I’m not good at titles. More precisely, I’m not good at finding them quickly and easily. I actually like the titles for all my stories and novels quite a bit, but discovering them was a struggle.

I usually find my titles in songs or poems.

• The Night Inside comes from the song “The Only Thing that Shines” by Shriekback
• A Terrible Beauty comes from the poem “Easter, 1916” by Y.B. Yeats
• Cold Hillside comes from the poem “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” by John Yeats
• “Into the Black” comes from the song “Hey, Hey, My, My (Out of the Blue)” by Neil Young
• “Discovering Japan” comes from the song of the same name by Graham Parker
• “The Party Over There” comes from a song of the same name by … me
• “Exodus 22:18” comes from the Bible

I’ve been writing the thing I call “The Witch Novel” since 2015 and last month, I decided to enter it into a contest I have no hope of winning. It seemed like a good way to push me to finalize a few things and one of those things was a title.

So I did what I always do. I brainstormed images relating to the characters and the story, I read poems, I read lyrics. All the titles I came up that seemed to work, regrettably, sounded exactly like those used for romantasies. There’s nothing wrong with romantasy, but the novel is definitely not one, and anyone expecting that would be seriously disappointed.

I wrote six pages of potential titles in my notebooks. I ran them by my husband and various friends. In the end, I didn’t find anything that fit the book the way the earlier titles fit their novels. I defaulted to the least bad, most innocuous of the semi-romantasy titles. Heck, if I win, I’ll get them to help me come up with a new title.

So it’s back to the drawing board. Maybe I should run a poll….