What's In a Name?

While I was driving from Atlanta to Minneapolis to help my dad with his house, I passed a couple of wineries. One was called Pheasant Hill and I thought, well, that’s nice. But I’m not a wine drinker and so I didn’t really care that much, and while I kind of filed it away in the memory banks, it was more because I was surprised how many wineries there were along my route.

Things changed when I spotted the Purple Toad Winery. I got all excited then because it was such a cool name. I turned to my dad and said we have to get some of that wine. Like I said, I don’t drink wine. It gives me headaches, even the whites.

This experience made me think of book titles.

A clever book title can go a long way to selling a book. There are some super cool titles out there that make me think, Damn, I wish I’d thought of that!

Sadly, I’m terrible at titles. As much as I love Purple Toad Winery, I would never have thought of it while brainstorming. I’m much more likely to come up with Pheasant Hill as a name, particularly if it’s literally on top of a hill with pheasants around.

Maybe someday my brain will improve.

Titles Equal Torture (Or Please Help)

One of my least favorite things to do is come up with titles for my stories. I usually just refer to them by the characters' names, but that doesn't make for a catchy or interesting title. When my working title is accepted, I'm elated. Like Phoenix Burning--that was what I called it from the start.

I wasn't so lucky with the second story I turned in to Nocturne Cravings. I've been tasked with coming up with 3-5 suggestions for a new title. By Friday. I've spent days brainstorming keywords, but I don't have anything awesome. So let me tell you a little bit about the book and if you have any thoughts on a sexy, catchy title, please let me know.

Heroine is Chloe Donovan and she's a wizard.
Hero is a demon named Marax.

She's looking for her sister in a nightclub and he's looking for Chloe's sister, too, because she turned his nephew's skin green.

Chloe normally reins in her impulses and walks the straight and narrow.
Marax is a demon earl and he tends to be conservative...for a demon. But with the heat flaring between them, they both act out of character.

The story is erotic paranormal romance so lots of heat and steam and the title should be sexy.

So begging here--any title ideas? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

I Stink At Titles

It's no secret that I'm awful at titles. There are some authors who are so good. I see their titles and I think, man! I wish I was that quick and clever. Unfortunately, I'm not and this is something I struggle with on every single project.

My latest title saga begins with the synopsis I wasn't supposed to be working on. It's for a project that I want to get to next, but not now. Now I'm supposed to be writing the Work In Progress (WIP), but instead, I wrote a synopsis, revised it, and got it ready to send out to my writing buddy. But I need a title for this project that I'm not supposed to be working on.

My first thought was Screaming Like Demons. Yes, I was listening to Nickelback. Hey, music helped before! In the Midnight Hour got it's title from Rebel Yell by Billy Idol. I was desperate, okay? :-) I never thought it would stick with the book, but it did. I've had more people tell me that they start singing Rebel Yell when they see that particular book. Could have been worse. At least the radio station didn't play REO Speedwagon or the Little River Band.

But back to my current saga. So I thought about "screaming like demons" only my h/h are demons, so that didn't really work. Okay, I thought, what about "Demon's Scream?" Um, no go there either since there's really no screaming involved. "Swinging From the Ceiling?" Okay, I decided, it's time to turn off Nickelback.

Maybe some word with demon. I tried a variety of different combinations and I actually came up with one that I like and that fits the story on two levels. And then I began wondering if it sounded too much like it belonged on a horror story. Sigh.

For now, I'm using it, but I'll continue to try to come up with something more paranormal romance and less horror. I'm not holding out much hope.

The Title Is Official!

The title for my July 2009 book is now officially Edge of Dawn! I'm excited to finally have the for real title and the first thing I did today was update my website with the new information. Now I can't wait to see how the cover turns out. :-)

Today was a good day. I accomplished more on my synopsis than I have in days. The only thing I can think of that made things click is that I moved a paragraph down the page. That seemed to do it, but it's such a small thing to get things moving.

My goal is to finish the first draft of the synopsis on Friday, inflict it on my writing buddy, and work on polishing it this weekend. My revisions for Edge of Dawn (still cool to type the title ;-) are coming next week and I want the synopsis done before I'm neck deep in them. I'm looking forward to them. I have a few things I want to fix in the story, my agent sent me a few things she thought I could tweak, and with my editor's input, I'll be ready to go.

Make It Snappy

Book titles. Sigh. I'm awful at putting a name on a book. My working titles used to be one of the character's names and a descriptive word--for example, Ravyn's Flight. Now I might go with the character's name--Shona's Story--or with something that I think represents the book--Dragon's Dawn.

What I want for my titles is something snappy, something that grabs the reader and makes them pick up the book. No matter how hard I try, I don't seem to come up with those. I should be able to, right? After all, I majored in advertising copywriting--the epitome of snappy. The problem is that different types of writing (and I guess titling a book can loosely be called writing) requires different brain muscles. My ad copy days are far enough behind me that the talent has atrophied. I do have lots of practice, though, at writing 450 page manuscripts. :-)

Which brings me to the title for my latest book. I must have sent three dozen suggestions to my editor. Today, she sent me an email with the three finalists and asked me to pick. The choices were:

When Night Falls
At Dawn's Break
Edge of Dawn

I knew I didn't want "Night" in the title because I'd like to use it on my next book. It fits it perfectly. In fact, I already have what I think is a great title for it--which will not be revealed unless and until that becomes the official name of the book. :-) Don't want someone else grabbing it when I worked so hard to come up with it. ;-)

Anyway, that left me with the two "Dawn" titles, which jives with what I'd been using as my working title. I couldn't make a decision and wanted some input, so I emailed one of my writing buddies, hoping she'd see it right away and reply. That didn't happen. Then I remembered--Twitter! I'd ask my Twitter friends what they thought.

