For the last I don’t know how long, I’ve been working on a book about retirement planning on less than a seven-figure nest egg. A couple of people are reading the first draft, and I’ve just spent a week trying to come up with a title.<\/p>\n
I think I’m there. But it needs some explanation. First, the title and the sub-title.<\/p>\n
“The Javelin Catcher in the Bran” J.D. Salinger\u2019s \u201cThe Catcher in the Rye\u201d tells the story of a teenager who is fearful of adulthood and who desperately wants to cling to an idealized version of what is left of his childhood.<\/p>\n He envisages his role in life to be the \u201ccatcher in the rye\u201d, a vision brought about by his mishearing the words of a Robert Burns poem. His vision involves a large field of rye, with thousands of children wandering through it, some of whom reach the other side where there is a sheer drop off a cliff; his job is to catch them before they fall.<\/p>\n (Book synopses don\u2019t come much sketchier than that!)<\/p>\n Unlike \u201cThe Catcher in the Rye\u201d, \u201cThe Javelin Catcher in the Bran\u201d is not a first-person-narrated novel.<\/p>\n The title \u201cThe Javelin Catcher in the Bran\u201d is my (desperate?) attempt to (a) lead you to think that you\u2019re reading a classic (or at least the illegitimate offspring of one), (b) establish the book as material that addresses the fears of people on the threshold of retirement and unprepared for it, and (c) indicate that this is a humorous book.<\/p>\n For \u201cThe Catcher in the Rye\u201d fans, here is my explanation of how a person like Holden Caulfield might have described his vision of impending retirement[1]<\/a>.<\/p>\n Anyway, I keep picturing all these old guys playing games in this humungous open silo of bran and stuff. Thousands of old farts, all of them throwing javelins, and nobody’s around\u2014nobody young and responsible, I mean\u2014except me. And I’m standing on the edge of this crazy giant silo of bran. All the younger people are at the base of the silo, wondering what\u2019s going on. What I have to do, I have to catch the javelins if they start to go over the edge of the silo. That’s all I do all day. I’d just be the javelin catcher in the bran. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to do when I retire. I know it’s crazy.<\/p>\n That, dear reader, is how the title came about.<\/p>\n And for the record, that\u2019s where the similarity ends.<\/p>\n [1]<\/a> I don\u2019t want the copyright police to prosecute me, so I\u2019ve said, \u201ca person like<\/em> Holden Caulfield\u201d.<\/p>\n Needless to say, I’ll be soliciting opinions on the title, but I’m not sure if reading the book is a pre-requisite to expressing an opinion or not.<\/p>\n If you do<\/em> have an opinion on my choice of title and\/or its rationale, please feel free to leave a comment.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For the last I don’t know how long, I’ve been working on a book about retirement planning on less than a seven-figure nest egg. A couple of people are reading the first draft, and I’ve just spent a week trying to come up with a title. I think I’m there. But it needs some explanation. First, the title and the… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[671],"tags":[656,658,657,655],"class_list":["post-1513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-wip","tag-amwriting","tag-boomerhumour","tag-retirementplanning","tag-wip"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1513","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1513"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1513\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1516,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1513\/revisions\/1516"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/span><\/strong>“High-fibre Advice for Retirement Planning on a Hummingbird-sized Nest Egg”<\/p>\n
\nThe Explanation<\/h2>\n
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