I used "space-hyphen-space" when writing, because I prefer the aesthetic, but I'll happily format it to whatever the publisher guidelines want me to.
He never finished it, right? I don't really remember. That was, what? 2000 or so? I think I remember that Kind accepted payment on a voluntary basis and then got pissed when nobody did? Is that what happened? Either way, I remember not being terribly disappointed.
The Plant, I just remember reading and reading, and thinking, what in the world IS this plant? And how will all these plot twists be "explained" really getting wrapped up in it and then bam! Blank page. WHERE'S THE REST OF IT? I went to the King fan website and it was like something you weren't supposed to talk about... Maybe SK got himself into a plot hole and couldn't write his way out of it!
I talked to someone up the chain of command at the publisher, but she was not too forthcoming or willing to yield an inch. Kept repeating "We follow the Chicago Style Handbook" justifying all the "corrections" they made. They did not really explain why, after the first 20 "errors" followed the same pattern, they did not notice the pattern? What's the point of proceeding and marking up all 4000 similar errors? But, "that's our process." she says. I messaged their main competitor, they said they will give me a guidelines document that I can submit giving them my input on how I want to do hyphens, dashes and spelling-out numbers, basketball jargon, etc. My first time to deal with a publisher. Live and learn. I think it is their first time to deal with a sports story.
Here's a basketball story from a real newspaper, talking about the UConn women's basketball team: This newspaper is not just a small-town rag -- it's owned by a major newspaper conglomerate. Comments: In the first paragraph, "13" is in numerals, not written out. In the third paragraph, her scores are in numerals but the number of games and starts is written out. In the last paragraph, they used both an em dash (with spaces) to split the paragraph, and they used hyphens (without spaces( both for "regular season" and for the game scores. I'm confused about this situation. You are the author -- it's YOUR book, it's not a work for hire. YOU are the sports expert. IMHO, they are out of line demanding that you adhere to the Chicago manual of Style when the Chicago Manual of Style is not meant to be used for writing novels (although it is often used for that) or sports articles (and it is rarely used for that)--it was developed for academic writing and has more or less overflowed its original purpose. That said, it's a guide. "Rules are made to be broken." If an author has valid reasons for wanting to depart from the Chicago Manual, a decent publisher should pay attention, not stonewall.
New York Times and ESPN both agree with that style, too. Good points you make. I'm going to borrow them if you don't mind...
It seems this has been well covered above, but I hope I can add something useful. In typography you have four symbols; * Minus symbol for maths. * Hyphen, which is visually identical to the minus, for hyphenating words (e.g. "pre-order", "box-ticking"). * N-dash, which is longer than the above, for separating ranges (e.g. "Mon--Fri", "1--98"). * M-dash, longer again, which is used for breaking up sentences, as you have been discussing (e.g. "You are the author---it's YOUR book") But the ASCII character set, and Qwerty keyboards, only have the one dash/minus/hyphen symbol. You can insert special characters, as described above. But for various purposes many people prefer to stick within the ASCII character set. To do that you can use the Knuth's TeX standard. This is two dashes for an n-dash ("--") and three dashes for an m-dash ("---"). If you follow that format then typesetting tools like TeX, LaTex, Markdown and Pandoc will automatically convert into the correct symbols. Even if you aren't using those tools its a useful habit to get into because you can write drafts without remembering key combos for special character and just do a search/replace before handing to the editor. P.S. For what its worth I was always told you write one-to-twelve out in letters, after then it goes to numerals. (Unless you are already using numerals, in which case you might not want to switch to letters half way through. "They scored 14 in their first game, 16 in their second game and twelve in their third game." Correct? Discuss. In my opinion that is correct unless your writing is technical in nature. But that's an uninformed opinion.)
