Story Titles from Song Titles
Inspiration for story titles

I was listening to a Billy Joel song one day called "It's All About Soul." This was a reference to music, but I started thinking about it and wondered what might happen if someone wandered into an afterlife and found out it wasn't quite what he'd thought. The result was "It's All About Soul," which eventually appeared in American Atheist, Volume 41, Issue 2.

It wasn't planned, but several years after I wrote that, I was listening to another Billy Joel song called "Sometimes a Fantasy" in which he sings "It's just a fantasy / (Whoa-oa-oa-oa) / It's not the real thing / (Whoa-oa-oa-oa)." I got to thinking about how one had inspired "It's All About Soul." And I started thinking about the current Billy Joel song I was listening to, and I started wondering about what might happen if a man couldn't tell what was reality and what was fantasy—and thought of a twist to that idea. The resulting science-fiction/horror tale "It's Just a Fantasy; It's Not the Real Thing" was born, and sold to the anthology Blood, Guts & Psychopaths by Maniac Press, to be published in late 2006. (However, that anthology canceled and the story was released... so, so much for that example! By the way, the same thing would later happen with my Evervale example.)

Note: I really do like Billy Joel, but as a die-hard Meat Loaf fan, it seems I'd have done Meat's song titles as stories. Maybe something to consider in the near future...

Update: And now I do. Appearing in the anthology Enchantments: The Many Facets of Magic is "Execution Day," which is the name of the leadoff track on Meat Loaf's 1984 album Blind Before I Stop.

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