My new novel has been christened with a new title. I had a working title of ‘Light from the Window’ and it took me a long time to find something to replace it. As Robert Louis Stevenson appears in the story I turned to his writings for inspiration. I had already used a line from ‘Requiem,’ in the story itself,
‘Home is the sailor, home from the sea’.
When I looked at the poem again the line, ‘The wide and starry sky’ leapt from the page as it embodies the theme of a quest that is central to the story and also evokes the huge scale and wild nature of the Canadian landscape.
There was one snag – when I checked on Amazon this title had already been used for two other books. The same applied to any other quotations from that poem. This is not surprising, given the fame of Robert Louis Stevenson. But I had become attached to my title. I left the problem for a few days, hoping that another idea would surface. I decided that ‘No Safe Anchorage’ conveyed a sensation of danger. Also of travelling in remote places, both real and metaphorical.