FREE for a limited time: Rascal on Earth by Evan Glint

[Aurora Denara]

Hello everyone,

My humorous fantasy novel RASCAL THE ASSISTANT WAITER: The Spiritual Guide from the Galactic Federation is currently available for free on Kindle, with no fixed end date.

It is a light, warm, and slightly absurd story about Alex, a tired café waiter trying to survive work, bills, customers, and ordinary life — until the Rascal, a self-appointed spiritual guide from the Galactic Federation, appears and turns everything into a mission involving magical stones, paper dragons, a turtle, a hedgehog, and far too much confidence.

The book uses a European dialogue style, with dashes instead of quotation marks, as an intentional stylistic choice.

No pressure at all — I’m simply sharing it here in case someone enjoys gentle humor, café chaos, odd spiritual messengers, and stories that are funny but still have a heart.

Amazon link:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H1QN2P5Z

Thank you for reading.

[Dr. Drib]

Sounds interesting, so I went ahead and got it.

I like the cover very much, by the way.

Thank you.

[Quoth]

Actually dashes are more usually for scripts. There are many European quotation styles and they depend on country, such as Ireland, UK, France & Germany. Anything in English should use “and” (USA, Ireland, Canada, UK etc) or possibly ‘and’ (some UK only). It's a matter of standards. People used to English novels rather than screenplays or play scripts will find it very tiring. The French and German systems would only be for those languages, not English.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotat...#Summary_table

I've over 10,000 books, over 3,000 on paper. I've only ever seen dashes for scripts. I've some French and German books too and they are per Wikipedia quote marks for dialogue.

You can of course do whatever you want. People even gone back to the Roman lack of punctuation, or used different fonts or colours.

[Quoth]

BTW, Thanks for the free eBook. I see it actually does use “and” for dialogue, though without a comma and it's merely a dash after the closing quote!

Very odd.

EDIT:
No, later there are dashes to start dialogue, but no tag to indicate who might be speaking. Sometime regular use of tag and quotes.

Edit 2:
Sometimes the Dash isn't speech!

[Dr. Drib]

Go for gold and never stop. Dream big and write with bold strokes. William Gaddis did, and you can too.

Below is the first page of Gaddis's novel, JR, a book that won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1976:



—MONEY . . . ? in a voice that rustled.

—Paper, yes.

—And we’d never seen it. Paper money.

—We never saw paper money till we came east.

—It looked so strange the first time we saw it. Lifeless.

—You couldn’t believe it was worth a thing.

—Not after Father jingling his change.

—Those were silver dollars.

—And silver halves, yes and quarters, Julia. The ones from his pupils. I can hear him now . . .

Sunlight, pocketed in a cloud, spilled suddenly broken across the floor through the leaves of the trees outside.

—Coming up the veranda, how he jingled when he walked.

—He’d have his pupils rest the quarters that they brought him on the backs of their hands when they did their scales. He charged fifty cents a lesson, you see, Mister . . .

—Coen, without the h. Now if both you ladies . . .

—Why, it’s just like that story about Father’s dying wish to have his bust sunk in Vancouver harbor, and his ashes sprinkled on the water there, about James and Thomas out in the rowboat, and both of them hitting at the bust with their oars because it was hollow and