Do You Even Bracket, Bro?

One thing I provide as a public service is my ability to butcher popular slang and quotes on the regular. However, my cringe-worthy post heading has another purpose: utilizing all those little keys that aren't as worn on my silicone keyboard cover.

Not talking hot key shortcuts, function keys, the arrow keys or even the poor redundant Tab key that fell out of use when word processor formatting favored auto indents. Nope, I'm talking... *whomp whomp* brackets. I guess there's no mystery there...

It seems to be a personal mission to torment myself with making certain challenges towards communicating my ideas. UnNamed was about the concealment of names mostly (and the creative use of pronouns and descriptors in absence of names) and UnSung is no exception.

Aiden is mute. I am not. I don't pretend to know what it's like to be so this was not a book based on an issue I can relate to. However, I do know what it's like to desire to communicate or the exhaustion of that effort leading to isolation. In Aiden's case, he finds that his own efforts do not go unrewarded. He greets all of those moments of breakthrough with exuberance. He finds two unique ways to communicate with two of the women in his life, one through a language he created through music, one through a magical link.

Before I go into what this has to do with brackets, this wasn't an attempt to mask a disability with a superpower. That's not what this is, since the two people still aren't going to afford him the same sort of 'voice' that people who can speak have. Aiden still finds the limitations of these 'break-through' abilities and still endures the frustration of having to depend on someone's ability to want to understand him at all. As a point of reference, my granddad turns off his hearing aid when my grandma starts arguing with him, causing her hurt, frustration, rage and impotence with communicating-- that he can just 'turn off' when it doesn't suit him is always a one-sided solution that never benefits her. It would be like learning ASL to debate with a deaf person, then closing your eyes or looking away when you're done. It's worse than hanging up the phone on someone because you are right there still, negating someone with an advantage they can't use.

So, brackets. When Aiden uses his language, I knew I wanted to deviate from just italics. While his 'thoughts' are still italicized, italics are also easy to miss when spread out in a conversation and since he is speaking through these thoughts, it deserved something as important as a quote. Not these ( ). No, parentheses are a side note, often serving the purpose of injecting a secondary idea. Not these guys either { }. I'm never quite sure where those brackets are used but they're too busy. Quotation marks are clean and quick so I wanted Aiden's voice to have a similar simplicity. I dug these guys out from my high school days: ⎡⎦

Yes! L brackets! These remind me of the ¡! deal you get with exclamations in español. As you can tell, I know my way around the optional symbols on a keyboard. Other favorites are © ™ and … Yes, yes, you can make an ellipsis with Option + : (colon) on a Mac (because three periods are more work than two simultaneously pressed keys maybe). Here's the thing-- I also have to make sure that the choose-your-own-font capabilities of an ebook doesn't warp my precious L brackets into some OTHER bracket or worse-- the 404 equivalent of character nullification: the random wing-ding symbol. And no, I don't have that stupid rectangle's hot key combo memorized. I'm rather partial to this choice so I will conduct ridiculous amounts of research to make it happen.

I suppose it would be my designer training that makes me so enthusiastic about utilizing fonts to communicate effectively in a novel. No matter how complex my ideas are in planning, I always stand by the mission to deliver these ideas with all of those complexities combed smooth for sharing. I'm not going to be using ASCII art (although you should do yourself a favor and see how awesome this endeavor is), but I do work to be sure that my punctuation and style choices are the best choice possible.

Even if you don't use special characters outside of the basic set in the body of your writing itself, I bet that many people, from time to time still end up pulling one of these: 

--~~{@ TITLE @}~~--

You can't deny that a nice little bit of dressing for those headers isn't at least a little bit tempting. There use to be some serious excitement when you told people those look like roses. That was before the excitement of using eggplant emojis as penises. It's okay if you don't remember...

 And that's what matters most.