Rejected Titles and Other Things I Learned While Walking

Every book begins with a bad title.

Some books begin with twenty.

Mine usually begin with something that sounds profound until I have to imagine saying it out loud to another human being.

"What's your new book called?"

"Instructions for Becoming Moss."

"...Oh."

So, in the interest of public accountability, here are a few titles that have been rejected before they could embarrass either of us.

• How to Misplace a Soul in Northern Illinois
• Instructions for Becoming Moss
• The Prairie Doesn't Care
• Everything Eventually Becomes Dirt
• A Surprisingly Large Number of Crows
• Please Do Not Disturb the Ghosts
• The Department of Unimportant Discoveries
• Midwest Existentialism for Beginners
• Things I Was Pretty Sure Meant Something
• Probably Just a Stick

Some of these may yet have their day. Others deserve to remain quietly buried.

Walking is good for this sort of thing. Bad titles have a way of falling off somewhere around mile two.

It also teaches me things that are almost entirely useless.

Today's lessons:

• Crows notice you long before you notice them.
• Every cracked sidewalk eventually decides it would rather be a garden.
• The best mushrooms always seem to appear where no one was looking yesterday.
• If you stand still long enough, birds stop treating you like a problem.
• There is no such thing as "just another weed" if you spend enough time looking at it.
• You don't have to solve a day to have lived it well.

None of these observations have made me richer.

None have advanced my career.

None would impress a venture capitalist.

But they have made ordinary Tuesday mornings unexpectedly interesting, and that feels like a fair trade.

Besides, if Probably Just a Stick ever becomes the title of a book, you'll know exactly where it came from.

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