Zackman asked Jo Walton:

Good evening! I started enjoying your work about a year ago and I am hooked. Thank you for the pleasurable hours of reading and the food for thought. This is probably a dull question, but do you struggle much with titles? I find yours both memorable and evocative. Also, the double meanings in your Small Change series really tickled my brain.

Jo Walton Normally my titles are thematic and I have them either right at the beginning or very early in the process. Sometimes -- as with "Tooth and Claw" and "My Real Children" -- the title is the way I think about the project, it's part of the encapsulation of the idea. Sometimes I will have two potential titles -- "Ha'Penny"'s alternate title was "The Hamlet Bomb" and I wanted to call "The Just City" "Thessaly" but kept that for the series title.

The only book where I had problems with the title was Among Others, which failed to develop a proper title. The problem was that it had the wrong title -- "Industrial Landscape of Elfland" which wasn't right and pulled in the wrong directions -- in the direction of something like Swanwick's "Iron Dragon's Daughter". But it got in the way of finding a good title. It was quite a long time after I'd finished the book that my next door neighbour came up with a title for it!

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