The Galaxy Tales - Dirk B. (Page 17 of 49)

They all want increased time with the body. Joseph kept them mostly in check during v2. I was saving the subplot of Andrew taking over for book two. But, hey, why wait? I'm going to make Billie so nasty even Andrew is afraid of her!

Sometimes he writes so he can pull off Star Trek puns. The punier the better:-)

yes, I'm accusing njc of erudition

Such as shooting helpless opponents?

Check out the battles near the end of Kate Paulk's =ConVent= and =ConSensual=, especially where the angels end up on the wrong side of things.

Didn't I already get pulled apart limb-from-limb by legions of screaming fans?

Yup. A T tunic is standard item of clothing that uses a maximum of fabric with only two seams if you don't finish the neckline. Usually the only difference between men and women was the length of the garment.

highlighting were my eyes rested...

Joseph and Apollo are teenagers living in the 41st century who grow up worlds apart but share a common bond — both are visited by a being who calls himself God. God takes each of them on an incredible journey to fulfill their destinies. With God’s help, Apollo, heir to Earth’s grand Imperium Romanum, leads a holy crusade to conquer a perilously divided galaxy. At the same time, God helps Joseph, the deeply religious crown prince of the strategic world New Bethlehem, found a radical new religion to steer humanity away from the Apocalypse. Ultimately, the teens' destinies will collide, something neither may survive. But is God a real deity, or the imagination of two mentally ill boys?

Some of the words I've deliberately overlooked (so you can see my thought process):
living > that they're alive is implied
grow up > implied they're growing at least a little unless they both die in chapter 1 paragraph 1
common bond > implied by them being mentioned together
incredible journey > superlative / advertising speakum
deeply > I realze you meant deeply with respect to Apollo but it reads out of phase here
religion > appears a lot in this little paragraph if we shall equate God / holy / religion / crusade
(destiny appears a lot too)
I dropped Imperium Romanum for reasons I'll make a separate post about
didn't like perilously because a) adjective b) it's not that "divided" when it's 3 parties but kept for now

And then taking what you wrote and joining all the blue parts:

Other notes:
a) I tried to shave off words wherever I could by joining / grouping concepts.
b) tried to get religion fown to 3 mentions (crusade / religion / Apocalypse)
c) Made God realer by asserting he's an entity (as written that last line forces him to be imaginary in the head of a believer)

I wasn't going for short, I was going for "glue the most interesting stuff together". Don't think of it like me snipping words to death but of pruning filler to bring out the flavour of the meat.

Also, I tried to stay true to the original, otherwise "destiny" would have been gone entirely (when a writer tells me "X is destined to do Y" what they mean is go ahead and skip to the final chapter because (i) X will succeed at Y or (ii) X will fail at Y and you're read this whole story for nothing)

deity vs entity:
Bob met with Joe and the followers of the Bing deity
Bob met with Joe and the followers of the Bing entity
If you can't see a subtle nuance in the second sentence that makes Bing realer, I will back away from this one

"Mentally ill"
is a very strong word. I mean very very strong. Not quite as offensive as some of the other words. recommend "Mentally challenged" or "mental disorder". I'm not saying don't use ill... just saying that if you put tomatoes on your sandwich, you must be prepared to get tomato flavour in every bite.

Overall, I find it approaches the concept of the story and what I presume to be the central theme. Don't let me bully you out of it

Mentally ill is very very strong? That's news to me, but so much the better. Mentally challenged doesn't quite have the same drawing power. And if God isn't real, then these two are seriously ill, especially after I put Billie in Joseph's head and Nero into Apollo's head.

This is a tough one. having not read to the end yet, this 'real or imaginary' concept puts a heavy assumption in the readers head. The chances that two galactic young leaders suffering from delusions are slim so from reading this I would think God obviously has a hand in this, that there is some kind of cosmic master plan at play here, beyond the understanding of human beings. As a scifi reader I'd be looking for something like this. This story promises this. The title promises this. In the synopsis you lay out a major plot twist, and a scifi reader like me could feel that they might be cheated if they invest in this story. This could be end up being about mental illness and not about high cosmological/theological concepts, or left open ended.

I have a question that will help me better understand how to approach this.
Without spoiling the details in  final act of the story, have you made a decision on whether these boys are both delusional, or is God real in the Biblical sense, real is a high scifi conceptual sense, or is one delusional and the other not?