dr_pretentious: (Default)
Sarah Avery ([personal profile] dr_pretentious) wrote2006-12-09 01:25 pm

In Which The Spouse Gets My Goat, And The Bob Novella Gets A New Name

I was trying to describe the location of a Korean restaurant I want to try.

Me:
It's in the strip mall with the vitamin emporium and the women-only gym. The restaurant's a hole in the wall right between them.

Dan:
What? There's a hole in the wall at the women-only gym?!




In entirely unrelated news, I finally have a permanent title for The Novella Formerly Known As Bob and the Black Head of Atho.

The old working title was fun, but completely misleading. I wish I could take credit for having come up with "Shopping Toward Shambala." I lamented to my critique group that I still didn't have a title I liked. (Well, I had liked "Ash for Roses," but Google informed me that there was a young adult novel called Ashes of Roses and an anthology of Middle Eastern poetry called Between Ashes and Roses. So much for that.) One of my groupmates sent me a list of possible titles, and "Shopping Toward Shambala" clicked into place. It's whimsical, it's euphonious, and it points just obliquely enough to the central problem in the story.

The only problem is that so many chick lit titles have the word shopping in them. I tried to imagine what kind of chick lit novel would be called "Shopping Toward Shambala," and ended up with a story about a Buddhist nun who leaves Zen Mountain Monastery in the Hudson Valley for the stricter, more savage disciplines of the Manhattan fashion scene. Now you see why I don't write chick lit.

[identity profile] dr-pretentious.livejournal.com 2006-12-10 04:14 am (UTC)(link)
No, definitely not redneck, since so many of the students these days are from crumbling inner city neighborhoods. And not red state, that's for sure. Reification? Reductionism? Or maybe Rasputin, since this is a university whose budget has been chained, drowned, shot, and beaten, and yet it refuses to die. If at any point evidence arises that the university has been sleeping with the Tsarina, we'll know for sure.