The interruption mark

Unless you’re a scriptwriter, this post probably won’t interest you. I’m a stickler for uniform-looking documents in series: one of the main reasons why I use (La)TeX. Recently, I’ve been writing what are basically ‘design guidelines’ at the beginning of my upcoming coursework publication, Wine Glass Moustache—don’t ask—so, when proofreading it, I have a definiative solution to common problems like how to arrange radio scripts if they’ve got timecodes, or how to cite people’s quotes rather than their publications (in these cases, an omiliography is what I’m after). Today, I’ve been musing on what interruption mark to use; an interruption mark is something put at the end of a line in a script to indicate an interruption. For example, …

KS: I think all religions are, in practice, cul-
JE: Stop right there.

In the above example, I’ve used the hyphen to denote an interruption to my (KS) lines; I think this is the mark I’m going to stick with. Alternatives were things like ellipses, but then the line looks incomplete:

KS: But they are. Just ask the OED: it defines ‘cul…

It looks like I haven’t finished writing the line, at least to me it does—kind of like a programmer’s TODO. [1]

I think I’m going to stay with the hyphen but I’m interested to hear what you think, not just on boring bollocks like how to write interruptions in scripts. Do you have your rules of writing written down?; is it so you don’t waste time having an internal conflict with opposing brain halves?

Writing

I write a lot. I write copious amounts of waffly shit, mostly, but sometimes I’ll write for quite a long time—being passionate about the subject helps but so does being passionate for and about writing itself. In June last year, I got ~21,000 words into a book called Waffle (the title was changed to Untitled when I began a podcast of the same name) but the format wasn’t working for me, I stopped writing for a couple of months and when I returned, the content I’d written was not only irrelevant but it gave me an opportunity to see how much of a twat I can be when I’m busy writing / hating people. I’ve had a few other ideas for books, all non-fiction: a transcription of my best AudioBoos or at least a book based on transcriptions of said AudioBoos, a collection of my ND Radio essays (currently in singular, unredacted form at http://6xfour.co.uk) or perhaps some articles authored using a multi-collaborator editor like SubEthaEdit or even Google Docs (not sure what the subject would be or who I would author the work with). Tomorrow, if I get time, I’ll begin writing my most daft idea to date: in 100–120 words, my opinion on the article returned by Wikipedia’s random article engine. Who knows: might even get some of my own.

Steinhardt Handwritten

I’m off to the Netherlands over the Easter holidays as it happens—if I wasn’t, I’d be using the last three weeks in April to touch-up my Main Document but this’ll probably have to be put off to the spare hours of weekends in May, June and July. If I get the Main Document thing out of the way, finalised, proofread and published, I might be spending my summer developing a 'full' typeface of my handwriting: for now, I’ll call it Steinhardt Handwritten. I’m not intending for it to have any serious application; it’s just a little fun and a chance for me to gain some experience in typographic design and also working with applications like FontForge.