Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Title Update

No news to report, just a couple new ways to obsess about my lack of the “perfect” title for my novel-in-progress:

1. Writer/friend Robin Gaines suggests that if I write out my title options in a different font I might see them in a new light…and perhaps discover they’re more brilliant than I’d imagined. This reminds me of another excellent tip: when you’re revising your manuscript, put it in a different font than your “first draft font” to trick yourself into seeing it differently.

2. While going crazy with google, looking for architecture terms and archeology terms, I found a fabulous site of odd dictionaries: AlphaDictionary.com. I found myself in the history dictionaries, where there were many to choose from, but my favorites were
--the Canting Dictionary (thieves’ slang from 1736)
--Bartlett's Dictionary of Americanisms (from 1848)
--and the Grandiloquent Dictionary, “the result of an ongoing project to collect and distribute the most obscure and rare words in the English language.” (Example: galeanthropy - The delusion that one is a cat.)

No titles…but so much fun that I forgot how stressed out and crazed I’ve been about my lack of a title!

Work-in-Progress

DC-area author Leslie Pietrzyk explores the creative process and all things literary.