#tbf lots of my story titles are the same - something clicks and then i just make it work

[rataltouille]

How do you come up with some of the best titles for your stories and also what is your short story writing process? You are amazing and all your works are *chef's kiss* <3..

anon oml!! you’re so sweet, i’m so glad you like my writing + my story titles; they’re usually a struggle™ to pin down so this means a lot. i’ve answered your other question [my short story process] in an upcoming ask, so here’s the gist of how i title things. i'll be exampling this with the process of me naming my short stories it’s gene magic and/or turpentine and geometry of the holy moon (1 am) to make the process clearer. [i’ll be referring to them as gene magic and gothm respectively]

1. figure out the key emotion/aesthetic of the story. this refers to how you perceive the story. it works if you’ve already got the vibes pinned down. so for example, if it's an airy, dreamy story that’s set in the hills, you can pick a lexicon that fits that: grass, air, gauze, wind, bloom, blah blah. for gothm, the vibe was that of nighttime [midnight specifically], the full moon in a cloudless sky, a small village, a very thick and dreamy air which was slightly suffocating, etc. this is where the words ”moon” and ”1 am” came through. for gene magic, the word ”turpentine” fits the story as it’s a sharp and bitter aesthetic and turpentine is a pungent smell.

2. allude it to the theme(s). okay so this one doesn't always need to happen because sometimes you don't have a theme / don't know it. but basically, referencing theme [not overtly] in the titles helps add some depth! for gothm, there are themes of religion and faith, and that’s where the word ”holy” comes in. i added this descriptor to the previously chosen moon aesthetic, and so it helps [and it alludes to the story too because in it a god lives on the moon]. for gene magic, the phrase ”it’s gene magic” alludes to the story as the plot has surrealist / fabulist elements and there’s a magical disease running in the family.

3. maintain a lexicon. this brings in both the previous points: maintain a set of words that fit the story as a whole. so this is kind of like a word bank for your story specifically. for gothm, the word bank had ”moonlight, weave, water, reflection, velvet, interval, liminality, silence.” this gives you a general vibe for the story and are used to embellish the aesthetic. i usually do this at the start of the story and then add onto it as i write. so you can use this word bank to pick out the title! for gene magic, it originally had a different title which i’d used at first but by the end of the draft it didn't fit the story at all. so in looking for a new one i referred to the lexicon, where the term ”turpentine smoke” once appears, and this helped the new title click and fit.

4. maintain a general ideas list. this one. this is a LIFESAVER. i’d recommend keeping an ideas list for everything [plot, character, tropes, titles, themes, etc.] but for titles, this helps infinitely. basically just jot down every word you find interesting [this list would not have to be for the aesthetic of the story because it’s a general list]. so any word you come across that intrigues you, or random phrases you find cool. just plop them all into this one document. and in case you want a title for a future story you can always reference this collection of super assorted words and title ideas and pick out ones that sound right for your story. for gothm, the phrase ”geometry of the” came from my general ideas list, where i’d written down the word ”geometry” for later use. this always helps me because i’d done the same thing for gene magic where the word turpentine had been on the list. like i said, this is a lifesaver.

5. trial & error. this one’s something that happens for some stories and doesn't for the rest.

for gene magic, before starting to draft it, i had a vague idea of the aesthetic and referenced my general ideas list for a working title [it’s impossible for me to work on a story if i don’t have a title] and found the term ”elbow grease”, and because i knew this would be a super weird and funky story, the working title was ”elbow grease works for shoulders too”. [yes i know that does not make sense, that does not mean i’m not going to use it for a future title lmao]. i drafted this story and by the end knew that the title and the story had literally nothing in common. and then while actively hunting for a new title i came across the phrase ”turpentine” in my ideas list and the title ”it’s gene magic and/or turpentine” immediately came to mind. as before, i wanted to allude to the funky / weird vibe of the story and thus i use the phrase ”and/or”, which tbf is pretty unusual.

for gothm, i’d gotten the general vibes down, but had a bunch of very similar titles that differed only in the phrasing: ”anatomy of the full moon”, ”geometry in moonlight (1 am)”, ”geometry 101: the shape of moonlight”, ”geometry in moonlight, is it holy enough?” etc etc. none of these sounded exactly right, so instead i picked specific words i liked and put it into one title.

