Titles . . .

Speaking of Red Dragon Rising, one of these days I'm going to write a post on how difficult it can be to come up with a good title for a book.

The books in the Red Dragon series have gotten into a certain pattern: "X of War" for you math mavens, with X being a variable based somehow on the relevant happenings. "Shadow" and "Edge" have done it for us so far.

That sounded like a good idea when we started, but now we realize that it cuts down on the possibilities. The next installment in the series - which will be out this fall - presented a serious challenge. The best "X" based on the contents would have been "casualties" - but that gives you the title of a fairly famous movie set during the Vietnam War. Not only that, but the movie's central storyline was something we didn't want to connect with this book.

(Full disclosure: I didn't know until I looked it up. Duh. I still haven't seen the movie.)

Fortunately, Larry hit on a much better alternative on the second try, and we ran with it.

Or at least we think we did. The publisher still hasn't OK'd it, which is why it's not appearing in this post.