Yes, believe it or not, English has rules of grammar… even when it seems they are honored more in the violation than in the observance.

Nevertheless, there are formal standards. Established standards. Like all standards, they are set by bodies quite certain that they know how English should be written.

Now, a technical standard is one thing. And even those constantly change. When they change, they are updated. There is usually little room for argument over whether the change is correct and for a good reason.

The English language is much more fluid. Every historical attempt to “police” the English language has failed. The language keeps changing underneath the rules. The rules don’t, in the end, dictate how English is spoken or written (although the rulemakers persist in trying to). Instead, the best one can hope to do it describe what is considered the current best practice of how it is written and spoken.

And sometimes that means they are wrong, because they do not reflect how actual users of the language are speaking and writing it. The fact that the rules CHANGE from time to time necessarily means that the rulemakers themselves agree from time to time that some of their rules are wrong.

Today, I speak specifically of the em dash—the long dash signifying a brief pause between words.

In the sentence above, I used it according to the current “official” grammar standard. Which is to way, with no whitespace around it.

But in this case, I believe the standard is wrong.

Why?

Several reasons.

For one thing, in a monospaced/fixed-pitch font, an em dash can be almost indistinguishable from a hyphen. Which potentially confuses readers.

For another, the “no whitespace around an em dash” rule flattens nuance. Whitespace, properly used, has MEANING. And a flat “no whitespace” rule takes away that meaning.

Consider the following two examples:

“I — don’t know,” I said.

“I— I don’t know,” I said.

The first line conveys a momentary pause in speech. The second gives a much stronger sense of speech abruptly broken off, then continued. Remove the whitespace, and a lot of that is lost.

“I—don’t know,” I said.

“I—I don’t know,” I said.

The nuance is gone.

So, sometimes I have yielded on this particular rule, and followed it. But I don’t like how it looks. So, more often, I have ignored it, and used whitespace in the way that I think looks right.

I am the writer here, and I insist it is MY privilege to decide how I will use the language, to convey the things I intend to.

Just a fun little fact:

The original mental image that gave me the initial starting point for the Stardock Trilogy came from three things: An illustration in an old copy of the long-defunct OMNI magazine, and two songs. Prologue/Twilight, by the Electric Light Orchestra; and Nova, by VNV Nation.

Shine, shine your light on me

Illuminate me, make me complete...

OK, first of all, the title of this post is a bit deceptive.

I could say that there is no right way to write. But that's a bit of an over-simplification.

Many writers have a strict order planned out in advance of what books they're going to write, and in which order, and for each book, they have a detailed outline before they start of everything that's going to happen in each book. That order may even be contractual.

I'm not one of them. That's why Fireborn, which I actually started seriously working on — turned it from a writing doodle for my own eyes only, into a book — well after I began Bearing Gifts, was actually finished and published first. And it's why Because It Tells Me To, which was started and 70-80% complete before I even began Bearing Gifts, is still unfinished now (but getting closer and closer). It's why I woke up one day with what turned out to be almost the next 100,000 words of Fireborn in my head. And it's why at this moment, I'm making more and faster progress on Becoming Real than on Because It Tells Me To, but haven't even really made a start yet on Godthief. I'm still forming the ideas that will become Godthief.

It works for me. But that doesn't mean it's the right way to write. Because the truth of it is that there is no SINGLE right way to write, no matter what a creative writing class might have taught you.

"The right way to write" is what works for YOU. And the corollary to that is that there is no wrong way to write ... as long as the writing happens, and produces the books that you want to write, and of the quality in which you want to write. It's like the eightfold path of Buddhism, which says in part that there is no such thing as an incorrect — or perhaps invalid — path to enlightenment. There are longer paths, there are shorter paths, there are easier paths, there are harder paths. But any path by which you reach enlightenment in the end must by definition be a valid path. Or it would not have taken you to enlightenment.

