The title conundrum

 I'm actually pre-writing this on 24 May - today I've officially finished the first draft of The Book, by which I mean the current book.

I spent a couple hours batting around titles with friends because the book already had three working titles, ie "The Mafia Romance", "Jack & Sal", and finally "Dealmaker". For quite a while, Dealmaker looked like it would be the final title, because one of the character is one of the main fixers/dealmakers in my mafia-riddled little (fictional) city, and we start with his POV. 

Then a friend alerted me to "Deal Maker", a successful and well-regarded m/m romantic comedy published in 2017, and my book might be m/m and is structurally a romance, the tone is really quite different. 

Since then, we've gone through multiple potential titles, with the "emergency fallback" title literally "Mobster's Kiss". I also liked "Mobstertown" and "Lucky We Survived that Shit" (this one came up when I was asked to characterise the relationship between the MCs). One of the apparent rules of writing is to indicate the genre of the book with the title - and I'm really not very good at that part, but I guess I have a few more decades to get that one right. (The title for the next book, BTW has been set for 10 years or so and it's a banger and no-brainer.) 

I'm now about 80% set on a title and will roll that one around in my head for a week or so before I make it properly public and set up the book on Goodreads/Amazon/etc. 

Mostly I'm extremely jazzed to have the book done. My "easy, quick mafia romance that will be no longer than 50-60k because I don't have that much plot, lol" (which is how I've been talking about it to friends) topped out at 101k words in first draft and I'm still too close to really understand what this beastie is, but I sure enjoyed writing it a whole lot and I'm deeply in love with the characters. 

I'll be aiming to get it edited over the next 6 weeks and then publish at some point in September ((yes, this will be self-published). Stay tuned!