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Wanted to clarify, I wasn't suggesting building on the crush - that part is evident. I was suggesting to build how she decided she needed to resort to violence. That part blindsided me.

Slugging my way through [A r c h a n g e l s K i s s] since that writer not only a best seller, but widely accepted as a leader of the pack in UF/Angel series.

Now, this is a Book II and best seller writers tend to know where their bread is buttered, so I walked in knowing ahead of time I was going to get the same formula as the other... but the plot has been surprisingly thin. I'm about 200 pages in, and it's all burning gazes and dour faces. I checked goodreads -- always good for fun. Sure enough people are like "This entire book is sex and dismembered limbs"

I'd go one step further and add "...and angry people". So much anger in there... like the head of the vampire pack was turned against his will,  so he has a pretty decent reason to be dour. But the six minor characters who work with him are all taciturn grumblers fond of steely gazes and stony silences. And these are the good guys. The villains are also angry mofos with chips on their shoulders, and I can only imagine when they're not on camera, they're eating stones or sleeping on thumbtacks.

There's a lesson for me in there somewhere because I also have a lot of angry characters. Looks like Patty's getting a promotion to a more prominent role

Workable and different enough

My line of thinking is his illness will drown among the other illnesses that have been healed (minus the notable blindness). My writing temptation would be to go some completely different route such as de Rosa has insistent debt collectors and his miracle/intercession is the debt collectors are suddenly nice. Or maybe a beam of light shoots through them à la Temple of Doom

Coming in cold, no idea of the plot or the players (except recognizing the final one) it seemed kinda one-sided, but I'll buy it

Luckily I renamed Heaven to paradise so I can get away with caps. I just need a name for Hell

I was curious about the 370 years... but wasn't prepared to crawl down that rabbit-hole until I understood how the context works. Eg if there was a special date you were working backwards to.

I figure that's enough time to pretty much own every cardinal if you're an immortal. You do have a limitation that the plants become bold over time and make mistakes, but through 4 centuries, I bet you get that 1 in 100 who's too crafty to fall that way. After I got some of those guys, I'd grant them immortality - I'd only need about 3 in the whole organization.

My evil plan would be:
a) Keep making stupid minions whose sole job is to get caught so I can monitor how good the church is getting at finding me
b) I'd introduce translation errors in some of the popular bibles such as NIV. I'd sow confusion by painting the devil's number as 665 and 667... I'd make sure dead sea scroll show up and split the faithful over verbiage
c) I would NOT try to get my evil guy into the seat of the pope. I would work hard to break in a good pope who I hold on a leash (Think Wellington Yueh). This is the best guy cause he can pass any radars, right? Everyone trusts him. Once he's in place, he doesn't need to last long... 8 months should do. I'll find sneaky ways to break the succession so the next guy they choose is also tainted. Give me 370 years, I bet I could do it.

I think 1876 would have been good. Hit the cardinals I don't control with the plague right before a big vote... sneak my suk-doctor-pope in. Then off him and replace him with my real guy. Then use my real guy to find and destroy some of the idiots working for me who I don't like, thereby validating he can root out agents of the beast.

"90 years": That's only ten popes or so. Might be harder for my evil plan to get a guy in the key spot in this time. I'd have done it during WWI then use the 1918 H1N1 to ratify guy #2.

"25 Years": Virtually impossible

You can see the pattern in all these ideas. Sneak someone in, and tilt the scales. Then feed him to the machine and back off. Wait till everyone dies off and pull the trigger.

Question: How relevant is the time scale? What are the shortest and longest time you've looked at?

Note that your time period is generally considered the "birth" of modern statistical analysis. Though the Greeks as far back as Aristotle understood a "midrange" or a "mean", things like averages, medians, or modes would not be possible on large data sets (unless you had a decent abacus!).

A casual google suggests median pops into existence around 1599
http://jse.amstat.org/v11n1/bakker.html
and you can see how theoretical it is from Example 4:

@Rachel: I did some digging into the gender issue.

So scholars generally say angels are androgynous. I dug into why they say so, and it seems to boil down to the bible using a male pronoun, so no one's really too sure if gender really applies to them.

In other words, we don't believe there are female angels simply because the bible never mentions any. I find this assumption rather fascinating to be sure.

Of, so since I have created my own gender problem, I have been careful throughout both Project L and Project R to never cal them "men" and "women" which would be human terns created long after angels existed. For the record, I'm unconcerned with achieving biblical accuracy, but I wonder if scholars have penned themselves into a logical quagmire where if a female angel one day showed up, they may have to ask her to cease to exist.

A star wars staple (even in the books) is a desert world, which is pretty much impossible in a star-faring society.

Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars colonization series even nods to this because they take ice comets and do low orbit runs for like 20 years to build the planet's water reserves. It costs pennies to deflect a comet if you have broken the fossil fuel barrier. So ya, I can see Herbert's point-- at least he had a purpose for the desert world

New post forthcoming?