On Yore Side

I get asked alot what the title of our debut children’s book means, and I always answer in a different way. It can mean alot of things, and I’m sure that it DOES mean something, and it’s been changing ever since we came up with it.

  It may have been Kenny who suggested it first. He came to me with a drawing of a frog in a tortoise shell and said something like “I want to do a children’s book. It’s about a frog, and he’s an herbalist frog.”

  He may have had the title then, I can’t remember, but I’m almost sure that it was Kenny who initially came up with it. After that fateful cue, I went to writing, and after a week came back to Kenny with three chapters.

  He said, “I thought we were writing a children’s book.”

  But by then engines had cranked to full throttle, and I couldn’t stop writing. Kenny started drawing pictures from the three chapters, and was inspired to draw even more pictures, and I in turn began to incorporate them into the story.

  By the end of the ordeal, we couldn’t remember exactly why we had called it “The Other Side of Yore,” but the title had come to mean many things.

  If you type the phrase into Amazon.com, which is the largest searchable database of books printed in the english language that I know of, it only comes up in one natural instance.

 It’s in one of the Redwall books by Brian Jaques. The phrase can occur naturally in his wonderful mole-speek, as in “Hurr, This mole hur is gonna lay moi shovel on the other other side of yore head!”

  This is an interesting coincidence because several of my readers asked me if I’d read Brian Jaques after they’d read “The Other Side of Yore.” They saw a similarity between my animorphed amphibians and Jaques’ animorphed rodents and small mammals. Both his and my fantasy books are set in the “Dark Ages” with swords, princesses, heroes, and armor. I read my first one, Martin the Warrior, only a few months ago and I enjoyed it tremendously and would recommend it to highly to anyone who loves a great story and skillful writing!

  The only other book that has anything close to  the phrase  is Tex by Clarence E. Mulford which has “…the other side so yore……” This is also a spelling of slang rustic dialect, and the book is a western that I haven’t read.

  To us, “the other side of yore” means many things. It might mean the “other side of the past,” which might be the future, or might be something else. It might mean the other side of the story when talking about the days of yore, which would be an alternative history. If spoken, the phrase might mean “the other side of something of yours.” Or it might be an unfinished sentence, as in the other side of your “whatever you want it to be” or the other side of your “answer that is contained within.”

Or it might just be pure nonsense.

Let me know what YORE idea about the meaning is!

What does “the other side of yore” mean to YOU, when you read or hear it?