Tag...you're it

I didn't have much time this weekend to write, in fact I'll be honest and said I had none. Or, I chose not to, is the better explanation. And I probably won't invest much time this week either. I have exactly five days before we leave for the States and in that time a veritable avalanche of activities needs to be attended to. I won't bore with the details, it's all petty household stuff, but I am keeping my mind tuned in to possible seeds of inspiration that might pop out of the writing soil I'm leaving to recover.

It helps to read the ongoing development process of other writer's. Sneaking in a little blog reading time this morning, before I commit myself to less inspirational duties, I noticed Stewart Ferris's entry of 10th March 2010.  Here he describes a little thing called a tagline. Normally reserved to movies, they capture the essence of the story without revealing too much, yet garnering enough interest to draw a potential viewer in. I like it, because it's very Zen. Using a minimal amount of words to convey the essence of something has always attracted me, so I too thought: why not? Let's find a tagline for Simon and Sally.

A tree starts with a seed, but can it withstand a forest of greed?

I found this a little to impersonal. Sure it rhymes and has a tree motive in it, but it doesn't speak about the character. Funny enough that's exactly what I'm afraid the story will feel like: a collection of moral bullet points without so much as a personal story. 

Once upon a dime, greedily ever after.

I like this one more as it mixes the themes of fairy tales and greed, two main pillars upon which the story revolves. However, will readers not living in America know what a dime is? Also there's still no involvement of Simon, just a catchy summation of the book and not even a correct one (greed does not prevail).

In a world acting on greed he has to imagine a way out.

It's got the personal touch and the strange, hopefully interest peaking, non-act of imagining, but it's too vague to excite. It also lacks to say anything about fairy tales, trees or any real danger.

So I end up without a tag line for now. If you know one that hooks into the following keywords: wood - fairy tales - greed - deforestation and kidnapping, feel free to let me know and I'll make sure I'll thank you properly in the acknowledgments.