Gently brush the dust.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a people in possession of a suddenly and drastically foreclosed future, must be in want of powerful distractions. So when I tell you that diving headlong into a deep re-build of the ebook editions has led me to discover a solution to the breaking non-breaking space problem, that has bedeviled me lo these many years, you should understand that it is still possible for tiny sparks of light to glimmer in this darkness, and go and cherish your own.
(The breaking non-breaking space problem: one might have noticed in the text that those moments of cæsura and interruption that might ordinarily be marked by an em-dash [—] are instead marked by the trio of space–en-dash–space [ – ], a practice picked up from Dean Allen back in the day. Said trio must nonetheless travel as a unit, easily enough done in the fixed and rigorous typesetting of a static printed copy—but when the text is fluid, in all the many variable containers it might find itself in the electronic world, a website, an ebook [a desk-top monitor, a tablet, a phone]—well. An intemperate line-break, or paragraph-end, could result in a dangled punctuate, an interruption interrupted, due to the spaces between the text, and the dash. —Luckily, HTML has a code for that: , or   : the non-breaking space, just the thing for when you don’t want those awkward ends and breaks. Except—
(Except: it seems that, in the rendering engines that run within pretty much all of the current browsers and ebook readers, some interaction between dashes and quotation marks ends up breaking the non-breaking space, so that even if the code says—
run all the way across town to find out what the hell you wanted and – ”<p>
(—it’ll end up nonetheless rendered as this, if margins squeeze it so:
(You may have seen these dangled quotation marks from time to time over the years, here on the website, or in one of the ebooks, snagging the eye, an obvious mistake autonomically generated, but no less distracting, disrupting, disappointing; the failure of rendering engines to properly account for this particular use case not enough to drive me to change my typographical habits. —But! But: wrap each en-dash in its own span, with a margin to the left, or to both sides, as needed, a margin just wide enough to match the width of a space in the font you’re using, .2 of an em, or .3, thereabouts, and voila! There’s no longer, in the code, any space at all to be broken, no matter the rendering engine’s preconceptions, but, to the eye, the en-dash is properly nestled and set, and never a niggling dangle, no matter the shape of the container into which the fluid text’s flowed.)
—Thus, some slight measure of blissful satisfaction. But: it is slight, and passing, and only in the ebooks, at the moment. Making the same changes to the website is a rather more involved undertaking. A distraction, one might say. Quite powerful. Mighty, even.
And yet but also, let’s face it: the design and structure hereabouts, the shape of this particular container, it’s largely unchanged since it was first put up, some (peers closely at the calendar) quite some time ago, and forty-four novelettes is a load a bit unwieldy for a box built to hold but a dozen or two. And the doughty CMS is several generations out of date. And the provider’s reached the point in their enshittification arc where they raise rates willy-nill, I’m paying twice what I did just five years ago, and I’m not getting anywhere near double the value in return, I must say. —And so: I’m casting about for a new provider, and shortly, within the month, I think, I’ll be moving, shutting things down, rebuilding, reinventing, reloading, reintroducing—there will be some interruption of service, I’m saying, a cæsura, one might say, for a space, a span of time, but then, afterwards, oh my. But then.
(I know, I know: this is just procrastination, you’re telling yourself, busywork to distract from the necessary work of plotting and planning and writing the volumes to come, you’d say, but oh, oh my, just think: how even more powerful a distraction from everything else it will be—it already is—to figure out what happens next, then write it down to be read—)
