The Secret Origin

Not very secret, actually. Many years ago I was in a bookstore and noticed a book with the title Blood Moon. The very first thought that popped into my head (really) was, "Cool. A werewolf attack on a lunar colony!"
Of course it wasn't, but the second thought that popped into my head was "I'm a writer! I can do that!"

The Title

Given that the idea for the story was another book called Blood Moon, naturally the project was initially called--wait for it--"Blood Moon". However, I didn't like it as a final title, because let's face it, it's been done before. At least once. Probably a lot more but I'm not going to google the phrase to find out, because that would depress me.
At some point I decided to get a different title, and went googling 'blood moon' just to see if there were any related alternatives. There were, since The Blood Moon is one of the names given to one of the full moons of the year, around Halloween, and one of the other names is--wait for it--The Cold Moon! And St. Martin's Moon, too, which sounded cooler to me. Even better, the page I found also had some very well-phrased text, which the site owner was kind enough to let me borrow.
However, at various points during the making of the book, I had described my project as 'it's about a werewolf attack on a lunar colony', which usually got a reaction of 'cool!' from whomever I was speaking with. And at about the same time there was a movie released called 'Snakes on a Plane', which was about...I'll let you guess. So it did occur to me to simply call this book 'Werewolves on the Moon', but despite all it's myriad charms my publisher was agin it.

The Legend

I've already blogged about this, so I'll refrain from repeating myself. This will also allow you to discover my blog posts, but I'm hoping you won't notice this subtle manipulation. To be honest many of the posts I've put up there over the last year have mentioned St. Martin's Moon in some way so I invite you to read the whole thing.
But no pressure.