The Title

I've never liked the title. Doh! If I put it here, you could search and find this blog. And then your bubble might be burst. Argh. How am I supposed to write about how much I dislike this title...?

I've read other stories and seen movies where I completely forget about the title. But this... The title implies that a beauty queen is going to be murdered. That back of the book says nothing about this beauty queen. Or a pageant. Or a murder. What's going on here?

The first main character nicknames her husband's crush "Miss Nevada." No one within the novel gets the joke. (Yeah, seriously.) Once or twice every hundred pages there's a reference to Miss Nevada and we wonder, Who?

This is the title character. Angela wants to kill her—but not really. She's not really plotting her murder because then she would be DOING something. But there it is in the title, regardless. "Offing." Like this is 494 pages of plotting to kill "Miss Nevada," a woman who is not a beauty queen and has no deep ties to the state of Nevada.

"Offing" is such a strange word. How many people actually would look at that title and think this is a story about killing someone? Would most people look at that title and think, What?

I've finished your novel and can assure everyone it has little to do with Miss Nevada or offing her. Angela seethes over the presence of this woman in her life, but 99 percent of the novel is spent following Angela and Bev through a series of ridiculous situations that have nothing to do with their mother's long-term care or Angela's failing marriage.

Like everything else, the title needs work. It rolls around awkwardly on my tongue and sounds a lot like "awful."