Do I choose my book titles?
The real reason I'm awful at naming my books and the drag queen who helped me realise it.
If you’ve ever had the misfortune to be on a pub quiz team with me, you’ll know how terrible I am at coming up with team names. I am the person who unironically suggests ‘Shall we be called Team Name?’, hereby demonstrating that I have never had an original thought in my life. I can’t take the pressure of it. The quiz master reads it out! The panic! I’m going a little off topic here, but perhaps this will demonstrate the point further. We’ll get onto book titles in a minute, promise.
A few years ago, I went to Drag Bingo with my friend Emily (who is an incredible poet, side note) and time and time again, the queen told us that if we won a game, we had to go to the front and say our name was Sandra. Okay, I thought. Sandra, Sandra, Sandra. I won the second game. Dabber in the air, I jumped up, buzzing, high on life, ready to claim my free bottle of Prosecco. Sandra, Sandra, Sandra. What happened when I was handed the microphone? ‘What’s your name?’ What the fuck was it?! I was too giddy, of course I was.
‘Abi!’ I screamed. Let me tell you, there is nothing that willows your soul quite like a drag queen slow blinking at you. What’s more, a ‘whomp-whomp’ noise played through the speakers and she literally removed the Prosecco from my hand.
‘You’ve made a show of yourself,’ she said. She wasn’t wrong. Anyway, what has this got to do with book titles? Oh yeah, basically I’m shit at them.
So, let’s get into how each of my novels came to be named.