Nineteen hundred wrong quotation marks
Volume One was finished, proofread and formatted. Then I looked at the punctuation, and found the thing that had been quietly announcing it was not a real book.
A reader will not write to you about quotation marks. They will not notice them at all, in the sense of being able to point at them. What they do is close a sample after two pages with a vague feeling that this is not a professional edition, and they will never be able to tell you why.
It was the punctuation. The English edition carried 1,938 straight quotation marks and 893 straight apostrophes. The French edition carried 3,436 straight apostrophes. Typewriter marks, on every page of dialogue, in a book that is mostly dialogue.
They are curly now, both editions, converted and checked.
Why it is not a find-and-replace
Because the same character is three different things depending on where it sits, and a blind replacement produces a book that is wrong in a new and worse way. The cases that had to be looked at by hand:
Plural possessives. the clans’ takes a closing mark, not an opening one. A naive pass turns every one of them the wrong way round, and they sit at the end of the word, where the eye lands.
Dialogue broken by a dash. The speech resumes; the mark before the resumption is not the mark that opened the line.
Italics straddling a quote. Where the emphasis starts inside the speech and the tag falls outside it, the nesting decides the direction.
The markup. An EPUB is HTML. A straight quote inside a tag attribute is not punctuation, it is structure, and converting one of them breaks the file silently.
The count afterwards: 980 opening marks against 980 closing marks in the English text, zero unbalanced paragraphs, zero tags touched.
Two things I found while I was in there
The title was corrupted. The em dash in The Breath of Origin — Volume One had broken somewhere in the export chain, and the debris had propagated into the file metadata, the table of contents, the running heads and the title page — the four places a reader meets a book before reading a word of it. Eighty-two corrupted characters, removed.
Both EPUBs were invalid. A single cover declaration sat outside the metadata block where it belongs. It had been there since the first export, which means every file I had ever sent anyone was technically malformed. Moved. Both editions now pass EPUBCheck without a single error.
None of this is writing. It is the difference between a manuscript and a book, and it took a day.
Chapter one, free.
A boy comes down off the mountain with a flute at his belt and no name worth saying out loud. Read it on the site, no account, nothing to sign.