Title help for my WIP and a couple wedding pics

So I'm trying to come back to reality post wedding & honeymoon, albeit not trying very hard. I've been just kind of staring at the messy state of my house and my email inbox and wandering off to eat leftover wedding cupcakes, stare at new pots and pans, and daydream about husband. Next week I'll get productive again, I swear. And yes, productive will include blogs about and photos of the wedding. I have to organize those and wait for photos from the professional photographer. But for now I will share two of my favorite images. The first one taken by my cousin Becca and the second by our photographer, Brian Hacker.



I did come home from my brief honeymoon to good news though. My agent is ready to send out the partial of my next book! However it was titled Anarchists, Soap Stars and Regulars, which she thinks is a little too unwieldy so I'm trying to figure out a new title this weekend. If you have any ideas please feel free to leave them in the comments.

As I explained in a blog last month the reason for the initial title was because the main character Zoë is a very political teenager whose former stepfather Pete taught her about punk rock and anarchy when she was ten. Pete was her real father figure. Zoe refers to her estranged real father as the Soap Star "because that’s what he was—although the “star” part was debatable. He’d never won a Daytime Emmy or even landed a leading role on a well-known show like General Hospital. He played a brooding vampire bar owner on Passion Creek, one of those cheesy half-hour soaps that combines daytime drama with the paranormal." And finally, Zoë's mother Ivy is a bartender (yes, finally my bartender book!), whose regulars teach both Ivy and Zoë a lot about life.

The basic premise of the book is that every time Ivy breaks things off with a man, she and Zoë flee like the end of a relationship is a natural disaster. At seventeen Zoë has already lived in eleven cities in five states. On Sunday, August 28, 2005, the same day that a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans is declared due to the impending arrival of Hurricane Katrina, Ivy announces that they are moving from Seattle to Chicago. At first, Zoë accepts her fate because everything in her life is messed up: her anarchist boyfriend Gabriel broke her heart for the second time and her best friend, a homeless punk who calls himself Bender, kissed her. But after seeing a poignant interview with an elderly woman who had to flee New Orleans because of the hurricane, Zoë decides she needs to fix her problems in Seattle and claim it as her home. So Zoë and Ivy make a go of staying in one place, working through their various relationship issues (Can Zoë become more than friends with Bender? How will it affect Ivy when her ex-husband the Soap Star comes to town?), and trying to grow up together (Ivy is an alcoholic and perpetual teenager herself). Added to the mix is Jake, the son of Ivy’s best friend Hanna, who has come to live with them and he's dealing with anger issues and possibly bipolar disorder.

Umm yeah that is all I'll say about it for now and that's probably too much already. It's very much in the early stages (I have 50 pages and a synopsis that will go to my editor at MTV in hopes she'll like it enough to give me a contract before I write the whole thing), but hopefully that's enough to inspire title suggestions? Lemme know your thoughts. In the meantime I'll be listening to music looking toward lyrics and song names like I did with IWBYJR. Ugh, I wish good titles could always just come to me like the title of Ballads did. That book was Ballads of Suburbia from the beginning. It was perfect and just stuck.

Anyway, quickly for those of you in the Oak Park area, there is a local author reading tomorrow, an event I am hoping to go to if I can slog through enough post-wedding work. Kathi Baron is celebrating the release of her book Shattered at Magic Tree Bookstore (141 N. Oak Park Ave in Oak Park, IL) from 1 to 3 pm tomorrow, Saturday, October 10. Go if you can! Shattered looks like a great book for music lovers (about a teen violinist who runs away after her father smashes her violin in a violent outburst) and I can't wait to read it. Kathi will be on the blog in a couple weeks for Women Who Rock Wednesday!

Okay more cohesive blog entries with wedding pictures next week, I promise!