The Wizard's Apprentice
Copyright© 2023 by GraySapien
Prologue
I wonder if Will Shakespeare had the same issues writing plays that I’ve had writing The Wizard’s Apprentice?
Holisz’ tale, you see, is told by a bard.
The normal convention when writing his words would be to begin each short paragraph (another convention flouted, in an effort to write as a tale-teller would speak) with a quotation mark. Yet I soon found that cumbersome, even a bit silly; I ended up with double quotations when the bard was quoting the words of a character, and double quotations plus an apostrophe (“ “ ‘) when the sentence began with words such as “ ‘Twas”. Which might seem strange at first, and pretentious; but would such as “ ‘Twas the night before Christmas” sound better had it been composed “It was the night...”? Nah.
I tried several approaches, beginning the bard’s narration with an apostrophe for example, and separating breaks with a centered *** symbol. Yet even then, I found I needed something else. I finally settled on ~~~ to indicate when the bard stepped away from the story (to indicate that his ale-cup was empty, or to visit the jakes), with the *** as an indicator of action breaks in the tale. Such are the fussy concerns of a writer of tales who writes about a teller of tales who tells the story of a most unusual hero!