Writing is the same way. Write in the way that works for you. Don't let anyone tell you that you're doing it wrong. Accept criticism of your writing, and listen to it. But don't listen to anyone who tells you that your actual methodology of writing is wrong, if it's working for you, just because it's different from what works for them.

It's not so much that there is no right way to write. It's that there is no wrong way to write ... as long as it works for you. You are the writer.

I've seen a few reader reviews that complain that The Stardock Trilogy glosses over a lot of issues of global economics.

Why, YES, yes it does. Necessarily so. Because there would be so much ground to cover there that if I attempted to fully and accurately cover all of the political and economic ramifications triggered by the Stardock and Alex Holder’s efforts to share Cricket technology with Earth, this series would not be about Earth, the Crickets, the Fleet and the K’heert’na, it would be about politics and economics, and it would be deathly dry, dull and boring — and almost certainly mostly wrong.

That’s probably not the series you want to read, if you're reading the Stardock Trilogy now, and it’s CERTAINLY not the series I want to write.

Gentle Readers,

I have in my inbox a pre-production questionnaire from Podium Entertainment in preparation for the upcoming release of the audiobook editions. It includes a number of questions that are really for my readers to answer, not me, because they are questions about how readers react to the books. So I would take it as a favor if readers would please comment with answers to any of the below questions:

• What is the main feeling or emotion that the Stardock Trilogy so far evokes in you?

• What tropes spring to mind when you read Stardock books?

• What quotes from either book do you think capture the essence of the series? Do any particular lines stick in your mind?

• Do any other books, TV series, movies, video games immediately spring to mind as a comparison?

• What kind of reader do you think would love the Stardock Trilogy? What would you say to convince them to read it?

• How would you fill in the blank: "If you love [ ] then you'll love this book"?

Don't feel obligated, but your insights would be much appreciated.

...That there is some incorrect usage in radio chatter in Bearing Gifts.

There will be a correction, later, after I have time to collaborate with the reader who pointed out the errors and correct the text.

I also just uploaded a couple of minor corrections to United Fleet, including fixing superscript formatting, again (LibreOffice keeps determinedly generating incorrect CSS for it, and sometimes I forget to manually fix the CSS).

I'm currently about three quarters of the way, at a guess, through A Line In The Stars, but obviously I can't say exactly, since I don't know exactly how long the finished book is going to be.

... When you go back to check the spelling of a name, and notice for the first time that right from the start, you have somehow consistently mistyped "National Security Advisor" in place of "National Science Advisor."

So how do I write?

Well, that depends on how you mean the question. So for now, let's just talk about the mechanics. The tools I write WITH.

When you look under the hood, the EPUB ebook format is a zip file containing XHTML files. But nobody would write a book in handwritten XHTML. It would drive you crazy. One misplaced character could screw up an entire chapter. [X]HTML is not truly a language intended for humans. The only sane choice for writing in is some kind of actual office document application, be it MS Word, OpenOffice/LibreOffice, WordPerfect, or some walled-garden Mac app.

I actually remember a time when at least some Microsoft software was really pretty good. Word for Windows was paradigm-changing when it came out. But Microsoft software has become progressively more and more shit over the years. There was a bug in MS Excel that Microsoft knew about perfectly well, that went unfixed for over 14 years solely because too much other Microsoft code depended on that specific code being broken in that specific way, and nobody could be arsed to fix all the bits of wrong code. And then there's stuff like Windows 11's new CoPilot Recall feature, which creates a record of every single thing you do or look at on a Windows 11 PC that can be trivially exfiltrated — stolen — in seconds, by nearly anyone, with minimal difficulty.

Nope. No Microsoft crap. Not happening. And I've never been a fan of walled gardens, and I detest the Mac anyway.

So I write using LibreOffice, then export from LibreOffice into EPUB.

