Title, #1

Man, do I hate coming up with titles.

I like the idea of Ambrose being the title character in some way. Now, he's not a monk this time around, so The Monk won't work, of course. And I don't want to do something similar because it would be like The Student or something dumb like that.

Ambrose might work by itself. Maybe. I could always do that pretentious think and call it Ambrose: A Novel. Not sure how I feel about that.

I'm somewhat tempted to call it Saint Ambrose (har har) but I don't want to retain the tie to Catholicism that the word saint creates.

And then there's the abbey I'm using as the setting. The setting is a powerful force in my novel because it changes the characters' thinking and perception of reality, much like it did in Northanger Abbey. But The Abbey, I don't know. I don't think it's something I would pick up if I were browsing in the library or bookstore.

And Mission Trip is equally dumb. It sounds like Road Trip or Euro Trip.

The problem with picking the title beforehand is that I think I will find the title while I'm actually writing the thing. Sort of like Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Not that Jonathan Safran Foer definitely didn't know his title ahead of time, but I could see him discovering that while he was writing it, since Oskar keeps saying things like that all the time.

My favorite so far is Ambrose or maybe even Ambrose: A Novel. I will stick with that for now but continue to think about new ideas.