Thursday Thoughts

For whatever reason, I've always had trouble naming (or titling) things.  I can syllable-mash with the best fantasy writer, and I've spent hours working on naming languages that produce very cohesive and credible results, but if you ask me to come up with a descriptive name for an organization or - perish the thought - a business, my brain seizes up.  Part of it is the inner editor, given room to have laser focus and dismiss everything as not good enough, but the rest is inexplicable.

Of course, I'm terrible at word jumbles:  I look at a mess of letters and my brain doesn't unscramble them, it goes, "Oh, that would be a great character/place name."  But I digress.

When I stumble upon something that works, it often seems to be an accident.  I'm fairly happy with the titles I used in Flow:  water-witches, Borderwatch, the Unwashed, but I don't recall spending a lot of time or mental energy on those - they just developed naturally.  I can't say the same for the Pinnacle Empire and the Galactic Collective in Scylla and Charybdis - they took a while to work up, and they're workable, but not the most brilliant gems in the box.

This all comes up for a reason far more mundane and probably more important, in the scheme of things:  I'm trying to come up with a name for my pastry / culinary face.  I don't want to be "Lindsey Duncan Pastries" or the like - as a matter of personal preference, I've never liked that kind of business name.  I have a great one for the future, Entwined Harmonies ... but that's for use with wine-related ventures.  I want something serious but clever, ideally with a musical reference ...

But I can't even start.  Forget brainstorming, all I have is a handful of lame, unsuitable notions.  I just have to relax and let the idea simmer on the backburner ... but I wish I knew why it was so hard.