I'm very pleased to have another Tenner guest blogging for me this week. Everyone please give a warm welcome to Dia Reeves. Dia is a fellow twitter addict and author of the upcoming yong adult novel Bleeding Violet. Stalk Dia on twitter: @diareeves

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The Story of a Title: A Captivating Tale of Love and Loss

I wrote a book called Bleeding Violet, which is kind of an odd title, so I'd like to explain its origin, if I may.

Some titles come to people like fairy gifts, full of wit and evocative imagery. But the rest of us have to scramble to come up with something even halfway decent. That's especially true for me. Titling things is hard. I always end up feeling like Dr. Frankenstein, snatching a word here and a word there, stitching them together, and hoping for a spark of life. But usually getting squat.

What's sad is that even if you do manage to sweat out the perfect combination of words and chance upon a title that you like, you still might have to listen to your agent or editor tell you very sweetly and diplomatically that it's crap. Which is what happened to me and my novel.

Originally, I titled my book The Snippens. I don't remember why or what the logic behind such a title was supposed to be, but this was back in 2005 when I was younger and more of a flibbertigibbet than I am now. Anyway, after I finished several drafts, I came up with...wait for it...The Suicide Door.

I loved that title. I thought it was so hardcore and would just blow everyone's hair back. And it might have, but my agent at the time didn't like the word 'suicide.' Plus when I told my mom the title, she raised her voice at me--"SUICIDE?!"--so I caved and went back to the drawing board.

I pored over my thesaurus looking for synonyms for suicide. They all sucked--The Dying By One's Own Hand Door doesn't have quite the same ring--so I consulted my vast music collection because songs have the coolest titles. Who wouldn't want to read a book called Little Miss Can't Be Wrong or The Great Gig in the Sky or Take Your Dead Ass Home? But nothing really clicked, so I thought about book titles I liked--A Drowned Maiden's Hair, Sideways Stories from Wayside School, The Bewitching of Alison Allbright, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Somebody Owes Me Money--and attempted to deconstruct them to figure out why they worked. But the best answer my nonanalytical mind could come up with was, "Cuz they sound cool," which didn't help.

The thing I found that did help, luckily, is that I have this really brilliant friend who came up with a cool title for me. She thought that since the colors purple and red not only play a big part in the story, but also symbolize two of the main characters, they should be reflected in the title. So she came up with Bleeding Violet. It made sense to me visually because the main character, Hanna, only wears purple clothes and spends a good part of the novel covered in blood. Perfect, I thought, but what would the agent think?

Happily, when I offered up my friend's suggestion, the agent totally got it and also pointed out that the title is kind of a ghoulish spin on the term 'shrinking violet', which Hanna most definitely is not. And that was good enough for me. Even though my mom still wasn't pleased--"BLEEDING?!"--but hey, you can't please everybody.

So that's my title story and the moral, obviously, is that you should be sure to surround yourself with clever people because you never know when you may have to access their brainpower.