Here it is: the advanced readers’ copy of the new book, which will come out in November.

It arrived this morning, and of course I stopped doing everything else I was supposed to be doing, and just sat down with it and gazed upon it, just the way you’d need to look at your newborn baby if it had somehow just come in on the UPS truck.

I still haven’t finished editing the page proofs, so it felt a bit surreal to see this all bound up like a real book, when there are still about 1,347,523 typos that need to be corrected, but I didn’t hold that against it. Instead, I carried it through the house and sang it a few songs, introduced it to the dog, and set it on the kitchen counter so it could look out over the rest of the house and sort of settle in.

It’s called “Kissing Games of the World,” as you can plainly see, which is the title I dreamed one night, a funny dream really, in which my husband claimed he’d written a book proposal with that as the title. His book was going to be an expose of kissing games, and so far he had thought up two of them: Post Office and Spin the Bottle. As soon as he came up with more, he would get a huge advance.

It hit me that this was a perfect title for the book I was writing at the time…about Nate, a salesman, who travels all over the world having relationships of no consequence. One of the other characters accuses him of just participating in kissing games, as a way of avoiding true feelings.

Naming books is always so hard for me. (The one I’m working on now still doesn’t even have a working title.) My first book was called “The Fortune Teller’s Daughter” in my head, except that it took me so long to finish it that somebody else wrote a book with that title, so we had to choose another. It became “What Comes After Crazy.”

The second book, “A Piece of Normal” was named by a friend of mine who mentioned that one of the crazier characters seemed to be seeking just that–a piece of normal, after her wacky childhood.  

But this book–well, it’s nice when the title just comes to you in a dream, even if somebody else in the dream was about to use it himself.

How do YOU get your titles? Please, please tell me!