Can anyone tell me if king should be capitalized in the following sentence:
You’ll have to do the same when you’re king.
I'm trying to follow K's "rule of one", so I normally capitalize references to king (e.g., the King is here), except when it's plural, non-specific, etc. In this case, it's the Regent talking to the Crown Prince, so he's not king yet. Caps?
Thanks
Yes. And does it matter if it's: "a remove frontier world, Wild West" vs. "the remote front world, Wild West".
Can someone please tell me if I need a comma before Wild West in the following sentence: Realm agents executed a raid on a suspected Aussie hideout on the remote frontier world Wild West.
I think I do.
Thanks
Dirk
Any word back from Aussie?
I think you're referring to K's recent post to my thread. He has a rape scene that he didn't "show", but his reviewers were asking him to do so.
Thanks, Amy. This is getting tricky. Crispers have an impact, like a body blow, which makes them great for blowing things up (e.g., heads, chests, transmitters, headlights, etc.). They're also great for burning things (bodies or parts thereof). The latter makes them ill-suited for bleeding. I'll have to go back and check, but the only instance I recall where I need profuse bleeding is the colonel in the prologue when his arm is blown off.
Lightsabers are supposed to burn tissue, yet I recall the scene in Star Wars, where Obi-Wan slices of the arm off the guy in the Cantina, and when they showed the arm on the ground it was covered in blood. Ditto when Luke cut off the arm of the snow creature on Hoth.
I could just say "it's space opera, stupid; roll with it." I'm leaning that way.
It's almost done. No body parts, circling birds, or clouds of buzzing flies. Over one hundred dead and injured cadets, though. This will be my most adult chapter. Others like where I destroy the planet are more like Star Wars violence, not really shown. I finally decided to keep your scene in the prologue where Ensign Ecks blows open the chests of two invaders. After a whole chapter of desperate losses, I figured the reader would root for that moment. After which I pull a K and kill off everyone who's left. The student has become the master.
Nuts. I was counting on you tell me my solution was crap, so I could justify slaughtering them all. Having written the battle scene, it comes off as silly, especially because the violence is identical (over a hundred cadets are down, the attackers pick off the ones who are left, etc.), until the reader learns "surprise", just kidding. On the plus side, I found yet another item made my Warheads Et Cetera. :-)
Nice work, Sol.
How about this as the justification for not slaughtering hundreds of cadets? It leverages the Neuer Mond Treaty and Battle Chess, which I like, but it doesn't have the punch of a mass killing.
“What I don’t understand is why they didn’t kill the cadets. Obviously, the attackers’ weapons were set for burn.”
His mother nodded. “The Imperium’s fingerprints are all over this. The assailants followed the Neuer Mond Treaty to the letter. It forbids lethal assaults against minors. The Realm has been trying to negotiate with the Imperium for the removal of the word “lethal” from the treaty for years, but the Imperium has yet to agree. We will respond with equal force, but for better or worse, this event doesn’t qualify as an act of war under the rules of Battle Chess. The dead police officers are considered combatants, making them legitimate targets.”
The other option is to keep the mass killing, but remove some of the gratuitous elements, such as dismembered limbs, circling birds, and buzzing flies.
Thoughts?
Dirk
Thanks, but the scene was too gratuitous for v3. I've been dialing down explicit violence since chapter one. The same number of people get killed, but I show only what I really need to accomplish the story goals. If I follow Neuer Mond Treaty rules, I can still burn/hurl a lot of teens without killing (m)any of them, otherwise it's an overt act of war. I'll also trample some in the resulting stampede. Law enforcement, on the other hand, are like stormtroopers, just dying to be shot.
Another option is to involve the Imperium again. They wouldn't dare kill cadets since that would be an act of war, but limited engagements, known as Battle Chess, among evenly matched members of the military are fair game, already covered by the Neuer Mond Treaty in v3. Technically, it already includes one-on-one combat among shipboard Marines. That would explain why the perpetrators use non-lethal means to attack the cadets. I'm liking this one...
I seem to have hit a brick wall in one of my chapters. I've generally reduced the violence in v3 to broaden the potential audience down to age 14 (from 16 or 18). However, I have a scene from v2 that I need to keep for story/character reasons, but the major event in that chapter is a deadly attack on a parade square filled with teenage cadets. There were some gratuitous elements from v2 I can definitely get rid of (body parts strewn about, birds circling, flies buzzing), but I can't think of a way to further reduce the violence. The attackers are pissed about the hanging of their comrades, so I'm not sure they would be merciful enough to use non-lethal weapons, especially since the guards protecting the parade will shoot to kill. Perhaps some shoot it out with the guards, while the rest set their weapons for "burn" rather than kill? Meh. I suppose all of the attackers could set their weapons for burn in spite of the fact that the guards are shooting to kill, based on the idea that they don't want to bring down the wrath of the government on their families and friends. Iffy. Another possibility is for the attackers to shoot guards to kill, but they throw some form of non-lethal explosive at the cadets in order to cause panic and show what they could have done. Again meh. Or just go with the deadly attack minus the gratuitous elements.
