When it comes to novel ideas, I’m fantastic. I can dream up ideas all day long, there’s ideas coming out the wazoo… you get the gist. The follow through, however, is where I start running into problems. And slapping a title on a finished creation that miraculously made its way from idea to publishable-novel? Ugh.

Damn, people still like titles? Yeah. It’s not easy.

I like short clean titles that are a word or two because this is easy and classy. And also I’m lazy. But often short titles can’t sum up the whole work on its own and also doesn’t really intrigue people as much as something more compelling and thought out.

But for my latest novel about best friends falling in love, magical hexes, and bisexuality, I thought I had the perfect title all set and ready to go.

Okay, here’s the premise:

Our hero John is an overlooked 16-year-old in Buffalo, New York. His quest to come out as bi and confess his love for his best friend becomes infinitely more complicated when he starts disappearing from view.

So what’s it called? Invisi-bi-lity.

Yes, still one word, but the way it breaks up provides two of the most important points: there’s invisibility and bisexuality involved. Truthfully, I wanted to call the book ‘invisible.’ I ran into my first snag when realizing how invisible was actually spelled.

‘Bi’ is not in ‘invisible.’ Now I know. Changing it to invisibility solved that.

My next hiccup came when putting the book upon Kindle Vella. I typed in Invisi(bi)lity and thought all was well. But not so! On the page where I input the info, it shows up correctly. But when I looked at the page others see it showed up as invisi(bi) lity.

Now maybe I shouldn’t care about the extra space in there. Maybe I should just let it go. But I’m not known for my ability to just let things go and move on. I’m not sure what I am known for but it definitely isn’t that.

I just don’t like the way invisi(bi) lity looked.

Maybe I should use invisi (bi) lity instead but I don’t love that either.

Maybe, definitely, I should have taken a screenshot of what I’m talking about. As this whole post proves, I make mistakes and things don’t always go my way. So this didn’t occur to me until now. Oops!

What did happen next was that I tried to fix the issue. I started over and typed the whole thing in again as I wanted it to appear. I copied and pasted the title in how I wanted it. I typed the whole word in then added the () later. Nothing worked!

At some point I gave up. And eventually settled on Invisi-bi-lity.

Or so I thought. Only later did I realize what I actually wrote was Invis-bi-lity and spell checker couldn’t help me because it doesn’t like any of these combinations where I break up the word, so I expected to see the red squiggly lines of wrongness. If you’re having trouble seeing my mistake (or if I’m imagining someone else might make the same error so I can feel better about myself?) then I’ll let you know there needs to be another ‘i’ after the ‘s’.

If you somehow saw and caught the spelling error that was definitely on the Vella page for I’m not sure how long, good job! You caught it before me. But look at us laughing at our mistakes now! Or okay, my mistakes.

And thus ends my comedy of errors where creating a simple title turned out to be anything but. Simple. Anything but simple. TL;DR I’m bad at spelling, titles are hard, and you should check out Invisi-bi-lity.