Friday, August 28, 2015

Title Crisis

I've made it through round one of copyedits. Now I want to re-read the entire book for a final sanity check. I still need a title. I worked for about an hour on that last night, searching Bartlett's Quotations with key words, skimming through Shakespeare, looking at the AFI's top movie titles, looking at lists of top songs, reading fairy tales, and all the usual things I do to come up with titles. And I'm still drawing mostly a blank. I have one or two ideas that are kind of stuck in my head, and while I don't like them, I don't seem able to move past them.

I would say that I'm having more trouble coming up with a title than I had writing the book, but I had a lot of trouble writing the book, too.

One strange effect of this book: It's given me a craving for petit fours. There's a tea party scene in the book, and I find myself vividly imagining those little iced cakes. I kind of want to try making them, but that wouldn't be a good use of my time right now. Maybe I'll run to Kroger and see if they have any. That's the only way I'll get through reading that scene one more time. Maybe that will inspire me to come up with a title!

In other news, I have a little booklet with the first chapter of the next/final Terry Pratchett book, which was just released in the UK. I'm not sure of the US publication date. But I don't think I want to read the first chapter without having the rest of the book handy. It would be just too frustrating. So I'll keep the booklet, knowing I have it.

In the meantime, I've been re-reading a lot of the other books, which got me out of a reading slump I'd been in. I guess I could read something else, since the convention's over, but I don't really want to right now. It's probably best not to get sucked into a book I haven't read before when I have so much work to do.

No comments: