First off, we have the one-word titles. These include names of people (Sabriel) or places (London). Straightforward and fairly safe. They’re not exciting but they get the job done. I prefer a little zing to my titles, so I like seeing more unusual nouns–novels named Dust–or compound words like Stardoc, Wintersmith, Inkheart. Then we have those nouns that are also adjectives. One that works for me is Soulless–a book that’s on my to-read list. I picked up an urban fantasy called Benighted once because of the title.

(Then there are the almost one-word titles that add an article to the noun–think John Grisham novels like The Firm and The Partner. I want to say that there are some historical romances out there with names like The Promise and The Keepsake. I’m not wild about this template.)

Now we come to the [adjective][noun], such as The Black Ship or The Red Wolf Conspiracy. These are workable, too. I’m not seeing any in my lists that has me filled with title-love.

Next up, titles that are [Something] [preposition][Something]. Most often, the preposition will be ‘of’ and we get titles like Prince of Darkness (how many vampires novels and historical novels could that title fit?–ha! I once read an autobiography called The Prince of Darkness!). That formula works for me if it juxtaposes two words your normally don’t see together. One I particularly like is Diplomacy of Wolves. A similar template is [Something]’s [Something], so you have The Singer’s Crown, instead of The Crown of the Singer.

Then we have the [Someone] and the [Someone/Something] title. Nancy Drew and the Case of the Clever Clown! The Hardy Boys and the Trembling Turnip! Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Peter and the Starcatchers. I think this works when you’re trying to go for a certain adventurous almost-retro feel to the book. Sometimes you have [Noun] and [Noun], like Whiskey and Water. If you pick two nouns that go together without being a cliche and throw in alliteration, you have a winner in my book.

I also noted titles that are allusions to poetry and literature, like Burning Bright (Tracy Chevalier’s novel about William Blake).

Whew. After going through the lists of books I’ve read over the last couple of years, I think that the titles that work for me are the ones that find fresh new words for their genre. Heart, desire and passion are overused in romance. Fantasy is filled with kings and princes (ditto all other royal titles); crowns, thrones, swords. Find some new words, or a startling combination of words. I will certainly pick up a book named Drowned Wednesday or Superior Saturday. Compound words work for me, too. I get a delicious thrill when I see names like Mistborn and Grimspace (regardless of how I feel about the books).

Any other title templates I missed? What are some of your favorite book titles?

SQUEE!  /fangirl-ish moment

Check out that gorgeous cover (in fact, all the covers of the current hardback editions are outstanding–or maybe I am just blinded by my love of the stories!). MWT is one writer who has always surprised and delighted (and sometimes horrified) me in the directions she takes her stories. I’m eager to get my grubby mitts on this book.

Also coming out this month is Lord Sunday by Garth Nix, the last in his Keys of the Kingdom series. I devoured the previous six in a book-reading orgy last winter. Book six ended on a cliffhanger so, yeah, I wanna know what happens next!

What about you? Are you looking forward to anything?

I have a big book review post, and one continuing on the theme of titles. Also, a couple of smaller ones and probably a friday fun (though my brain insists it only wants to do a friday unfun, oy!).

I will be back.

Now I’m back to post my reading roundup for February. I managed to squeeze in six full books and two half-books. Not bad for a short month!

Here they are:

• The Red Wolf Conspiracy by Robert V.S. Redick (my review here)
• Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics by Liping Ma (I’m a homeschooling mom. ‘Nuff said.)
• The Magicians and Mrs. Quent by Galen Beckett (This secondworld fantasy of manners combines elements of Jane Eyre and Pride & Prejudice. Good, though sometimes the pacing lagged, some of the characters were underdeveloped, and the antagonists were not well-defined. There’s a sequel coming out later this year, which I will check out, but I’m not on pins-and-needles for it, either).
• Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination and Invigorates the Soul by Stuart Brown, with Christopher Vaughan (review forthcoming)
• Napoleon’s Buttons: How 17 Molecules Changed History by Penny Le Couteur and Jay Burreson (I read this book in bits and pieces since last November. This is fun stuff, appealing to both the chemistry geek and the history/worldbuilding buff in me. I appreciated the writers’ balanced views of some of the more controversial molecules (like CFCs and DDT) they covered. Now I feel nostalgic for my organic chemistry classes!)
• Fantasy in Death by J. D. Robb (The speculative element of a futuristic New York appeals to me, especially since it’s not unremittingly dystopian and grim. I like how the mystery, and not the romantic relationship, is paramount in the books I’ve read so far in this series. These are fast, gripping reads.)

