An erotic novel gets signed; tips on dashes.

Written By Jason Pettus

Plus, reviews of "Nightbitch," "The Electric State" and more; plus interesting questions from English as a Second Language Redditors and a special mega-sale editing offer

Originally published at the Jason Pettus newsletter on Substack on May 13, 2022, then republished here at this website on January 20, 2024.

(Image: Wikipedia. Used under the terms of their Creative Commons license.)

Another client gets signed (and it’s Biker BDSM!)

I heard recently from author *Jane Smith (I haven't heard yet if she's publishing under a pseudonym, so I don't want to reveal her real name yet), who I worked with a bit ago concerning her debut novel, a sexually graphic erotic BDSM tale set in all places among a "Sons of Anarchy"-style outlaw motorcycle gang on the outskirts of Las Vegas. She was writing to let me know, in fact, that it got signed with a press! And none other than Wild Rose Press at that, which has a strong and admired reputation within the world of dark erotic fiction written specifically by and for women. 

I don't want to give too much away, but if I stick to what I imagine will be the coming dust-jacket copy (neither it, the cover, the official title, or a release date have been announced yet; I'll get back to you on that in a future newsletter), it concerns a down-on-her-luck yoga instructor in Las Vegas, leading sessions among flabby tourists at overpriced hotels, an innocent in the world who would be classified "Lawful Good" if a Dungeons & Dragons character. Through an odd and thrilling set of strange circumstances, she becomes a "sex prisoner" of said motorcycle gang, the word in quotes because technically the women can leave at any time, but usually are recruited among skid row where life at the MC ranch as a well-treated BDSM slave is actually a big step up in safety and comfort. When our chaste protagonist finds herself reluctantly developing feelings for her new trainer and master—the morally pure "thinking man's motorcycle outlaw," who runs their dungeon and associated moneymaking schemes with a strong financial eye, and uses years of Zen Buddhism study to guide his steady spanking hand—our straight-laced heroine is confused, but curious. And horny. Did I mention horny?

I send out a huge round of applause to Jane for getting this signed by a well-known, reputable small press like this. Many of my clients go the self-publishing route—and since I come from a self-publishing background myself, I of course always encourage this, and part of my freelance services include giving advice on the subject—but I think it's especially great when a client takes the time, effort and patience to go out there and find an existing well-known and respected press, not just a fly-by-night one taking in any old manuscript, but one hanging in there and dedicating themselves to superior work and high respect and rights to the author. That's increasingly difficult to do, as yet more and more manuscripts get written and finished every single year, so I really admire Jane for going the distance and getting this signed with a place with such high integrity and regard within the industry. 

Have your own news to share about a manuscript? I always love showing off the latest of what my clients are doing, so please let me know at ilikejason@gmail.com.

Stylebook Corner: Dashes (aka "Hello Madness, My Old Friend")

In my last newsletter, I talked about some of the unique challenges that come with editing Christian texts, and concluded with a bit about when different kinds of dashes should be used within various parts of that specific genre with its own highly specific set of grammar rules. That in turn got me thinking about dashes themselves, and the three main types we have in standard English—the em-dash, the en-dash, and the simple dash or "hyphen" (two of which you're seeing on display here, but more on that in a bit)—and what a strange leftover thing they are from a now ancient world of hot-type, metal-plate printing, a world that needed all these arcane rules to work before computers came along and automatically corrected all the problems with a push of a button.

That's why we have different types of dashes, and that's how the dashes got their names—an em-dash in movable-type days used to be the exact width of the letter "M," while an en-dash was the exact width of an "N." Don't forget that in those olden days, it was actual humans using their actual fingers and their actual eyes to insert every single element you ever see on a page of printed text now—not just the letters and punctuation but the exact amount of space between each one to make the margins look visually correct—and so whether a dash was the size of an N or an M really mattered back then, because it directly affected how much space the typesetter would need to add or subtract to make the entire line of text work out.

So how to know which to use each time? That's easy—and by "easy," I mean "so complexly byzantine that it will drive you to madness no matter how many years you've known and practiced the rules." Let's start with the em-dash, which is the one I've been using a lot in these paragraphs here describing the subject, and is the one most often used incorrectly these days. To type one on a Windows computer, the keyboard shortcut (or at least in Word) is Control-Alt-Dash (although note that if your computer has both an alphanumeric keyboard and a numeric keyboard to the side, often that will only work with the numberpad's dash key); on a Mac it's Option-Shift-Dash; or on any kind of computer, you can type Alt-0151. You can instead type — to have one appear within an HTML web page or EPUB page; and of course, don't forget as well that most programs dealing with type (Word, Open Office, Google Docs, Adobe InDesign, etc.) tend to have an "Insert" option in their menu, which typically leads to an option called "Insert Special Character," and you can enter it this easy but slow way as well. It's used when trying to set off part of a sentence, like so:

Crime is for the wicked—and it's pretty lucrative, too.

