My work in progress is tentatively called Eye of the Storm, but unfortunately there's like 5 million thousand gazillion novels, video games, nonfiction books, movies all called Eye of the Bloody Storm. I don't want to be like everyone else.
Part of me is worried since some of my prerelease marketing has the title Eye of the Storm in it that I'll somehow ruin my marketing efforts by later changing the title, but then the other more pragmatic side of me says ... no, it's more content. lol. Guess which side has won!
The feeling that I'm trying to convey is the calm before the storm, so I thought Eye of the Storm, but again, everyone has named everything that. But why am I trying to name my story that?
Well, weather does have a part to play in later books of the series, so there's that. This is the literal calm before the literal storm that's coming. But there's also some major changes coming to the fictional society that I created and some changes coming to the main character Tessa.
There's a lot of tipping points.
So why is it calm before a storm? Because in the moment before winds shift, there is a mathematical reason for there to be no actual wind. It is like the moment between breaths. The shifting winds cancel each other in a really cool, yet boring mathematical way. It's called catastrophe mathematics. One of the professors on my dissertation committee actually specialized in that sort of math. Super cool.
How do I convey a sense of a tipping point, the calm before the storm, the eye of the storm without using any of the cliched phrases? Should I just make one up and then use it as the title?