Mary J. McCoy-Dressel

Well, now. What is my inspiration for the muse today? As I started writing this, I hoped the precise reason would come to me, and I’d have real inspiration for posting under this Tuesday theme. It took writing this entire post before it came to me…

Completion. Pride. Relief. Stress.

Yep, it’s all four of those bundled into one. Completion and its friends.

I’m not finished. I’m a chapter away from writing the end to a first draft on a still untitled book. Therefore, completion, pride, and relief came in. I feel like jumping up and clicking my heels together for being close to completion. Now I have a dilemma. I’ve been faced with this before, but I don’t think I ever came this far before choosing a title. Oh, except for Of the Cowboy’s Own Accord. I wrote about it here. To be honest, I had this difficulty with Hey, Cowboy, too. Must I remind myself?

This is where the stress comes in. Stress, as bad as it is, makes me determined not to be satisfied with any old title, and to strive to come up with the perfect title.

However, for now, here I sit again. Out of four possible titles, one of them is the one I’ve been leaning toward. I wanted this one. Now, I want to kick and scream! Waah waah. Sob. Cry. Pout.

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Quiet, crybaby. Yesterday before writing this, I found the same title on another romance published less than a year ago.  😦  Drats. It’ll be hard to reword this four-word title to get the same meaning.

Another choice is from a line I wrote in the book—part of something my heroine says and using that one would put a keyword in the title. So far, there is no book with this title. This is the heroes story though. Should my title reflect something the heroine says? It’s a good title, but longer than what I’d like. Of course, the story is hers, too, and she has her own difficulties to overcome. It might work. I could write Wade’s Story. Hahahaha. Not. I believe there are titles with only his name, anyway.

The third one sounds more like a travel book than a romance title, but I love it, too, because it fits. My cover designer might work with this title for the design. (I know her so well now.) This one was my first title choice and the one I keep going back to.

Last but not least, the other title is also a song title. I checked. It isn’t trademarked. Sure, I could use it, but yesterday I found the same title, again, on another piece of music by a Jazz player. That’s kind of like two strikes, so we’ll scratch it from the list.

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The thing about stress is, it also drove me to brainstorm. Brainstorming took me down another path yesterday, and now three more new titles were added to my long list of four=seven now. Another word for all this might be obsession. I know it’ll come to me sooner than later. Please?

There’s time. No rush. I have to revise. I’ve had to start reading this book over from page one thirty times or more continuously because of delays and distractions, and each time of reading it from the beginning, I’d do more revisions, so the draft is fairly clean. This is what I do. Don’t try to change me.   🙂

Anyway, maybe through a hundred a few more revisions I’ll come up with the perfect title. My muse keeps telling me ‘you already have it,’ but she isn’t telling me which one it is. Let’s get with the program here, Ms. Muse!

Thanks for lending me your shoulder as I go down the path to preparing another book and another title dilemma. I’m sure my author friends understand this.

Readers, I hope you see how much work, stress, sweat, stress, tears, sweat, stress, hours, HEART we authors put into every aspect of a book, but we love it.  IMHO  ❤

Happy Tuesday. Thanks for reading.