It allows for hyphenation, for one thing; it also handles widows and orphans, something that I vaguely understand.  More impressively — at least to me — it also handles “smart” quotes properly.  Smartly, in fact.

This is a bugaboo of long standing for me; I find it irritating to see contractions like ’tis starting with an opening single quote rather than a proper apostrophe.  This plugin seems to solve it.  (If “’tis” is spelled right in this post, it’s thanks to the plugin.)

Pedantic? It sure is.  But we all have our pet peeves, & for whatever reason, improper punctuation is one of mine.  And I’m glad to have stumbled across a technological solution to the problem.

Update: I see from the notes on the theme I’m using that wp-Typography is in the Recommended Plugins list. I thought sounded vaguely familiar…

The “micro” in micro fiction was definitely a challenge; the story had to be less than 200 words, including the title.  When I finished the first draft, it was about 300 words, which meant I had to trim it by a third.

If I’d been smart, I’d have saved the original 300-word version, but I just started to hack and slash, removing colour and combining thoughts.  It was a good exercise — it forced me to choose my words very wisely — but I think I had a better story before the slicing.

Now, though — now I’m trying to recover what I subtracted, and it’s not there anymore. Well, it is, but it’s not exactly the same.  I’m chasing les mots justes and they’re eluding me.

Just one of those things, I guess. At least, without the 200-word limit, I can tell the full story. I’m not sure how long it’ll end up; I guess I’ll know that when I’m done.

For whatever reason, the last couple lines on this lovely poster really stood out for me.

The story concerns one Ignatius “Ig” Perrish, who wakes up one morning after an ill-remembered night of drinking to discover that he has grown horns overnight.  They look a bit like devil horns, and they hurt to touch.  He discovers the horns seem to have given him certain powers, too:  people can’t help but reveal their darkest secrets to him, and they don’t seem to remember talking to him.

Ig’s girlfriend Merrin died about a year ago, a horrific sex-murder; all the evidence seemed to point to Ig as the culprit, but he knows he didn’t do it.  The evidence conveniently vanished, and no one was ever convicted.  The townsfolk all assumed Ig’s rich parents bought off the justice system to protect the family name.

Now Ig has the power to learn the truth at last.  Who really killed Merrin?  Can he defeat the one man that seems immune to the horns’ power?  And will the horns cost him his soul… or is that already lost?

Joe Hill comes through with this story.  The tale of Ig and Merrin is intricately plotted, deliciously devious, nasty, tragic, and forceful.  When it comes to an end, you’ll want more.  (At least, I did.)

This was the first piece of fiction I read by Joe Hill.  I’ll be keeping an eye out for more of his work.

Horns, by Joe Hill

You being lazy and unmotivated and not writing allows another writer, who does sit down and write, to get published in your place. Magazines and publishers only have so many pages, so many annual publishing spots. You’re letting someone else who wants to do the work get published.

So very true.  Write faster, Johanneson.

Via Neil Gaiman’s Tumblr site. (Tumblog? Tumblmaba? Twitterkiller? Never sure what to call those things…)

And I quote:

Japan’s first robot buddy cop movie, a silent film released in 1919, was shown only once, to an assembly of wealthy land owners in Tokyo. When the film ended, the audience demand for affordable giant robots to work their fields and control the peasants was so insistent, emperor Hirohito had the only copy of the film impounded and destroyed to prevent the idea from capturing the public’s imagination.

Found via Wil Wheaton’s tumblr. Go ahead, click through. There’s a great photo and everything.

In the novel, people’s faces are painted to indicate what they’re currently programmed as.  Surgeons might wear an orange butterfly, couriers a green triangle, pierrots a harlequin mask.

Today I saw this photo on Flickr:

…and part of me thought, I wonder what that paint might indicate.