PEN-thee for the previous title and leeth for the new title.
Roman Leeth. Leeth Tower. Tower of Leeth.
Who Needs Enemies?
With more than a year to go before book 9 is ready to publish, I'm in no hurry to find a title. And yet, I still reached out to my cover designer to mock up some options. He did Tower of Lethe and The Haunting of Lethe Tower and others. And even without knowing how to pronounce the word, the word "lethe" just looked... wrong.
And then I went to my monthly writers' group where I asked for help brainstorming some title ideas. I gave them the gist of the story, its connections to the greater universe, and the struggles the main character has to overcome. Then I rattled off my title ideas.
"Wait a minute," one of them asked. "Isn't it pronounced leeth-ee?"
The fuck it is.
I've never been struck in the chest with a sledgehammer, but hearing that question and knowing immediately that she was right felt a lot like taking a thrust kick to the sternum. When I got home, I looked it up, and sure enough.
Leeth-ee.
Tower of Leeth-ee. Leeth-ee Tower. Roman Leeth-ee.
Ew.
The Bright Side-ee
I can't tell you how embarrassed I am to have made this mistake. Nor can I quantify how stupid I feel for not making the connection between nepenthe and lethe. The only silver lining is that I can now remove that word from everything: the title, the tower, and the character.
Y'all remember that quote: Never make fun of someone if they mispronounce a word. It means they learned it by reading.
Well, I'm not hiding behind that this time. The next time we're sharing a burrito bowl down at the Chipotle, feel free to bring this up and make fun of me. We'll both have a good laugh and maybe I'll cry a little.
By the way, I had no intention of sharing the working title with you until much later, but since anything lethe has been removed from contention, I thought you would enjoy this story. It's just one of the many anecdotes from the story of my writing career, tentatively titled Little Embarrassments Everywhere.
Anyway, I can't wait for y'all to meet the new cast of book 9, including the very recently renamed Roman Leith. That's Leith as in Prue Leith, minus the fashion sense and the love of baking. And yes, it's pronounced leeth. I checked.
