This afternoon I gathered my Hollow Earth Expedition players – also known as The Friends of Mister Cairo – and I spent the afternoon playing, chatting, and having a much needed laugh. And it’s really great to have the web to help us keep our sanity this way.

But before that, and afterwards, I wasted the best part of the morning and a fair chunk of the evening trying to dream up one of the most dreaded things for a writer: coming up with a title.
It seems easy, right?
And most of the time it is not a problem _ I usually can come up with something feasible. But today? No cigar.

The fact is, this is for a big-ish project – quite fun, but also rather big – and it does not involve only me, and I can’t get myself and my accomplices stuck with a bad name forever.
We need something easy, catchy, original, and that conveys certain ideas at a glance. Something that cannot be mistaken, or twisted out of shape. Something with staying power, that can be printed on a T-shirt in a fancy font, and sells in cartloads.

There is no formula, and indeed I tried a couple of online title creators, because … technology.
But it turned out to be useless mostly useless.
And so it’s back to the basic pre-tech systems: jot down as many titles come up for your work, and then start erasing all those that really don’t work on a second pass – and so on and so forth until you have only one left, and that’s the good one. Well, at least the one that provides you with the highest degree of fit for the subject. A starting point, if nothing else.
And rather a time waster.