I stink at titles. I really do. I just can’t come up with titles for ninety percent of the things that I write. In my creative writing classes, I had to come up with titles for my short stories and poems (and when you’ve got over three hundred poems, that’s a LOT of titles!) and always felt that whatever I came up with just fell short. My titles weren’t witty or insightful or even altogether that descriptive. So now that I’ve got my first novel typed up, half-edited, and the cover in the works, titles are more important to me. I had decided some time ago (probably two or three years ago) that I wanted the number two to feature in all the titles somehow, either directly or indirectly with words such as “twice” or “second” or what have you. This is mostly because I consider the books to have two main characters: the one speaking and her mentor. Also, the number two pops up again throughout the series, so I thought it’d be appropriate. So all the titles will have something to do with “two.”
There are lots of locution out there with the number two as an integral part (hehe, integral, integer…uh, never mind), so coming up with phrases wasn’t all that hard, but coming up with phrases that had anything to do with the nonsense of my novels is something else entirely. During NaNoWriMo, I decided on Second Time’s a Charm for my third book, and somewhere along the line I had also decided on Two Minds Are Better Than One for the first novel. That left only novels two, four, five, six, seven, eight, and nine that needed titles. I know a lot of people would say “Don’t come up with titles until the book is written,” but these are my books, and I know their plots backwards and forward, so I know the gist of each enough to be able to name it; if only I could come up with names!
This morning I was puzzling over book titles again because the books have been on my mind rather heavily lately, and I was thinking about the phrase “two’s company and three’s a crowd” because that was a working title for Book Two. I think one possible title I had come up with months ago was Two’s Company, Three’s Trouble, but I wanted something more interesting. I got to thinking about how many characters there are in the book, and thought Two’s Company, Twenty’s an Army sounded cool, but I wasn’t sure of the exact count of people living at the inn during the time of the novel. So I got up, checked, and came up with Two’s Company, Twenty-two’s an Army. I don’t know that I’ll keep it exactly like that because, come to think of it, there are actually two more “beings” who are at the inn, making it twenty-four (and a twenty-fifth is born before the end of the book), so rather than be accurate, I might drop it back to just twenty. The point is, I was actually having some inspiration as to titles, so I thought I’d ride that train of thought for as long as I could before it derailed.
After about an hour of brainstorming, I came up with some decent working titles for all of the nine books in the series. I even went through and made a template for each novel within its folder in the Story file where I keep them. Some of the titles are just tired, old locutions, but others are my own creation depending upon the situation of the novel. So for those curious few out there, here are my current working titles for the Solennelle and O Series.
- Two Minds Are Better Than One
- Two’s Company, Twenty-two’s an Army
- Second Time’s a Charm
- Two of Hearts Beats the King of Clubs
- Two Ways Out
- Two Plus Two Equals Five
- Once Smitten, Twice Shy
- To Be Two or Not to Be
- The Last Second