Spacing after periods

Nice post about the one-space-or-two controversy over at Book View Cafe! Deborah Ross takes the words right out of my mouth:

You have got to be kidding me, right? Of all the things you could worry about in writing — characters, plot, theme and metatheme, moral center, rising and falling tension, use of language, etc. — you’re obsessed with this?

YES TO THIS.

Good God above, hasn’t everyone realized by now that you can do a find and replace to change all the . space space to . space, if that makes you happy? That your editor or any copy editor can do this in less time than it takes to type this sentence? (This is exactly the point Deborah is making, too.)

I can’t imagine anybody wasting time worrying about this. If your fingers, like mine, are trained to hit the space bar twice after a period, fine. It is ridiculous to spend time trying to retrain your typing reflexes. If you need, for some reason such as ebook formatting, to switch from one style to the other, do it at the end. If you send a manuscript to an editor and they don’t like your formatting (or font, or whatever), I am pretty sure every editor in the universe knows how to fiddle with your manuscript to make it match her personal preferences.

The things people worry about, honestly.

Okay, rant over.