Two books made it to my BLITS list this month. Both were non-fiction and there wasn’t anything egregious about them. I just wasn’t as interested in the subject matter to keep going past the halfway mark. You just can’t please everyone. *grin*

Edited to fix typo in one of the titles.

All of you probably know I write. You might have heard me mention “homeschooling” and “driving kids around”. You may even know I take piano lessons, and love it. You may not have known that I enjoy doing art with my kids, and have made some forays into doing art with other people’s kids. Yet, these are just a few of the hats I wear. I suspect you all wear lots of hats as well (fedoras, berets, tricorns…. okay, I couldn’t resist the joke!).

In the comments, tell me about something you do that is not writing fiction. Maybe your day job is Python Handler. Maybe you collect fine china. Maybe you volunteer at a soup kitchen.

What is one of the more unusual hats you wear?

Recommended Reading: Define Yourself

1. Out of Shape, because it fits perfectly with the plot on two levels, one of which you can see right away in the first paragraph:

Thaddeus Pudgekin, middle-aged accountant, paunchy and balding, ran for his life through the gloom of Blackburn. Sweat plastered his thinning hair to his scalp and stained the underarms of his silk suit coat. Acrid air scoured lungs, blood bludgeoned heart and brain, skin strained against shirt. He cursed his flabby body and all the food it had ever consumed; the buckets of deep-fried eels, trays of trembling soufflés and luscious bonbons, even the two biscuits with his mid-afternoon tea.

2.  Singing for the Enemy, because it contains one of the twists of the story. There’s a lot of things you can imagine doing for an enemy (all unpleasant), but singing isn’t one of them. It took me a while to come up with this one–Poisoned Lullaby was stuck in my head for the longest time–but I love it.

3. Here Comes the Bride. I took a well-known phrase and used it as a title for a story that twists the concept of bride walking down the aisle in a couple of different ways.

4. Beauty, Unraveling. One of my recent stories, a dark retelling of Beauty and the Beast. I didn’t want to name the story just plain Beauty, because that’s overdone (and Robin McKinley wrote a novel-length retelling with that same title ). Then I noticed how much I used the words and imagery of coming apart, and this title was born. It’s literary-ish, which is a fun mask to don once in a while.

Have you come up with the perfect title? The one that completes the story, that zinged your nerves when it first popped up? Please do share.

It’s tempting for me to dismiss titling my fiction as a hoop that I have to jump through on my road to publication, akin to putting my story into Standard Manuscript Format. (Why can’t we just name stories like we do piano sonatas? Then we could have stories like Teenage Vampire in Angst Major). On the other hand, some might argue that a good title is an integral part of the story, one that completes it and adds that final polishing touch. Others might say that it is a marketing gimmick, hooks designed to lure the reader in, to sink into the reader’s brain.

How does titling your work fit into your creative process? How important is the title to your story as a whole? Does your story feel incomplete unless you have titled it?

Nobility have them: baronets, barons, earls, dukes. So does the military: privates, corporals, sergeants, lieutenants and so on. All institutions have hierarchies. We grade gemstones and hurricanes, ski slopes and rockfaces, stars and planetary bodies. Part of being human is the insatiable desire to name, sort, classify and rank.

Why should your black-ops military group or magic order be any different? Perhaps you have a far-future military whose various types of battleships need classifying. Or you need to come up with houses for your boarding school, or breed names for the griffins that your protagonist raises.

This week’s fun is to come up with cool names for whatever it is you’re ranking. For one of my short stories, I named my ship types after birds: eagles, gulls, kestrels. My one magic ship was known as a raven. While David was working on his book Storm Rider, we brainstormed animal names for the various intensities of different types of storms (for example, the sandstorms increased in rage and vigor from scorpion, to tarantula, to asp, to cobra, and finally, phoenix). Why settle for Cat 3 and Very Bad when you can be more creative?

Georgia O’Keeffe-inspired art

sewing and stenciling

stars and stripes

sugar-cube and vanila frosting buildings