For Want Of A Title

Giving my stories a proper title is often the most frustrating part of writing. Often my stories go through most of the writing process with nothing but a descriptor like "Nadine's Story" or "Amanda's Story." But while such a descriptor is good enough for tracking a work in progress, it simply won't do for anything that purports to be the finished product.

Ideally, a title should evoke the story without giving it away. At the same time, one should avoid an overused title, since it has effectively lost its power to touch the reader, simply because it already has too many associations.

And that's what I'm facing with the entry-point novel to the Jan-Pawel Trzetrzelewski sequence. Originally I was going to title it In the Presence of Mine Enemies, which simultaneously gives the sense of the way in which Jan-Pawel is surrounded by enemies, both obvious and not, while at the same time, being a quotation from the Bible, helps give notice that he is a cleric. However, not only has a friend of mine used that title for an unpublished work of hers, but the noted alternate-history novelist Harry Turtledove has used that same title for his work of hidden Jews living in the cracks of a world taken over by the Nazis.

So while I may keep it as a working title, I really need to find something else as a final title.