: Re: How much leeway can be expected from an editor regarding my preference for nonstandard punctuation? As I hope to present a unique style to the world, as I am not especially tolerant of being
The punctuation in all of your examples is defensible, and only the second is non-standard — you are using the full stop to mark a pause, but the stop has a semantic role that you don't want. Using an em dash would avoid this and emphasise the pause even more, although it would still be non-standard.
I think the first two examples have defects and can be improved:
It was a cold night, frigidly so. — I don't think "frigid" is effective here, and the sentence can be given more energy: 'The night was icy cold.'
"That wasn't the issue at all," she said. Vehemently. — Adverbs don't have the stand-alone force I think you attribute to "vehemently" here. How about '"That wasn't the issue at all." She was vehement.'
My claimed improvement has nothing to do with punctuation, but it gives simpler language, so eliminating the need for punctuation tricks.
The third example is good, effective English, and the punctuation makes use of a familiar and completely respectable device, the asyndeton, whose name is less well known than it should be, and which introduces a series of parallel parts of sentence without a conjunction. You need to watch that the parallelism between the parts is clear, if so, as it it is in this example, then it is perfectly readable. It allows images to build up one upon another, just as the two adjectives do in example three.
I entirely agree with JSBangs about what you should expect. Though deadline pressure can make publishers, and so their editors, cranky.
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