I talked about long term planning earlier this week.  Well, last night I may have blown my plans.

I have a series of shorts and novellas. They are all individually complete, but they also tell a larger story. Since they are best read all together, I gave the titles and covers themes. For Uncommon Animals, all the covers are based on Andy Warhol paintings, and all the titles have the word ‘hunt’ (or a play on it, as in Part Four: The Haunt).

For the second series, I had the ‘brilliant’ idea of  naming the series ‘Monsters of Pittsburgh’ and naming each story after the monster they hunt. The covers would be simple black and white images of those monsters.

The problem arose when one of the ‘monsters’ is a human. And a human they are going to fight again later in the series. I have to think of a way out of this naming tangle, or change my premise for titles.

I’ve had a few suggestions and I have more than one idea. But the truth of the matter is that I’ll likely have to change my naming premise and the titles, more than once.  Your first idea is rarely your best.

In the Uncommon Animals series, I’ve had to change my cover inspiration for several of the stories. Sometimes, I couldn’t recreate it to my satisfaction. And sometimes, I could, but it didn’t make a nice cover.  Even when I could get the image right and it makes a nice cover, I couldn’t get a legible font over the crazy Warhol-esque colors.

But even knowing all of that, I’m going to stress over this until I get some kind of answer that pleases me. It’ll take a few days, and likely a few nights.