6. don’t overthink it. look, it’s easy to get carried away with super deep and poetic and really complicated titles [i would know]. but sometimes a simple, short title is truly the best. for my short story ”saltwater”, there would be no other title that fit it better. it gets across the vibe of the story, the key character [the ocean] and how it plays into the plot. sometimes the simplest title is the best one.

for me the titling process, like everything else, is something that’s instinctive and intuitive. it’s mostly trial and error + just bouncing ideas back and forth until something clicks. sometimes the first title will stick, or it might need a complete revamp by the end. it can take a while to get to the right title, but it’s worth it. hopefully insight into my process was able to help in some way, best of luck with your stories!!

[zirkkun]

Yo you have every right to be upset about things! You're still a person with your own feelings and deserve to be treated kindly. No one should come at you for making things you enjoy or for misunderstandings. I hope things get better for you even if I wasn't here for when all the drama happened (or maybe I was and just wasn't aware of it? I tend to avoid drama as much as possible tbh)

I didn't really post about it much. I think I answered about 4 asks about it (three of them in the same post because i was sure it was the same anon due to the similar string of seemingly continued messages) and the rest I just deleted as soon as they came in, but I got... A lot. A lot of mean things said too. Kinda hurts when you wanted to make something because you knew this work was highly criticized and wanted to let people give it a second chance only to be shot down by the people you were hoping to defend lol

In short, and a lot of it I missed because I was blocked by a lot of people so my friend sent me screencaps; someone took I believe only the old ask box post I had for ULR, which at the time was called "Underlust Rewrite," and was disgusted at the fact that everything was revamped and "made for kids" (because it's not 18+ explicit content, but as I've said before, it's just cause I'm too scared to be horny on main, and I've literally made a whole different biological system for ULR so I can write the necessary story ""sex scenes"" without it being human-like sex or otherwise uncomfortable or too explicit for me to draw, but I still consider it a mature story overall), so they blocked me instantly here and on twitter and then made a callout post on twitter itself. People were telling me originally to stop calling the AU Underlust, and I didn't really get it at first, because like, what's the difference between my spinoff and, say, Underlust Gold, Swapfell Indigo, TS!Underswap, you know, names that have add-ons from the original title to differentiate it but still connect it to the source. So that's what I said, as well as if I removed the Underlust name, it would be considered stealing to me, because I'd be disconnecting it from the source. But apparently, instead, what had been the concern was that it was just being called "Underlust" and the "Rewrite" aspect was implying I was replacing the original story, which like, had never been my intention and I've made a bunch of things with both the ULR and UL cast together and love the idea of Lust and Ace meeting up and just being a disaster duo of not working together at all. I just adore Underlust like it's in my pinned FAQ, Lust's been in my banner for months now, and he's practically my staple pfp character on every account but here atm.

It took like 3 days for it to actually click what was going on, because once I finally got the chance to have a conversation with someone where they weren't telling me I was the scum of the Earth -- which, honestly, bless the three people I talked to, they were so sweet (which actually included someone from the Japanese side of the fandom whose art I loved too... yeah it got pretty far. Once I sent them a message though it was cleared up quickly and they did post a clarification post about ULR and me, so that was nice to see.) -- I finally got the chance to realize that this was a misunderstanding from the beginning, from both sides, where people coming at me were saying I was doing all of the stuff above and probably more but those stuck the most, while I was confused as to where this information and accusations were coming from and what they were referring to in the first place. They probably never explained it in the anon asks because, well, they probably assumed I knew what I was doing, but when they came at me about something I didn't do with vague context of something I did do, I was very confused, and got really defensive really quickly, and really honestly snapped pretty hard. After my first initial explanation post and people were still trying to tell me to stop ULR/don't call it Underlust/whatever else there was, I just got tired and told people to block me if they didn't like it. But that didn't really stop anyone and honestly made it worse because that's when I started getting really nasty messages. I like... Specifically remember one where someone called me a lowlife and a thief, and that one stuck the most, but I tended to not read through them before deleting them for my own sanity. I actually did this to one of the people who'd later talked to me calmly about it at first too, because I had just woken up, and really didn't want to read an essay lecture on everything everyone's been telling me at the crack of 7am when I was borderline ready to delete my account and start over lol

