Titles are hard

Believe it or not, coming up with the title of a story is one of the more difficult parts of the writing process for me. The point was driven home again recently when I finished writing a short story for an anthology that will be published later this year (more news on this exciting development as we near the launch date).

Like other authors, I have a working title in my head as I'm writing a story. In the case of the aforementioned short story, the working title was the wildly clever "Short Story for Anthology." Yes, my creativity astounds me too. The working title is just a name that I use to refer to the story because I have to call it something.

There are times when I think the working title will become the real title, as was the case with Beyond New Eden, whose working title was Adams and Eves. Eventually, I decided to change the name because Michael Grant released Eve and Adam a few months before my book became available, and some people had compared my prior novel to a Michael Grant book in the same genre. I didn't want to appear to be a Michael Grant copycat. (I'm not. And I read Eve and Adam. And it's nothing like Beyond New Eden.)

One-word titles tend to come easier to me. Gifted was the working title for the novel that now bears the same name. The same applies to Transmissions, although, truth be told, I really wanted to name that story something else but couldn't come up with a better title. The one-word name for my short story, "Drive," was more difficult to come up with, but once I did, the names for the next two installments in the series, "Protect" and "Search", came easily. I even know what the name of the fourth story in the series will be called, even though I haven't started writing it yet.

In addition to the recently finished short story, I'm working on a novel with an AI element to it. For most of the first draft, I called it The AI Novel. I have a better name for it now, and we'll see whether that sticks when I eventually publish the book.