The Book With No Title

My editor has not sent the manuscript back to me for the ninth edit, but it is due any day, if i can find it in the pile of Christmas packages that arrive daily due to my frenized realization that my children might be expecting gifts. All of the edits from The Dominatrix, as i call her behind her back, are carefully timed to coincide with holidays or vacations. To date, I've revised over two Christmases, two Easter breaks, two summer vacations, and wait that's only eight vacations ruined, I'm missing one. Maybe Fourth of July. "Mommy, look at the fireworks!" "Girls, you know better than to bother your mother when she's refining the backstory!"

And if anyone ever steals my computer and sees all my stickie reminders to make my heroine spunky, they will think i'm a drug dealer. Actually, I should consider taking up drug dealing, since the publishing company has paid approximately me approximately 1/2 a cent per month that i have put into this book.

But what does this matter? Soon I will be published. Soon, I tell myself. The book's launch date has moved from March 2006 to March 2007 to June 2007 to July 2007 to January 2008. Of course no one knows what the title of the book will be, since The Agent and The Dominatrix and The Foreign Publishers do not agree on what the best title is. Yes, it's true, my book will be published in the U.S., Russia, Holland, and Australia and who knows where else with no title. Every week a new title is dreamed up by someone, and every week i say, "Well, that was on the list of titles I came up with three years ago, so I guess I like it."

Titles are overrated anyway. I mean The Firm and The Stand sound like the same book and one sucks and one rocks, so what does it matter?