And Jax, that video is pure win.
Thanks kindly, although the video has been on the internets since forever. It brings back memories to my middle school days. You know, back when Newgrounds and Albinoblacksheep were actually visited by everyone and their mothers.
Indeed we do.
At what point do you give your chapters a title? How do you usually choose a title?
I often do it after I finish a chapter, and the trend lately has been that I do it after I get it back from my beta and/or just as I'm about to post it. Usually, I take whatever seems to describe the chapter content the most, but both AEM and MKD currently have themes in addition to that.
For MKD, I choose one or two words that not only relate to the chapter content but also are terms in either literature or theater. For example, the first chapter is Soliloquy, obviously a stage term. There's also Antagonist, Backdrop, and Boom. Pretty simple and straightforward.
AEM does things slightly differently. Once again, I scour chapters for the main idea and then try to summarize it in the title, but for AEM, I try to make a sentence out of it. Sometimes, these sentence-titles end up being something I completely pull out of my rear ("I'll bring down the stars for you"), but other times, I pull lines from songs ("Helter-skelter, birds flew off with the fallout shelter," from the song "American Pie"), books ("Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams," the paraphrased first line of Kafka's
Metamorphosis), or poems ("The affable Archangel had forewarned Adam to beware," from
Paradise Lost). I'm also planning on using a few titles that are quotes from people or other fictional characters, but we'll see. In any case, some of these quotes (but not all) tend to be modified slightly to fit. Yes, I'm making a game out of trying to get the audience to figure out where each title comes from. Just in case you're ever bored trying to figure out what's also an allusion in this story.