The unanimous consensus? Edge of Dawn

So I just emailed my editor and said let's go for this one. Hopefully, it's snappy enough.

Author In Search of a Title. Still.

No title yet for the just finished book. I sent my editor about a dozen suggestions, but none of them grabbed her. Me either for that matter. I wanted to fall in love with a title, but I haven't found the one that's done that yet. There is one I kind of like, but it uses the word "night" and I was hoping to save that one for the next book since it'll be a pretty dark, intense story. I think.

There are still half a million things on the To Do List and I'm not tackling any of them. Maybe I need to actually write them down to make myself do them. I have email backed up, I have things to go snail mail, I have vacuuming left to do, and assorted other things and I don't feel like doing any of them. That's so bad. I need to accomplish things. Seriously.

In other news, I walked out to my garden yesterday afternoon to take a look at it. It's kind of bare on flowers right now (just one type has a bloom on it. I need to find flowers that bloom right now for next year), but I usually take a look around every day. My tree ring and garden have chicken wire around them to protect them from the killer rabbits, but I have tiger lilies next to the evergreens that are unprotected and tree lilies behind the big garden because they'll end up being too tall to be part of the garden itself.

Anyway, I'd noticed while I'd been writing that something was eating the tops off my tiger lilies. Annoying, but they were free flowers from my parents, so I wasn't too heartbroken. Then the other day, I noticed that something had eaten the bottom leaves on my tree lilies. That did not make me happy. I was even less happy when something ate the top off one of my tree lilies. It was a small lily, though, and my bigger ones had been ignored and had a lot of flower buds on them. I'd survive.

Then came yesterday. I walked down to my garden and saw the one tree lily had been eaten bare. Then I noticed the top had been eaten off the next one in line. And the next. And the next. All the way down the row to my biggest tree lily--the one that had had 6 buds on there waiting to bloom. Gone. All gone! The rabbits got the bottom leaves, the deer had taken off the tops.

Steam came out of my ears. And then I began to worry. My elodie lilies are getting ready to bloom--it shouldn't be more than a week or so now--and they're against the back side of the garden. What if the deer, now that they're used to coming up to my garden, decide to stick their heads over my fence and eat my other lilies? OMG! My dad bought liquid fence for me today and he's going to spray tomorrow. Hopefully that stinky stuff will protect my garden from evil, killer deer.

Happy Indepenece Day, America!

Happy 4th to everyone who celebrates!

My own personal independence day was July 1, but I haven't known what to do with myself since I turned in the book. I watched a little baseball with the sound turned on; found some short, but very interesting documentaries on iTunes U; answered a couple of emails, although the bulk remain; and played around online a little. But I really feel kind of lost right now. Lost enough that I pulled out a project I was playing with before I sold the untitled story I just turned in and reread it. I decided the prologue is good, but the rest of it needs to go, so now I have no story for the book--just a hero and heroine.

Anyway, the title search is on for the book. My editor wants me to use a time word so that it fits with In the Midnight Hour and In Twilight's Shadow. The working title I used contained the word Dawn, so we're on the same wavelength. :-) So far, I've tried Dawn and Dusk and haven't come up with anything I like. Now I'm trying to find more time of day words to try. Let's see, there's:

Morning
Noon
Night
Day
Evening
Dusk
Dawn
Sunrise
Sunset
Sundown

But what else? I've done an online search and come up with a lot of very unhelpful hits. You'd think there would be some kind of helpful website with this kind of information, wouldn't you?

Oooh, what do y'all think of When the Sun Goes Down? Stupid? I'm terrible at titles. Really, really, really terrible.

And Then It Was Titles

While I'm waiting for feedback on my current project, I decided it was a good time to work on a title. I totally, completely suck at them and I hate coming up with them, but I've always believed you need a title that sells the story to the editor even if it never gets used on the final book. Unfortunately, there have been some books where I haven't even come up with that much. :-( It's just hard to be clever.

I searched online at lunch yesterday to see if anyone else had any good suggestions, and I found one of my own tricks listed, so that was no help. Then I found one I hadn't thought of. I tried using that, but nothing turned up that made me go, oooh, that's it!

The best one I could come up with was pretty boring. I've brainstormed with every word I can think of, used the thesaurus, searched online. How do some people do it? How do they come up with clever titles? Oh, I used to be able to do it. Back when I was in college, I came up with brilliant titles for my papers, not just for me, but for the other kids on my dorm floor. Did I use them all up or something?

And now for something completely different. Fire drill yesterday at the Evil Day Job (EDJ). They couldn't do it last week when it was warm--nope, we have to traipse outside in 40 degree weather. Of course, I got made fun of for wearing a hat along with my winter jacket. Someone asked where my gloves were, so I pulled my mittens out of my pockets. Hah! Bet he thought I didn't have those with me.

I wanted to stay up last night and watch the National League playoff game, but I was so tired, I couldn't make it. I ended up going to bed by 8:30. How sad is that? But Colorado won (yea!) and I'm rooting for them to sweep the series. Arizona beat my beloved Chicago Cubs and therefore they must lose. :-)