Thoughts?
You can't copyright a title of a book, song, or movie. You also can't copyright a phrase. That's why so many books have the same lines in them.
May the Force be with you?
Boiling fluid sounds cool. :-) I think my problem may be that I'm calling them crispers, which suggests burning. As far as I can find online, burns can leak a lot of fluid, but there's no discussion of bleeding.
I've seen the same book title appear on Amazon multiple times for different books. I'd suggest using a working title if you're concerned about someone using yours.
Amy, I have a question about burns. My characters use crispers in battle, which are basically my version of blaster rifles. In chapter one, I used one to blow the arm off a colonel, who then goes on to bleed profusely from the wound, eventually dropping dead from blood loss. Can a severe burn go on to cause profuse bleeding like that? I have a new scene to write with a lot characters getting hit. I'm wondering how much to make them bleed, if any.
Thanks
Dirk
I suffered from nausea some years ago that lasted for months. I found that special anti-nausea wrist bands available in most drug stores worked very well. They have a little plastic ball sewn into them that presses into the underside of the wrist. Look up "acupressure for nausea" or something like it.
Here's the revised version: Caesar, this procedure is excruciating. Replicated tissue produces a flood of uncontrolled nerve signals for hours, causing intense pain. It’s like being burned alive. It completely overwhelms any safe dose of narcotics I could give you. You must not attempt this without anesthesia.
Interesting. I'm going to wave my space opera wand and ignore that bit. At least until everybody reads it and tells me to get rid of it. :-)
I'm going to put some of that in. The biggest improvement is that I now have consistent growth of nerve cells across both medical scenes.
Thanks, njc.
Dirk
Did you make that up, or is it based on science? Either way, it's good.
When you say all the pain receptors trigger at once, what is 'all' in this case. Assume an instrument like a dental drill, maybe 1/4 inch in diameter at the tip. Given the size of the instrument, I would assume it's comparable to being burned non-stop with a candle flame. Although I've never experienced that (!), I wonder if a 1/4 inch steady burn would cause pain so bad that you're screaming. I could have there be a lingering burning in the new tissue.
Your suggestion leads me to think I should replicate nerves as well, since that would allow for additional pain triggers. That would be consistent with growing the arm, too.
Personally, I like the foul-tasting medication, vomiting, etc. for his vocal cords. It's a bit of a nonsense chapter.
Caligula convinced Nero to forbid anesthesia for Apollo. He either has to live with the scourging scars or undergo the procedure while conscious. I even added a medication he has to sip to protect his vocal cords while he's screaming. The doctor tells him the medication is referred to as sewage by patients and that the stomach rejects it, causing the patient to vomit as much as they drink. Seabrass thought the medication was over the top. :-)
Now I just need a way to reconcile the two aforementioned medical procedures (one creates nerves while the other destroys them), all while making the scourging treatment excruciating. One option would be for the scourging treatment to cause pain by some other mechanism than burning existing nerves in nearby healthy tissues.
Amy, help!
Got it: Maximus Aemilianus. Those were two Roman generals whose names were originally combined in the 15th century to form the name Maximilian. I'll change Maximilian to Maximus and use Aemilianus as the last name. It fits because the evil character has been around since the time of Christ.
Thanks for name suggestions, njc.
4017 human cell replication problem:
As you may recall, Apollo burns off his arm in Act III and orders the doctor not to reattach the nerves when she regrows his arm, which takes only a few days. I can stretch the regrowth indefinitely timewise, since the arm is useless without the nerves, so he doesn't really need it right away for story purposes. However, I'd like him to have a normal working arm eventually, which means nerves can be regrown under the right circumstances.
The problem arises in my latest chapter, Apollo Gets Spanked. Apollo is forced to undergo an excruciating procedure to rapidly treat/heal many scourging wounds on his back without anesthesia. The procedure uses rapid cell replication to fill in and bind the wounds together like a zipper. But what makes it excruciating? Tentatively, I have the procedure burning away at existing nerves in adjacent healthy tissue.
These two forms of cell regrowth strike me as inconsistent. The first can regrow an entire arm, including nerves, whereas the second destroys nerves. The only reason I destroy nerves is to make the procedure painful. Can anyone suggest a different/better reason why treating the scourging wounds would be excruciating?
Thanks
Dirk
