Drugless Tweak

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From 1989, fresh from Arizona, I drew this image on my
Macintosh 512K-Plus in MacPaint after a dream. This was
the image that led to writing the first scene of Mountain.
Two books out last month, hope to get two more out this month. Maybe more.

But while solving one problem, I discovered another. There is now a problem created in the translation of the original manuscript for CLIMBING THE SPIRAL MOUNTAIN from Apple Pages to Microsoft Word to LibreDoc the hyphenation that helps make text look pretty, called "soft" hyphenation, became fixed. "Hard" hyphenation. If the word bottom was soft hyphenated as "bot- tom," that became the fixed typography, no matter where it appeared in the line. Soft hyphenation is only at the right edge of the line within the paragraph.

Hard hyphenation is forever.

So I have been going through to change them one-by-one, which means making the determination of how to handle each instance of the hard-hyphen problem. Picky, picky, picky.

But it opened a new problem.

My background is radio and stage. I write dialogue for spoken performance. People on this planet seldom speak in complete sentences - interrupted speech makes more realistic exchanges. Sometimes a character is interrupted by another character, but often one character changes their track in mid-sentence as ideas coming into his mind. I think it is a responsibility to improve the manuscript without a full re-write.

It may take another week to go through all 180,000 words to make this change. It will also require a case-by-case evaluation.

But I think it's worth the bother.

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