Names names damned dames

Okay, so I'm getting frustrated. Kett's story has had, like, ten names in the last week, and none of them fit. The working title, for a long time, was Almost Magic, being that it's a sequel to Almost Human. But that's not quite right, and besides, it locks me into Almost titles for any future books. Plus it's ripe for ridicule.

I considered riffing on the Human part of the title, too--I once translated a bunch of my titles into Spanish and Italian and back again, via the Internet, and got Approximately Human back, which I loved. But the thing about that is that a) most of the titles I came up with were rubbish and b) after a while it's hard to remember which book is which ("It had Human in the title, that's all I remember...").

Hard to come up with a title that conveys that the book: is set in a fantasy universe; has characters who speak like modern people; has a heroine who is in her thirties, jaded, scarred and bitter; has a hero who is, basically, a complete lunatic; runs on very vague Taming of the Shrew lines; is full of sex; is full of bad language; is funny (I hope); and may have sequels.

Y'see?

Anyway. Today is my baby boy's birthday (they all come at once, don't they?), so here's a picture of him, doing his flower-in-the-mud bit. I was leaning out of the bathroom window when I took this, as said window is Spike's preferred portal for entry and exit of his house (since the Demon Puppy inhabits the kitchen, where his own cat-sized door is), and he was debating whether or not to come in for his special pampered-cat birthday treats (very hard to treat a cat who already eats the best food on the market and has his very own chair by the radiator for napping on). Hence the moss, the facecloth (unwisely left on the windowsill, and rather difficult to retrieve) and, just out of shot, the dead mouse. Lovely.

All together now: awwww.