Some people I do remember were accusing me of trying to censor nsfw content or erase it as well because ULR isn't 18+, and I'm out here on my horny ass like "wh. What are they talking about, where did you get that idea, have you SEEN my ao3 recommended list," /j but in all seriousness I really didn't understand that accusation at all because I've never been against nsfw content in the slightest and lowkey? This is very dumb -- but like, you know how they say when you get hate mail, you know you've made it? Well, for me, my thought has always been, "When there's 18+ fancontent of my OC's, I'll have finally made it." This is... Not a joke, some of my friends think its very weird LMAO oh well. I've been on the internet for far too long at this point -- like, definitely since I was far too young, probably, and being with a family of the next youngest being 12 years older than me, I really dove into stuff pretty quickly I definitely shouldn't have, but hey that's life -- I'm really unfazed by mostly anything now. Hell, me making ULR was honestly half motivated by me wanting to make others more comfortable with this kind of media, discussing sexuality and otherwise sexual-considered topics, without really being embarrassed or bothered by it. Because, people talk about death and killing and whatever other gorey stuff just fine, but the moment sex comes up, people just gasp in awe, y'know? I kind of grew up that way myself but like... ironically, in being more comfortable with my asexuality, I realized that it's honestly not that big of a deal. Sure, we don't need to hear the details of everything. We don't need to hear the details of a murder either. But I will never understand how murder is always the lowest on the "morally wrong list of things to not to" to so many people and that it's fine to mention, but even consider bringing up anything else and it's like, a sin and you're a bad person. Even racism is like, higher up on there for a lot of people, which it's like... this is an issue that needs to be discussed, or it can never be solved. You can't just kick that away and hope it goes away on its own, that's never how it works.

Ah, well, now I've gone off tangent lol. Sorry to make you read a blob of text lmao but having things in a cohesive format of what I've been thinking does feel a bit better. Thank you for the support regardless, and I do want to keep making what I really enjoy, because frankly, I really want to make things that make people take a step back and think for a moment, y'know? Things that invoke like a realization in yourself about something you didn't even know. That's how fiction's always been for me, so I want to give back by making it that way too. ... maybe my horny content is exempt from this however. That's just. Self indulgence LMAO.

Probably helps that I'm actually talking this all out for once, too, since before any of this I tried to keep as much of the situation contained to myself as possible in hopes I could clean it up before it got too bad. That was, in hindsight, probably a terrible idea lol. But I didn't want to be a source of stress for anyone following me or become the new creator-to-defend that like, 50% of people hate and 50% of people love and that you're either on one side or the other and there's no where in between. (I feel like Arin Hanson comes to mind for me every time I think of someone like this.) I know I can't please everyone and I knew internet hate would come eventually, but like, didn't expect it to be over a name or tag choice. I thought that would be a simple enough DM or clearable thing but apparently not, especially since I saw someone a few weeks ago delete their blog over a similar thing (though, the opposite, in a way: posting nsfw in a sfw tag by mistake). It wasn't in the UT fandom so y'all probably weren't following them (tbf I wasn't either, I just witnessed it happen from start to finish), but it was still disheartening.

Anyway, thank you, and sorry to make ya read all of that (if you actually did vahdbs don't blame you if you don't it's a lot of thought dump lmao)💕💕