This Post Has A Title

Because I don't have anyone to credit with the title for this post (other than myself...?) and my brother and I spent about five minutes laughing hysterically over this yesterday, I'm going to share with you a very amusing little video by the name of Tom's Tales of Awesome. It's quite entertaining, if you're looking for a laugh. Or a giant lemon.

But anyway, now that I've gotten thoroughly sidetracked, I would like to spend a moment talking about titles. Titles are really important to books, movies, etc., and it's not at all rare for the working title to be completely different from the final published title. The trick there is, I hardly ever have even working titles for my stuff. I have exactly zero idea how to come up with a good title.

Seriously. How do people (i.e. you, dear reader, who could leave me a comment with advice) come up with good titles for stuff?!

So many books have these great titles. Like SHIVER (Maggie Stiefvater) and HOLD STILL (Nina LaCour) and TH1RTEEN R3ASONS WHY (Jay Asher) and IF I STAY (Gayle Forman) - titles that are concise and descriptive-but-not-too-descriptive and make you wonder what's inside them. And then there's books like I'D TELL YOU I LOVE YOU, BUT THEN I'D HAVE TO KILL YOU (Ally Carter) - cute titles that make you smile, play with words, and just invite you to find out what they're talking about. Titles and cover images are the first things that you see when you look at a book, and they usually determine whether or not you pick it up. So good titles matter.

Unfortunately, my superpower is not Creating Excellent, Perfect, Wonderful Titles. Not, of course, that I have a superpower, but if you were to take something I'm good at and call it a superpower, Creating Excellent, Perfect, Wonderful Titles would not be on the list of options.

I wrote a vampire story once, back when you could walk into the young adult section at Barnes & Noble without practically drowning in vampire stories. Of course, then TWILIGHT came out and vampires were huge and now this Untitled Vampire Romance Novel is completely cliched and overdone and I don't really want to look at it anymore. But my point here was about the fact that this novel clocked in at 83K words on the first draft (which is where it still is...well, draft 1.5), had a pretty complex pot, was about characters that I loved, and...completely lacked a title. I was sort of calling it IMPOSSIBLE, but there's already an excellent and somewhat recent book with the same title by Nancy Werlin (you should read it, by the way, it's quite good). A friend who read the manuscript suggested BLOODLUST, but that seemed so dark and vicious and didn't at all convey the contents. And no one else offered any suggestions, and I didn't come up with anything else, and it has no title.

And for that particular story, it's kind of a moot point now, since that one's on the back burner until the vampire hype dies down. But now I'm working on a new story. It's currently saved in My Documents as "chelsey spy story." I guess it's not important to have a title for the whole novel when you're only 13,600 words into it, but I'd love to have something to call it besides "chelsey spy story" or "chelseystory" or "current spy story."

Sigh. If anyone has any Magical Powers of TitleCreating, I'd love to borrow them for a while. Please?

Having said that, I'd like to warn you that if you did lend me your Magical Powers of TitleCreating, it might be a while before you got them back.

Especially since I can't work on my story right now (grrrrr) because I have to do AP Lang homework (mega-grrrr) about "Civil Disobedience" (which put me to sleep several times) and "A Letter from Birmingham Jail" (which was better). I would procrastinate on the AP Lang work in favor of "chelseystory" except that Castle's on tonight, so I have to have my homework done by 10.

Because ohmygoodness I would be so sad if I had to miss an episode of Castle. It's an awesome show. ABC Mondays at 10, people. Watch. :)

Love,
Bex