Titles You SAY You'd Never Read

Tonight, I was bored. This happens very rarely, so I don’t really know what to do about it. I was bumming around on Facebook, and decided to post a link on my page.

That’s when it happened.

The Security Check box popped up. You know, where they give you two random words in a funky design that you have to type in to prove you’re a member of the human race? Well, the one in front of me read “Upgrading Imagaki.”

Hm, I thought. What on earth might an imagaki be? Or who? And why is he being upgraded?

And that’s when I thought Upgrading Imagaki would be an awesome title for a story about a Chinese man (so sue me, I know the name’s not Chinese. Just roll with it…) from some middle-of-nowhere province who’s brought in by an evil Chinese mastermind for secret military testing to upgrade his brain. Then a beautiful U.S. scientist breaks him out and ships him to America to save him from the horrid experiments only to find his upgrades have made him violent. He goes on a killing rampage in, uh, Detroit, and the beautiful scientist must team up with the evil Chinese mastermind to stop him. I’d totally read it.

I smiled to myself, and just as I was about to type in “Upgrading Imagaki,” I noticed a button on the security check box. “Try Different Words” it said. And so, with writerly curiosity, I clicked. Then again. And again. For like twenty minutes. And I found enough hilarious book titles to last me a lifetime. There were even a few good ones that could actually work as titles: Mistimed Matters, Rambling Far, Hazard Legacies, Time Restorer, In Cahoots.

And then, there were these:

On Stinking: A self-help book on how to detect and avoid the dreaded stink in all its forms: stinky feet, stinky armpits, and even a stinky (as in crappy) life. Critics call it “Surprisingly insightful.”
Carcass Year: New sheriff Shandra Plimpton must face not only the recent untimely death of her mother and the disrespect of a small town who doesn’t believe a woman can be a proper sheriff, but the trying case of desecrated carcasses of the town pets that are mysteriously appearing all over town.
Menfolk Problems: Published in 1765. A book especially for women about to be married on various physical, emotional, and psychological problems they should expect to find in their husbands, and discussions of how to accept and ignore them with grace.
The Squatted: When Tony Jarvis is magically transported to a world where only the rich may use a bathroom, he must make a harrowing choice. Either he suffers in constant constipation, or he joins the heinous underground rebellion of The Squatted.

Yeah. I had too much fun!