Sharing Song Logic love

Jonathan over at Metal Only, No rubbish has written some generous words about Song Logic. I was a little worried the book might be too niche, but realise now it's pitched just right: for music nerds of all persuasions. (I keed. It's good for everyone. Like George Clinton said, Funk not only moves, it can remove.)

And fellow blogger Katie has sent a nice action shot. It all makes me a happy author.

Love is in the Em

Hi, my name is Rino and I’m somewhat of a punctuation nerd. There’s one character I’m really mad for — the one character that floats my grammatic boat — and that’s the em dash. It’s the punctuation mark par excellence. Better than the colon or parentheses. Typographically elegant; functionally useful; and interpolative in the best prosaic sense. Used to mark an amplifying or explanatory element, or an interruption. Also for rhetorical pause: Darth Vader's line "I sense something, a presence I have not felt since—" And, to indicate a change of speaker in French novels and Joyce.

As wide as the letter m — and sometimes even wider depending on typeface. There’s also a 2-em rule if you really want to break in and score the text with a big, mean line.

I get a bit huffy when I see the lame use of double-dashes on a web page -- so ugly and scattered, like morse code in the middle of a sentence. Ummm, well, I don’t know how to make the proper em dash character, so I just ummm use the dash key. Just get into the html and paste: — and presto, you’re sorted. Get it right, mmmkay?

But this is preamble — what I wanted to say is that I did a count and Song Logic has a shining total of 470 em dashes. Of which I am very proud.

Song Logic on the Kindle

After an amazingly difficult, duh-geeky process to try and get Lulu to accept my ebook/epub file for the book, and failing with enough rage to hurl twenty computers out the window, I've got an ebook version at last! It's available for Kindle via Amazon. It's only 5 bucks, but really, if you promise me you'll put up a review or a link to this blog, I can send the epub file to you direct, for free. Just post a comment or email me.

The Lulu process for ebooks is insane because Apple's iBookstore is difficult and narcy and secretive about its QA standards. So instead I wanted to see if it works and functions well on the Kindle, which creation process is much friendlier. But yes, if you have a thing about books and paper and don't like the tactility of something you can safely throw at someone (to make a point), then by all means get the ebook version. And let me know what you think.

I'd rather people have the paper product because the paper's soft and creamy and the type looks great on it. Decision is yours.