Sour grapes

[devi]

The shortlist of winners for a story competition I entered has just come out. It is probably Bad and Wrong of me to be looking over the list of titles and thinking an awful lot of them are trite-sounding rubbish. I mean, "Somebody's Mother"! "The Summer's Day"! "Saturday's Kiss"! What is it with the 's thing? And "The Great Plains of Africa", ew. I really hope that's meant ironically. Though "The Happiest Mosquitoes in Breson" does sound quite interesting.

Fear Me, competition judges! Pass me over and I'll... I'll... mock your shortlist on my blog! Oh noes!

(Mine was called "We Wait In Joyful Hope". I like nicking chunks of prayers.)

Oh well. Insert standard grey-weather/stuckness/eye-strain grump here, then it'll be out of the way.

Comments

[ravenblack.livejournal.com]

Oh god, colons are becoming epidemic in game titles these days, and I'm afraid I'm not going to help any, given that my next project's title is "(something): Project Umbra". I haven't decided what the something is yet.

The thing about colons in game titles is that they make it so you can make spinoffs and 'sequels'. What a 'sequel' entails in gaming is making some new levels, and selling them as a whole new game, for new game price, even though ten man-years went into making the original game and about ten man-weeks went into making the 'sequel'. I believe this is why the colon is out to get us. Certainly it's *my* motivation for having it in my title.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

I haven't decided what the something is yet

How about "Colon: Project Umbra" ?

[verlaine.livejournal.com]

Surely colons are a natural symptom of rampant postmodernism. Once everything's been done once, the only way to come up with something "new" is to yoke two old things together with a convenient punctuation mark?

[ravenblack.livejournal.com]

There's a bit of that too, certainly. After dredging thesauri for words to pair up to form a generic title that says "wargame" without implying an era, I'd have invented the title "Warcraft" in at least three separate ways ('craft' being under skill, game and tactics, or some such), had several moments of inspiration involving "Command" and "Conquer", along with "Might" (but not Magic) and so on. Try any suitable wordpair that doesn't sound like arse, ask Google about their conjunction and chances are you'll find there's already a game with the title.

The one I really wanted was "Conflict", but lo and behold, not only is it already used for a game, it's already used as a colon-preceeding title for a whole series of games, just like I wanted to do.

So mm, not only do you have to string two things together with a punctuation mark, the two things themselves have to be each be constructed out of at least two things smooshed together as well. Or if you're lucky, one word mangled.