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Thanks, Bill/Janet/njc. Throwing in occasional words or phrases of actual Italian is appealing, although I'll probably end up with errors. Even Dan Brown got some of his Italian wrong in the original release of Angels & Demons. Fortunately, only real Italian speakers will know. More intimidating is getting inside the head of the most senior cardinal (the Secretary of State) and into meetings of the Council of Cardinal Advisers. How do the most senior Catholics on the planet think and conduct themselves?

Bzzt!

Check out BookBaby. They're affiliated with this site, I believe.

No rush. Yoda voice: rest, you must. It may help to tell you I'm only planning to do light edits at this point. Slap me around a little, grab the points, and go back to sleep. Seabrass's final edits are already included in most of the posted chapters, and I'm about to add K's edits, so it should be in decent shape by the time you see it. I'll take a few hours this week and update all the online chapters. Depending on how far back you're reading, I have some late changes to post.

I totally forgot about Acme (not ACME, since that'll get me sued) and Aussie as I was revising my latest chapters. I'll have to go back and see if I can find more use for them. Did you know that I once forgot to use God in an entire chapter? Had to make a chapter checklist after that, which I keep forgetting to look at. I now have five ghosts in Joseph's head, so it's going to be hard to use them all. There's particular overlap between Joseph's mother and Admiral St. James. I knew that might bite me eventually. I'd retire Admiral St. James, but she's his military advisor, which should come in handy in act IV.

I thought Roman history research was hard. Try coming up to speed on the inner workings of the Catholic Church and the Vatican (for my next book about the Antichrist). Especially with my memory. I need notes just for my notes. I've bought two books just to understand Revelation, plus Catholicism for Dummies. :-) Every time I go deep into Catholic documents (e.g., online encyclopedia, the Catechism, etc.), I need a religious dictionary. There is a large DVD set all about the Catholic Church that I will probably buy, but it's $70 used, so I'm holding off until I get over the guilt of how much I've already spent. Had to buy a Blue-Ray drive and software just to watch the damn Exorcist Anthology, which turned out to be mostly crap. If I had thought to check rottentomatoes.com first, I could have saved myself a bundle. The worst of the five films has an 11% freshness rating. I miss having access to US streaming. Netflix Canada is all we've got, and it's relatively slim pickings.

I'm now officially in act III of IV with my revisions (about 15 chapters to polish). Four months or so to completion, allowing plenty of time for Catholic research. However, after some discussions online, I decided not to publish Into the Mind of God until I return to the story (after my next book), which means probably four or more years from now. I'm hoping the Antichrist book will be more polished and make a better first publication. Marketing will be a time-consuming bitch, so I want to wait until I've done a better book.

G'night.
Dirk

While it's been pounded into me from day one not to get too fancy, I would use some of the entries on the forbidden list (e.g., snapped, stammered, urged, etc.). If it conveys more information than who exactly is speaking (i.e., it does double duty), I'm all the more likely to use it. The beauty of self-publishing. I do, however, agree with the idea of not using tags when a little action will do nicely (e.g., Mary turned to Joseph. "Did you finish your essay?").

I may rename Babilus Danasius (the car recyclling plant manager) to Babilus Sibrassi or something similar. Or maybe rename Leonardo, the Crazed Cabbie.

Bzzt!

Can you pay a copy of the list on this site as well?

My first line begins with "Battle stations!"  The whole first chapter (a prologue) is intended as an Indiana Jones-style opening.

I'm aware that many classics do it. I can even think back far enough to some of them. I'm more interested in modern trends. Almost all of the books I read here and elsewhere use multiple POVs. I mentioned the genre (supernatural thriller), since I've never written one and there may be best practices to follow that differ from sci-fi, which is what I've been writing. Even the best-selling sci-fi novel of all time, Dune, which was written in the 60's, used multiple POVs.