The latter part of the sentence is not just the second half of it; it's an entire special thought that's being added at the end and deserves its own attention, perhaps calling out for an emphasis or an "oomph" or what have you. That's just part of what makes this entire subject so complex, is that there are different opinions about when a single em-dash is appropriate, and when it can be expressed better with another punctuation mark. Like, many times you see a semicolon where an em-dash could rightly go:

Crime is for the wicked; and it's pretty lucrative, too.

Although most of us can agree that this doesn't set off the second half of the sentence nearly as much, maybe sometimes as a creative fiction writer that’s exactly what you want; for one good example, if you have a character who's supposed to be extra-dry with their sense of humor, or if you were writing within a specific genre like pulp-style gumshoe private detective stories. There's no one ultimate "right" answer, because there's no committee of the federal government whose job it is to say what "correct" English is; compare this to, say, France or Germany, who very much actually have such a governmental committee, and keep a strong federal control over what constitutes the "official" form and rules of their language. (English editors instead choose to conform to one of many dozens of official "guides to the English language" that have been written over the centuries, all of which have competing levels of loyalty and therefore "validation in the eyes of society;" when none are mentioned as a preference by a client, for example, I myself stick to the Chicago Manual of Style, while when I edit manuscripts for Gatekeeper Press, I adhere to their house preference of the Associated Press Stylebook.)  

What's less ambiguous, however, is that you definitely use two em-dashes when wanting to set off a phrase right in the middle of a sentence, instead of at the end:

Crime is for the wicked—and it's pretty lucrative, too—thought Rex Dixson as he poured a splash of rye into his morning coffee.

Here you're definitely going for a standout stylistic moment—you want your reader to know that this is a clever moment you're proud of and that you want them to notice. Unlike the single use, you would never express this as semicolons:

Crime is for the wicked; and it's pretty lucrative, too; thought Rex Dixson as he poured a splash of rye into his morning coffee. {{NO!!}}

Another good way to know if you're using this correctly is if you can entirely remove the phrase within the dashes, replace both dashes with a single comma, and still have the sentence make sense:

Crime is for the wicked, thought Rex Dixson as he poured a splash of rye into his morning coffee.

Hopefully this makes it more obvious that, within creative fiction, phrases within em-dashes should be reserved for things you might want to specially point out, like a particularly clever thought or turn of phrase, and therefore by definition not used very often—certainly not as often as I've been doing while explaining them to you, which I deliberately did so you can see how semi-annoying it is to read text with too many em-dashes.

Moving on to the en-dash, generated on Windows with Control-Dash, on Macs with Option-Dash, on any computer by typing Alt-0150, and in an HTML or EPUB page as – (or again through the "Insert Special Character" menu dropdown in most text-based apps), this is instead used for when expressing the span of something, like pages (pp. 16–19), or years (1916–1919), or measurements (16–19 tablespoons). And, uh, that's about it. Meanwhile, simply pressing the dash key on your keyboard will give you a normal, short dash, in many situations also known as a "hyphen." This is used for things like stringing compound words together (fat-free, gluten-free, sugar-free cake), or adding un- or re- to many English words (but not all, because our language is byzantine and maddening in that way), or when showing that a large word was cut during typesetting and its second half moved to the next line, to better make the margins line up right, or when using more than just your first and last name as your official name you go by (such as Hillary Rodham-Clinton), or when self-censoring a word because it's sacred (G-d) or profane (Tr-mp).

Oh, but what about when you see a dash in front of a quote, or the person attributed to that quote? That's back to our old friend the em-dash again! Although technically, if you want to get pedantic (and of course, 14 paragraphs into this, that's exactly what we want to do), really what you should be using is what's called the "horizontal bar," which is Unicode symbol 2015; sorry, you'll have to look up yourself how to generate a Unicode symbol on your computer, but much more easily, just Google "horizontal bar punctuation" then copy and paste the one that comes up:

“The poetry community is like Menudo; eventually everyone ages out.” ―Jason Pettus

Along these lines, you can technically get away with using the dash key to express the minus sign in mathematics, but realize that the math world has as many special rules as the religious world does, and needs its own dedicated newsletter in the future (maybe) to discuss it in detail. 