And therein lies a problem, because LibreOffice's EPUB export is both incomplete, and ... not as good as it could be. Also, because of the inefficient, lazy way that LibreOffice (and Word, and probably all the others as well) store text formatting information, the export ends up with a HUGE number of redundant SPAN tags in the XHTML. Places where a span of class X ends and is IMMEDIATELY followed by the start of another span of exactly the same class. Every time you make an edit, even to fix a single-character typo, LibreOffice wraps your edit in a new span. Word does the same thing. But just because everybody does it, doesn't mean it's not lazy and sloppy.

So the next step is to import that exported EPUB into Calibre, to add missing EPUB metadata like author and publisher, fix the table of contents that LibreOffice doesn't export correctly, clean up incomplete or redundant CSS, and occasionally hand-fix incorrect CSS, then optimize and clean up the HTML. (LibreOffice generates incorrect CSS for superscripts, for exam[ple, and often gets table column widths wrong.) Then, after that, I clean up the redundant SPAN tags with a custom tool that unpacks the archive, processes each XHTML section looking for redundant SPANs and combining them, and then repackages it all. That tool removes literally tens of thousands of redundant SPANs. This reduces the uncompressed size of the XHTML files by as much as 30% — which means they load faster in your ebook reader and take less memory.

And now we're almost there. One last step remains, to open up the EPUB in Sigil to have it automatically fix some of the missing XHTML metadata that the previous steps omitted. DOCTYPE declarations and the like.

And NOW, at last, after a final visual inspection via send-to-Kindle, it's ready for upload to Kindle Desktop Publishing.

It won't be the first, nor the last. Have you ever found yourself intending to type one thing and then you actually type another? Or you say to yourself "I don't need to look this up, I know this one," and then later on you realize that you were remembering it completely wrong?

Errors happen. I fix them as I find them, and yes, I do push updates to my books. (If you find one I've missed, please report it to me, and I will fix it.)

Nothing is error-free, really. "To err is human." The best you can do is be willing to acknowledge your mistakes, and fix them as best you can, as soon as you can. The world would be a better place if we all did that.

So, the Sunlit Land. Where and what is it?

Well, first of all, let's get it out of the way up front that it's not Finland. To my amazement, some readers have apparently finished Fireborn without understanding that simple fact. I have some difficulty grasping the failure of reading comprehension necessary to enable such a scale of misunderstanding.

No, it's another place altogether. But where is it? It's certainly not anywhere on Earth. It can't possibly be.

Alrekr Járnhandr believes that it must be thousands of light-years from Earth. But is that assumption necessarily true? He has verification that the speed of rift transit has been measured experimentally and is at least close to the speed of light, which, given his best assumption that it is thousands of light-years from Earth, would necessarily mean that it took him thousands of years to arrive there.

However, this presents certain inevitable causality issues. If we accept the hypothesis that the world chose him to bring there for a reason, then that would have to mean that somehow the world knew that he would be needed, thousands of years before he actually was. It also suggests that the source end of the rift opened thousands of years before the destination end, which is also problematic — like a rope having only one end.

Neither of these makes very much sense.

But what if, rather, the Sunlit Land is in another plane of existence altogether?

Let's do a thought experiment. Imagine taking two yardsticks, and laying them side by side on the floor.

Now imagine that they aren't straight. They can touch each other at various points, even cross, without being side by side or always in contact.

Imagine that the points of contact can be further apart on one yardstick than the other. Imagine that while they both claim to measure, let's say, inches, the inches on one are not necessarily the same length as inches on the other. Perhaps both yardsticks cross where they are marked 6, and again at the 24 marking ... but the distance between 6 and 24 isn't necessarily the same on both.

Now imagine that the second yardstick is in, say, Japan. But it can still sometimes touch or cross the one lying on your floor. Without moving from where it is.

Are you starting to get the idea?

Alrekr Járnhandr is probably wrong about how long he spent within the rift that brought him to the Sunlit Land. But he's trying to understand it as best he can. It's not his fault if he's mistaken.

Is he mistaken?

Maybe. Maybe not. Who can say?