Other Places

A random image from Behance, whose creator
name I've lost. It makes me think of a back-alley
market somewhere on Jorune. Maybe Ponteer.

My thoughts want me to run away. Since I can't do that physically - can't walk, driving is limited without amputation (required after a few hours), or financially.

So I have always run to other worlds through books, or radio theater, or role-playing games. Worlds that make more sense to me, where I would like to breathe and enjoy dishes made by alien cooks who use the flesh of creatures I could not have imagined. I want roast haunch of dothibider, or a bowl of Pilgrim pod with some friendly Dir Dir, or a spiced stew from boiled Ramian skull meat...

And I go beyond the safari-fantasy of most men in our imaginative excursions into new alien landscapes. I go home with these people. Where do they wake up? Where do they find the vegetables to take home to their family for the evening meal and what is the smell of those distant bazaars. I dream of quiet places where people can make a home away from the horrible dramas writers create for their main stage presentations.

Down the alley, up the stairs to a quiet one room over the Street of Breads in some little port that is a waystation from the distant suppliers and the homes of the wealthy lords, who live nowhere near me.

And then I seen beautiful artworks of these back alleys, shaded from sun and rain, which could be on a hundred worlds, including this one.

And I enjoy my visit. Rest a while. Then drag myself back to this world for the work that matters. The work that may change my life.

In that name, I have been doing the edits and adjustment to my novel CLIMBING THE SPIRAL MOUNTAIN. I find that at some point in the past few translations between Pages and Word and Linux to Amazon and back, there have been changes. Changes not desired nor acceptable.

For example — hyphenation. For some reason, some version of the programs used by me, past editors and the final draft hyphenation stopped being a software function and became hard typography. And wrong. I found the word Tradition hyphenated as Tra- dition. I don't care if it had been previously separated as Trad-ition, I want the hard hyphen to go away so the next version is hyphenated in a way that does not make a read stub his/her/their eye.  Remove all the hyphens, except where I use them to reflect speaking patterns*, and the software doesn't know the difference.

Which means that at the same time I am going through SEGMENT: SHO-CAUDAL #12 for details of the Colonial mission that brought humans to Jorune, I am on earth wading through the flung feces of different authors of word processing with a search and destroy mission for every damn "-" in the book. 180,000+ words.

It takes a minute.

But I am getting to read the book again, and it stands up. Through the fog of bad hyphenation made law, there is the story which rolls. Words slide by quickly to take the reader through a scene and to the next moment - 30 pages are an easy slide through Wade Hudson's story.

So that part isn't bad.

I am actually enjoying re-reading the book. I am learning how to make a proper .mobi formatted export so people on Kindle will have access (I'm becoming a champion of the Kindle reader and its wonderful look-up feature for every word in the book where a reader might need clarification). And it is becoming clear that I will do a "free book" promotion so people have a change to get the book and post their comments to the book's page on Amazon. The readers who have posted their comments have been very helpful and I need more comments to drive the sales of the book, even at the lower price for the Kindle version. Print will cost ... oh well. It'll be about 2 inches thick - 600+ pages for the print edition. So cash money is not unreasonable.

* My reviews for stage and radio have often made nice comments on my use of dialogue. I know my narrative has to be clean, grammatical, and conform to the tradition of complete sentences. But people do not talk that way. They change thoughts in the middle to expand upon an idea. They allow others to fill in gaps, or they overspeak to fill out an idea they think was not properly carried to their listener. So I have to maintain the formality of the interior narrative with the fluid, organic prose of interrupted conversation. The software has no idea how to do that. I have to take the reigns and drive the book back to the barn so the reader knows where to find it. 

There are worse jobs.