Not so fast, Mr Bond!

Sometimes it’s the detail that drains you of the will to live.

If your book is coming out with a mainstream publisher, apostrophes don’t present too much of a problem. When I sent Random House the final text of Gifted, I had used double-quotes generally, with single quotes for embedded speech — and straight quotes at that:

He smiled sadly: "My mum always told me, 'Don't put your elbows on the table'."

My editors very decently smartened all the apostrophes; and then, following their house style, swapped single and double quotes around:

He smiled sadly: ‘My mum always told me, “Don’t put your elbows on the table”.’

For subsequent books, I turned smart quotes on, and have followed Random House’s ‘ “ ” ’ style.

Life, sadly, is never that simple. One of the most stubborn problems arises when a character breaks off mid-sentence. On a Mac, you create an em-dash (—) with the key combination Option-Shift-hyphen. But, as so many super-villains have remarked:

‘Not so fast, Mr Bond—‘

Do you see the problem? If you end a quote with an em-dash, the Mac OS smartens the ensuing apostrophe… the wrong way round.

While I was writing the new novel, Those Who Wait, I failed to notice this. Since I had decided to self-publish, I had nobody to do my dirty work for me. So when I spotted the problem, during proofing, I had to do a search and replace — itself an intricate and frustrating procedure.

Now I realise that the solution, on a Mac at least, is to define a shortcut that converts a single hyphen and a straight apostrophe

-'

Into the required em-dash and smart ‘9’ apostrophe.

—’

So far so good.

But the other thing I spotted late in the day was:

’Not so fast, Mr Bond.’

Do you see it? The apostrophe at the beginning of the line is backwards (‘9’). I’ve no idea why that happens. I found and fixed about fifteen instances in the text and in future I’ll just have to watch out for it.

Maybe the French have the right idea:

— Attendez! Blofeld tenait un pistolet. Pas si vite, Monsieur Bond!

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