Reason for stopping: End of story, finally thought of a (slightly better) title. Time to cook dinner.
Other: I hate thinking of titles!
The first working title for this story was Alphonse and the Assassin and that's what the folder where the story files are saved is called. Half way through the zeroth draft, I tried giving it the title Springtime in Alingard, naming it after the piece Alphonse is writing when he first encounters the assassin and which crops up again, right at the end. The problem with this is that it keeps making me think of Springtime for Hitler, which is not an association I want a reader to make! G looking over my shoulder one day when I was working on it, also managed to read Alingard as Stalingrad.
But I hadn't thought of a better title all the time I was doing the One Pass Revision Method on the story or during the time the story sat around while I was busy with other things. I'd even tried thinking really hard about the lack of a title just before going to sleep the other night, in the hope that my unconscious would work on the problem. The next morning, my unconscious merely handed me the next part of the scene with Ceri and Gregor the Earth Mage from the main WIP.
So today I decided that Springtime in Alingardreally should have it's final polish and be printed out ready to go off somewhere. Despite still having a sucky title. All the way through, I thought hard about a title. Taking a break, I tried scanning a poetry book, in search of quotable lines. Nothing doing. In the end, partially inspired by the music I was listening to, I came up with An Unwritten Ending, which is still sucky and I'm not convinced that it's ideal, but it will have to do.