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keira metz, my fic, fic snippet, ask answered, Anonymous
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Ooh that’s a good suggestion!
I should talk about my usual approach to titles, and why I can’t really usually get anyone to help me. I know I asked for help just now in that post but what I mostly really meant was I just needed moral support, because I have to figure it out on my own, because I’m the only one yet who knows enough to really figure out what it’s got to be. (Although unusually, for this story I do have a beta-reader, though that was mostly since I’m working with them on something else and they were curious about this one and that was a good push for me to consolidate and organize it out of a lot of fragments I’d been working on, so, thanks for that, ao3-user-anoke, and I have mostly been ignoring their very good suggestions because I am a stubborn cuss.)
I know a lot of authors rely on quotes or references or things for titles, but I am not that widely-read really, and have a terrible command of popular music, so I can’t rely on references. I don’t listen to music a lot while writing, I know that’s a popular one– you pick a line from the song you listened to heavily while writing the story. That doesn’t work for me. I used to listen to music more, in general and while writing, but I’m old and tired and super-undiagnosed-unmedicated-ADHD so coordinating music is just one more chunk of logistics I can’t manage.
The other thing people do is to really try to sum up what the story’s about in a title. And i’m super bad at that. I almost always go into stories assuming they’re about something other than what they are, and at the end I’ve always discovered something else, and then when people start commenting on another thing I’m like oh yeah that’s what that’s really about, I super meant to do that. (And I did, is the thing, but it can be hard to articulate things to oneself.)
Anyway, so, that one doesn’t work for me either. So what I do is that I reread the story one last time and try to find a pithy line that I can pull out. The problem with this one is that I had a great line, where Lambert’s explaining how being nonbinary is nobody’s fucking business until you hit the awkward point of wanting to fuck someone and it does become their business kind of because it’s relevant and that’s always tricky to navigate, and so I pulled out the phrase Somebody’s Business from that because it did occur in his exact quotation. And I was using that one and then I started thinking and I have another story up on AO3 that’s got a similar title. Nobody’s Business But Yours, and I was like, that’s too similar, I don’t need that. So my second choice, and what I’ll probably go with, is Ideal Man, even though it’s a misgendering, right, because, well, it’s what Keira says when she’s really trying to get him to talk about the topic she doesn’t know how to bring up again, and it works. (We the readers know already, from the previous story https://archiveofourown.org/works/26367553, how she’s going to react, but Lambert doesn’t, so he’s being cagey.)
So I’m probably going to call it The Ideal Man and here’s the quotation, which isn’t all that pithy in isolation but just indulge me and imagine it in the flow of the story. Of course, now that I’ve got it up and formatted in drafts on AO3 and have done the final edits and split it properly into chapters, I was about to hit the go button when I got looking at the little nubby third chapter and then the abrupt transition to the next story that assumes a lot of stuff I don’t show at all, and realized that no, I want to show the next bit, so. Now I’m delayed, trying to work out that third chapter. But! Soon. Anyway, the quote:
She laughed. “You look like the ideal man in all the anatomy books.”
He couldn’t hide his expression at that, and being too tired to say anything wasn’t going to pass any longer. “I’m not one,” he said.
“Right,” she said, indulgent. Maybe a little condescending. “You’re a Witcher. Male, then, I should have said.”
“No,” he said, sharper than he should have; it wasn’t her fault he hadn’t explained it. “It’s not– that’s not– I’m not.” Now he couldn’t look at her, and his face had gone hot.
She didn’t move for a moment, hand still spread out across his belly. “You mean,” she said, cautiously, after a moment, “that you’re not–”
His breath was coming faster now and he took a moment to stare up at the tester above them, and try to get it under control. Fuck, he hadn’t meant to get mad about it, that didn’t help anything. “I’m not a man,” he said. “I’m not– male, I’m not manly, I’m not any of that. I’m me, and I’m–” But he didn’t have a good word for it.
She took a sharper breath, let it out, then took another, and assayed, “You were talking about yourself, then.”
