Just to give you an idea on how old this pic is, the RV pictured has been gone for almost 20 years, and that tree was removed to allow solar panels to be installed pre-pandemic.
The original inspiration for this blog post was a series of posts that I was writing for my FB author's page about my one and only traditionally published novel, Line 21. Specifically, I was lamenting about my poor title choice and how naive I was to think that the publisher would actually change it prior to publication.
So that got me to thinking about a task that I absolutely loathed over the years, to the point where it made my top five list of things associated with publishing that I hate to do: story titles.
This has always been a major splinter under my fingernail for as long as I can remember. Because I loathe this necessary evil to my writing life, I would often not even put in the bare minimum effort needed to choose a title. The end result would often be something like the aforementioned title to my trad publisher.
For this post, I thought I would revisit one of my least favorite writing related tasks to see what kind of progress, if any, I happen to be making.
My definition of "progress" is quite simple: am I now choosing titles based on the content of the story, or am I still being cutesy about my titles?
On the surface it does seem that I am making solid progress on the former. While I was spending the first half of 2026 editing my fantasy series, I was also coming up with solid titles for each volume. All the titles were based on the actual content for each given volume, of which the forth volume gave me the most trouble, as it took me almost two days to come up with one, and even then, I had to do some last minute tweaking to make it fit.
Now if we move over to the short story world that I had recently decided to refamiliarize myself with after about a year hiatus (give or take), to see what kind of progress I made there. I will note that the retitling has been a tad more difficult, as the content was more eclectic than normal.
If we take a look at the last story I had rewritten, you would see that the title more accurately matches with the story: a man traveling to Butte, Montana by train, so the story, naturally enough, is called 'Butte, Montana.'
As I thumb through the other fourteen short stories, it looks like I made a concentrated effort to link the title of a given story to the actual content of that given story. Although, it does look like one of them, titled 'Side Hustle', could be tenuously linked to the story content. However, the odd thing about this story is that I had, purposely it seems, added a few elements from my fantasy series.
So in my eyes, I consider this to be a win. Why? Because it's easier to explain a story with a title that makes sense, than to explain a story with a title that doesn't make sense (like my first novel).
I would like also to give a very brief update on my latest novella "Evil Has A Conscience": I should be getting the e-book version back by the beginning of October, with the print version back by the second week.
Have a fantastic week!
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Lay it on me, because unlike others, I can handle it.