Those are three good questions, and I’m sorry it took me a week to answer them. But I do have answers…

Let’s go in reverse order, just for fun.

There was a fairly long list of runner-up names, although New Neighbors is the ONLY name that all four of us really felt good about. Some of the 3/4-in-favor names were:

The Year Off
Book Fight
The Party After You Left
The Nepotists

Of those, only “Book Fight” came from the blog comments. But there were other names from the blog that we liked, even if they didn’t make it onto the short list. Dana’s already listed some, and here are some more:

Fiction Year
Exactly the Man
Martin Van Buren & the Epic Sideburns
The Nepotists
Yadda Yadda Yadda
Strange Birds
Fly The Desk Home Right

New Neighbors comes from a tapestry on Nate’s wall, which you can view here:

http://www.newneighbors.info/neighborhood.jpg

The original name Nate suggested was New Neighborhood, which we all thought sounded promising but not quite right. He suggested it late in the four-or-so weeks that we spent emailing each other names every day, at a time when I, at least, was wondering if we’d *ever* find one we all liked. Each name that got one of us excited got another of us (or another two) discouraged. So the fact that New Neighborhood had universal potential seemed like a big deal. It deserved further discussion.

While talking it through with Nate on the phone, one of us suggested shortening New Neighborhood to New Neighbors, which we liked immediately. Lo! Behold! John and Dana felt the same way.

Original plan was to make a list of about four names that we all liked, and then poll all of you on the website. But the process of finding just ONE name that we all loved was so hard, took so long. After we finally had one in hand, we decided not to invent the wheel twice.

So: New Neighbors. I like it because it can be interpreted quite warmly, which is part of who we are. But it can also be interpreted as evil, or inconvenient, or hilarious. New Neighbors, the general idea, manifests itself in different particular forms, many of which are starkly opposed to one another.

This I like very much.

Some of Dana’s favorites included:

Bender and Mom
the beatles
Brian’s Barn Swallow
John F. Kennedy & the Cuban Missile Crisis
Fishbreath
Whispermaphone
Walter and the Cronkites
Johnny Z and The Twinkle Toes
Sound Bandits