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Is Thecla going to be in it?

Think about your hook... if you had to choose four words for my eye to fall on in the first sentence, what would they be?

I'd hazard to guess "fourteen boy special powers"

It's probably not "Living orphanage Rome fourteen". That "Grab" is for a very different book, probably closer to Les Misérables.

Once you have your key terms, try to topload them if you can.

These things are always easier to see in other people's writings, so he's a sample for VQS:

(Actually, that can be much more top-loaded, but that's a whole different topic)

Paragraph two lost me by word #7 (Don't accuse me up pulling punches!). Hopefully by the time you're ready to publish you've got that whittled down to awesome-sauce. Here's my rendition of line 1:

Now that you mention it, there is a certain redundancy in having a mother + a grandmother in one head + a father in the other.

Perhaps he doesn't cause her death - anti-religion lunatics do?

It seems that song is from the 17th century. Surely copyright has lapsed on it

Feather of the Dark Angel

No major quibbles. Details don't override the pace. Of course you can thin / make precision-based finesse on future passes. But nothing felt brushed over - nothing screamed to me "missed opportunity".

God Emperor had a wicked ending

Not really progress, but fitting. here's just so many distractions these days, I find a book has to sparkle harder to get me engrossed. I go back to re-read books I liked back in the day, and sometimes I'm thinking wow, how did I ever have the patience to slog through 200 pages of this crap to get to the good part? (Tommyknockers, I'm looking at you)

All things being cyclic, this fad will one day disappear. Probably not until we as a society find a way to tame the noise of entertainment

I've been doing a lot of thinking on Apollo's reluctance to make war. We have this guy who assassinates his father and banishes his mother, but he won't order the guards to fire because someone might get hurt. I've been rolling this around in my head trying to harmonize the two aspects of the character.

It would seem you're writing Apollo in the style of a morally scrupulous leader. As such, he must always make the decision that involves the least loss of life (or if loss, kill evil people first). This approach would surely result in the decisions he makes.

If this is not what you were going for, consider that we'll still respect a ruler who must do a few evil things. King Solomon ordering a baby cut in half in order to determine who the mother was is the first example I can think of. If it is what you were going for ignore my comments like he's not prepared for war - he clearly is not if that's the case. And if not, ya might as well go ahead and hit all the accompanying notes that go with being a pacifist leader of a military state.

increasingly obscene here, Toronto-wards