This is far and away, most easily, the single most common mistake I regularly correct in manuscripts I work on; and no wonder, because it's ridiculously complicated for a subject that should be so simple (One Dash To Rule Them All), and only exists because it's left over from a time 200 years ago when books were created through SWEAT! and OIL! and BLOOD! So, don't feel bad if you too mess it up regularly; but if you want to look like a true professional, like "someone in the know," much like how bartenders identity themselves to each other by ordering a shot of Fernet-Branca (you can have that one for free, folks), take some time to learn how exactly to use each dash, then make a commitment to memorize the keyboard shortcuts and use them correctly every time. 

The latest links and news

Since my last newsletter, I've posted reviews of the following books over at Goodreads:

Also, as always I've spent some time answering questions from students of English as a Second Language (ESL), over at Reddit and specifically at such subreddits as "English Learning" and "What's the Word?" They often are fascinating questions for any native English speaker to contemplate for a bit, especially all you smart, literary little nerds who subscribe to this newsletter, so in each issue I like to share links to the most interesting questions I've answered there over the last few weeks, including:

Oh Yeah, And I Also Got COVID, Which Luckily Means A Sale For You

...Oh yeah, and the co-op where I live in Chicago finally succumbed to COVID, for the very first time of the pandemic; 9 of us altogether tested positive, some asymptomatic and some (ahem) sicker than they've been in the last twenty years, despite having the vaccine and a booster. (I can't even imagine now what would've happened to me if I had gotten it before the vaccine. Let my life be a lesson for you—even when vaxxed you can get very sick, so an unvaxxed person can still easily die, even at this point in the pandemic.) 

This thankfully didn't affect any of the freelance assignments I was already in the middle of, but I was too sick to bother going out and looking for new assignments; and so that led to two weeks in a row of booking no jobs at all, which you fellow freelancers know is exactly enough to start becoming a worry in the sink-or-swim, feast-or-famine world of being your own boss. So to get back up to full speed again, I'm offering a newsletter-exclusive offer: If you book a job through me directly by emailing ilikejason@gmail.com (as opposed to hiring me through a third-party service like Upwork or Reedsy, who keep 20% of my pay as their "finder's fee" for bringing us together), and you mention this paragraph in your email to me, I'll give you half off the total bill. Yeah, that's right, half off, no strings attached. It still makes it worth my time (or at least temporarily), since I'm keeping that large cut that the third-party companies would usually take; and you'd know you'd be doing a hardworking freelancer a favor, and helping him not only get caught up on bills and things but also fund some stuff down the road, like health insurance and memberships to professional editor organizations, maybe even a pass to next year's AWP convention.

Of course, you can still hire me through Upwork and Reedsy, I don't mind! There's a very good reason I continue to work with these third-party companies despite the steep cut of my pay, something that they don't get a lot of public credit for; they have an ironclad way of ensuring that neither party gets ripped off, by demanding payment upfront but then holding it in escrow until the client says that the freelancer legitimately did the work. If you ever have any fears as an author about getting ripped off by a freelancer because you "didn't know what to look out for," I always strongly encourage you to use one of these third-party services, because they offer an extremely foolproof way to get your money back; namely, they don't actually send it to the freelancer until you specifically tell them to (or after enough time has gone by without a response that it’s assumed it was fine and the money is sent anyway—in Upwork's example, two weeks—which is where the benefit to the freelancer comes in, because they'll know they'll still get paid even if the client takes the work and then suddenly disappears [cough cough, authors, cough cough]).

But if you know me, if you trust me, if you've maybe worked with me before and are now ready with your newest manuscript, feel free to mention this newsletter when you get in touch with me, and I'll give you half off the final invoice with no further questions asked*. I look forward to hearing from you over at ilikejason@gmail.com.

*This has no expiration date, by the way; if you've become a devoted enough fan to be rooting through my Substack archives and accidentally come across this at some point in the future, then you too deserve the discount.

Jason Pettus
Previous

An Aussie client's New Weird book gets a second life; lots of books I've recently hated; and Seriously, The Very Last Guide To Writing A Query Letter You'll Ever Need, SERIOUSLY.
Next

New client book release, advice on Christian grammar, and more.