You aren't the only one thinking there should be blue in her outfit... the only problem is I haven't been able to make it work against a primarily green background. Also the specific scene in the story portrayed on the cover, she's wearing black and white (I'm a big fan of that energy rush when the cover-scene unfolds in the story).
I think someone also suggested Blue lettering
Hmmm going back to the well for another shot for J3nna cover. Third time's the charm?
Whenever you get into a spiral of complexity, just come stare at this
This all sounds rather tangly... why not just forge ahead with the violence and simply don't draw attention to it?
I suspect the market you're after is already nervous about the guns. They probably asked Spielberg to edit the guns in ET into walkie-talkies because though the guns weren't fired, the mere presence of them on the screen was too much.
So she is not presented as a fighter/hitter so you have some work to do to build her up to throwing a punch
it was clear that both had crushes on J
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.
Urban Fantasy
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
I toured the site. Looks cool
Workable and different enough
Ah, but I didn't mean healing -- only illness. You'd haveto work hard to make it not look like an illness
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
Can you just bump it to a different church?
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
Hah so I finally figured out why everyone's weirded out at my male character named "Sara Mindus". I was a little puzzled by this confusion but was prepared to roll with it an choose a new name, until a reviewer clarified that Mindus looks like a last name. Sara's a prefix not unlike "ibn" lol
I had no idea people were reading it as "sarah" or similar. Holy tunnel vision!
Luckily I renamed Heaven to paradise so I can get away with caps. I just need a name for Hell
The Church regularly purges certain offices (just to be unpredictable and to clean house). All the key positions are given to cardinals, who are usually old men with a very limited remaining lifespan.
Q: What happened to the purged guys? Assuming my plant was kicked out along with the others (I mean my one-in-100 good plant who hasn't given himself away) does he get transplanted into another office where I can apply his abilities?
If the A-C wants a near-perpetual lock on the key dioceses
Q: Does he need one? It sounds like as long as he can get two cardinals, he has control. Two cardinals gets him enough sway to keep fresh talent coming up the roster. Assuming he has the pope's ear much of the time through them. Should only be so long before he gains insight into the task force meant to find him. Yikes!
There's only so long he can stay in power before people realize he's not purely human due to the fact that he doesn't die of old age
Q: This is to assume he can't acquire fake ID and "rotate lifespans". Or are you saying there's a public figure he's riding on?
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?
Edit: Not to suggest your sharp-eyed monk can't spot the discrepancy... but the wording is key
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:
...obtain the arithmetic mean or mid-range can be justified if certain assumptions are defensible, i.e., that the underlying distribution is at least approximately symmetrical ...
Hard to believe the show only ran 3 seasons. Feels like 10
@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.
As a healthy recipient of the too many exclamation marks, I wish to note that my characters tend to run into/out-of burning buildings, explosions, and crashing vehicles more than most.Certainly your current story factors in, and definitely Galaxy Tales.
There's only so sedately you can yell Fire! or Watch out for that car!
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
Hi Dirk
What you have here is something my editor would throw red ink at, it's telling backstory through dialogue.
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, entered the graveyard. He was upset at his step father, Claudius, for marrying his mother Gertrude. His friend Horatio agreed.
Crowd: Don't do this. We don't need all this backstory. Show us the heart of the character and the action.
Writer: What defines action?
Crowd: What the characters say or do
Writer: Oh! That's easy!
Hamlet: "I am Hamlet, Prince of Denmark"
Horatio: "How do you feel about your mother, Gertrude, marrying Claudius?"
Hamlet: "So soon after my father's death, yea the cakes were not yet cooled. Forsooth, I was upset at Claudius."
Now, aside from the fact that Shakespeare pretty much did exactly this, it's getting a little frowned on because it doesn't produce natural two-way dialogue. It tends to sound like people stating facts for an invisible 3rd person.
Doesn't help you here, but chipping it in because I see Linda has detected that and straightened it back into narrative like my editor would.
Also note that the danger of the moment is in the past at which point Luke's actions may cause the narrator danger. This method removes any chance of such suspense by punting the danger into the past (admittedly another trick the Great Bard got away with).
New post forthcoming?
