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I finally continued watching the Exorcist Anthology. The film with the worst rating, Exorcist: The Beginning (11% on rottentomatoes.com), was almost as good as the original film, in my opinion. I actually ended up buying the Kindle book for that movie. It's very well written. That leaves me just one more film in the series, Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist, which is an alternate story from that of Exorcist: The Beginning.

The Catholic ritual for exorcisms only uses the line "The power of Christ compels you." one time, whereas the movies repeatedly uses "The power of God commands you. The power of Christ commands you." It's too bad that isn't part of the real ritual, since I was going to use those lines myself.

Thanks for the links, njc. I've only briefly reviewed them, but will do so in detail before I start planning the main story elements. I'm leaning toward keeping climate change out of the book and going with the original, simpler premise of the Antichrist trying to seize control of the Church in the present. It would be far easier to write without having to become well-versed in climate science, not to mention having to project the story world forward 30-40 years. Dan Brown tried to include antimatter physics in his Angels & Demons book and got the fundamentals wrong. Studying Catholicism is hard enough.

My initial impression is that wattsupwiththat.com isn't trying to give a balanced view of climate change, but refute it. Some of the links I followed in your first article showed what appeared to be cherry-picking from the papers. I also saw one reference in passing to Breitbart News, which is not a site I would look to for unbiased opinions. I'll see if I can find it again when I read the articles in depth. I prefer "fair and balanced". :-)

Your last article talks about 413 papers that refute some of the arguments made by climate change supporters, but doesn't say how many papers were published reaffirming the general consensus. It's roughly 13,750 (97%). Below is a link claiming the remaining 3% of papers were flawed.
https://qz.com/1069298/the-3-of-scienti … ll-flawed/

Interesting discovery. Apparently no one can accurately estimate the global assets of the Catholic Church, not even the Church itself. Most of the assets/income outside of the Vatican are held by the individual dioceses and religious orders for their own use. They're all separate corporations, most led by bishops. Only a small amount (Peter's Pence) is transferred to the Vatican, which has revenue in the low hundreds of millions, mostly from investment returns and tourism. Many of the assets have never been appraised, because the Church would never sell them (e.g., cathedrals, Vatican artwork from the Middle Ages, etc.). Most are on the books for $1.

One figure puts total Catholic Church spending in the U.S. at $170B annually, but most of that money comes from health insurers who pay Catholic hospitals for covered medical procedures, so it's not exactly charity. University tuition received from students is another big part of that total. The biggest Catholic charity in the U.S. spends about $4B annually. Another interesting number is Church collections. The average weekly donation in the U.S. is $10, although the source wasn't clear if that was per Catholic or per family. That totals at most $36B. That's not even enough for disaster recovery from one major hurricane.

In Germany, church members are actually taxed by the federal government on behalf of the churches, which then get the money. Try that in the U.S. :-)

It's going to be tricky imagining a Catholic Church rich enough to lead much of the world's response to accelerating climate change. I need a Church that grows exponentially 3-4 decades from now as people afraid of the end times return to God, and to the Catholic Church in particular. I was hoping for up to 2B Catholics by the start of the book, which is about 50% more than the current figure. On the up side, 30-40 years is more than enough time to build big companies like Apple, Facebook, or Google. If the Church could build or inherit that kind of wealth, it could make quite a dent and attract more followers.

I could do the story with current numbers, although the Book of Revelation prophecies a worldwide religion, so it would be better if the Church was much larger to justify it becoming the Antichrist's main target.

I've simply been responding to the suggestions people are making. I don't plan to write in Italian. I couldn't. Based on this discussion, I will either pretend everyone is speaking Italian (rendered into English), and I'll state that in the description a few times where needed, or I'll pretend almost everyone generally speaks English and throw in a few words or phrases in Italian now and then in their dialogue. The latter is what Dan Brown did, and it worked very well.

Thanks to everyone for their ideas.
Dirk

Don't you need to be fluent in the language to do that? At best, I might be able to hire someone to translate a few dozen words or phrases sprinkled throughout.

Mariana, *all* of the dialogue in the book is among native Italians. I can't write an English book with purely Italian dialogue. Who would understand it?

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?").