Glee?
Elation?
Relief?
Me, well, I feel all of those. Especially because coming up with the perfect title* for my current project has been a long road, and I don't feel like I can really work on something unless it has a name beyond WIP1 or @)(*&Q#$)(*%)@#(*!!!!! (<---This is a common stand in.)
No title is like not naming your children until they are 18 and headed out the door.** Too late. I try and make my titles capture the essence of the book in question, so once I find a fitting one I hang onto it for dear life. It's my fall back when I lose my theme or core of my story.
So, yeah. Call me a big bundle of Gleelation (that's really happeh, people.) I found the one.
Relieved? You bet. Which is probably what Wendy Corsi Staub felt when her work finally got the go-ahead title:
along with Mr. Green
and George Pelecanos
The HELL TO PAY by Wendy Corsi Staub was the book that brought about this blog post. Hot off the gleelation of finding a title for my WIP, I was perusing the book aisle at walmart when I saw it. The sight prompted me to first burst out laughing and then to do a quick search on Amazon, which is what led me to the others. There's even a Hillary Clinton book with Hell to Pay in the title. Needless to say, this just reinforces the belief that creativity is unlimited, but ideas aren't.
Just when you go a'thinking you're somethin' speshul.... Yeah. Not so much.
Consolation: None of those books are anywhere near mine in terms of theme or plot. Hell, none of them are even the same genre. So no harm, no foul.
Have a great one, everybody :).
*Yes, I know that titles usually get changed, but com'on--this one's perfect. (because I'm the only one with a perfect title...LOL.)
**This is a bad metaphor, I know. Books aren't children. And the writers who treat them as such generally end up never getting them out the door. That's right, those bookbabies become 40 year-old stay-at-home children who crow about the glory days of high school and wipe potato chip grease on your recliners.
hysterical! i wrote a dystopian novel a year + ago called Parted and wrote the second in the series and named that one Crossed. it was SUCH a perfect title for the novel. Crossed worked on like three different sub-meanings (or more). Then freakin' Alli Condi announced that the second book in her dystopian series was going to be called Crossed. sigh. i was so disappointed. never mind that hers was published and mine weren't. i'm still a little annoyed about it. ah well. i feel your pain. whatever, give em Hell (to Pay)
ReplyDeleteYeah, I'm a little partial to my titles too and I CANNOT work on a manuscript without a name.
ReplyDeleteThis last one I'm working on is killin' me though. For the first time I really don't like any of the titles I've come up with. oh well. It always comes to me...