Stylistic choices – The horror!

This is one of those times, one of those things, where being a writer utterly goes against my nature.  At my core, I am run through with the words “EVERYTHING SHOULD BE LOGICAL”, like a stick of cheap Brighton rock.  I am one of nature’s mathematicians, coders or scientists, fully aware that the universe around me is governed by unbreakable, definitive and logical laws, any of which I am free to look up at any time, simply to check that reality is ticking along as I expect.  I approach every task with a raging amount of common sense and basic logic, safe in the knowledge that, as long as I follow the rules, I will at least be competent at it.

Then I had the wise idea of being a writer.

Bloody hellfire, but this stuff is made up as writers go along!  While the English language has a plethora of rules and regulations as to what words mean, how they are used in conjunction with each other and what ordering provides what effect, there is nothing at all standardised about punctuation in the world of publishing – they are literally doing whatever they fancy!

Don’t believe me?  Fine: go to your bookshelf right now and grab five books.  Go on, I’ll wait.   Got them?  Right.  Open one to a random page and find some dialogue.  Look at how the author has formatted it.  What character have they used to surround the text?  How have they separated different lines of text?  How have they handled long pieces of speech?  How have they handled a single piece of speech split by narrative?  See they way all that is done?  Now open another one of the books and do the same.  Do any of the conventions of the first book match the second?  I bet they don’t, especially if you grabbed books from different genres and especially if you grabbed anything highly contemporary like Pratchett.

For those that have no clue what I am yammering about, allow me to illustrate.  I will type a small piece of dialogue below and then format in several different ways:

1. “Bob, you snivelling rodent,” she yelled as she threw a newspaper at her husband “what the hell did you do that for?”
2. ‘Bob, you snivelling rodent,’ she yelled as she threw a newspaper at her husband ‘What the hell did you do that for?’
3. “Bob, you snivelling rodent.” She yelled as she threw a newspaper at her husband.  “What the hell did you do that for?”

See the differences?  Now: which one is correct?  The answer?  All of them, apparently, depending on which books you pick up.  For my money, I am sticking with version 1 but trying to ensure you stay true to a given format throughout an entire book is infuriatingly hard, especially when you get to the editing stage.

To add even more crazy to a bowl already filled with confusion, we then have the wonder that is the ePub encoding software.  While I have been trawling through my first book these past weeks, furiously highlighting every last typo and misplaced comma, it wasn’t until I came to edit the list of correction into the book that I realised something: a lot of the mistakes in The Keepers of the Key are not actually there!  My master document, from which the ePubbed versions are made, has far, far less typos and bad punctuation in it than the book that is actually on sale.  The software used to transform my word document into other forms is actually adding errors as it goes!

At this point I just want to smack the coders of said software upside the head.  If you step out side on any given day and heave a keyboard in a random direction, you will likely hit 5 coders in the head and yet when it comes time to get a piece of software written, everyone always seems to hire the guy that is not just terrible at his job, but really just does not care.

177,781 – Part 3

A further pause in activity due to a week away followed by a birthday, all woven through with a massive amount of editing and some writing.

The new draft of The Keepers of the Key is about 50% done and I will have it finalised come the end of this week.  It contains no changes to the writing, just a brush and polish of what was already there (commas – why must you torment me so?!).  I’ll get it uploaded to Amazon and to smashwords so if anyone is mid-read, grab the new copy.

With that done, I will be diving back into the task of attracting a  publisher.  New synopsis is written, sample chapters are ready: I just need to draw up a list of prospective agencies and have at it again and nag the living hell our of everyone that bought the book to get a review written for me to add more fuel to my fire.  So few people have actually rated the book or left a review it is slightly worrying.  I am, however, choosing to believe that they simply forget and will leap eagerly to the task once I remind them!  Yes…