What's in a Name?

Anyone who knows me knows that I have a thing for naming things.  I once had hundreds of rubber duckies, and almost all had names.  Yes, I knew those names.  My computers are named (Friday, Dexter, and Howard).  My son has two middle names, and I would have given him a dozen if I'd thought it socially acceptable.  Two is kind of the limit on that, right?  Maybe three.  I don't know.

Anyway...

I haven't officially named the series I'm writing.  It has a working title, as an overall kind of thing for the whole series.  However, not a single one of the individual books has been named.  I feel that this is a hindrance, and that by leaving them unnamed for this long, I'm losing a valuable piece of my story.  What if the name is important to the story?  What if, once I know what it's called, I have to rewrite the whole thing?  That seems all too likely.

The naming issue has been in the back of my mind for over a year, and it's never mattered nearly as much as it does right now.  Why?  Because I named something else.  It's another story that's been in the back of my mind for close to a year now.  I could blame Rumi or Deepak Chopra for it, because I'm sure one of them had something to do with its origin, but I don't remember.  It's not that I'm unhappy that I named it, it's just that... doing so makes me wonder about what I'm doing.

If that name came so simply, does that mean I should shift my focus?  I wasn't even working on that story...I just have a couple notes written down...but the name is there, and it's a real driving force.  I already know I'll be starting the story in August.

I'm not burnt out on the story I'm working on... I hope to have the entire first draft finished relatively soon, but have already gotten caught in a seemingly endless cycle of edits.  I have this terrible habit of putting in placeholder text...it gets a very vague idea across, but isn't what I actually want to say.  Then, I have to go back and clean it up...and sometimes I'm not yet prepared with the right words.  Today I found  a few of them, but not many.  It's been exactly a week since I sent out a section to early readers, and it's already changed quite a bit.

Also, I'm not sure if it's just MY version of Word, or if there's some universal issue with the program.  After page 60, the grammar and spell check functions seem to go insane.  They're missing things that are incorrect, but wanting me to make changes to things that are correct.  I know to, too, and two; I know their, there, and they're, tyvm...but Word is trying to make it look like a text message composed by Swype (which is typically grammatically incorrect to an embarrassing degree).  No, Word, the water did not "creep too her feet."

All that said... I should be writing :)