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Actually mine should say: Joseph studied Andrew as he was led away. Better yet: As they led Andrew away, Joseph studied him.

Thanks

Does anyone have an opinion of the name flesh eater? Since it's my last major draft of book one, I want to revisit a few names. Flesh eater is one word too long in my opinion. If you're going to have a colloquial name for a weapon, I think it would be short, like oozie. I could introduce it as flesh eater, but then refer to it as an eater from then on. Meh. That brought up the idea of heater, which could be a recycled weapon name from Earth's past. Also, light toaster and deep fryer shorten nicely to toaster (you're toast!) and fryer (fry them!). Crisper is also good. For some reason, I like that one a lot.

Thoughts?

I almost wet myself when the redheaded Bilbo popped up.

misterindirect

Thanks, Janet. I lowercased perimeter because there is one per palace on Earth, so there is more than just one. Based on a bit of research, emblem is lowercase even though Coat of Arms is capitalized (at least in Britain). As a result, I went with imperial palace (lowercase) for consistency, but will name the palace as you suggest.

As for imperial family, I went lowercase. Otherwise I would end up with caps on Imperial Family but lowercase on imperator, which is wrong. I don't want to capitalize imperator since that causes a cascade of other inconsistencies. It looks weird to me to put royal family and imperial family lowercase (ditto for imperator), but I'm sure I'll get used to it. If not, I'll be back. :-)

Thanks for your help.

If it helps, here's mine: Not even the End of Act 1 of v3 of Book 1 of 5.

Donkey droppings!

USA! USA! USA!

Opinions, please (as if I could stop you).

You may recall that in the chapter entitled the Shadow of Death, the royal palace is attacked and the royal family is taken hostage. There is s scene where the ringleader, Cain, orders his son to kill Joseph, but he refuses to do it. Cain then pulls the trigger himself, but nothing happens. He grabs his son's gun and tries to fire. Again nothing. The queen (a regent in v3) reveals the big secret that the intruders' guns were automatically disabled when they entered the palace. She then reveals the only working weapon, a basic blaster, as opposed to the intruders' assault rifles. Cain charges her, Joseph jumps in, gets beat up, the queen eventually fires at Cain, saving the day.

I took a lot of heat from several people because she waited until Joseph had been "shot at" twice before revealing why the weapons failed. My rationale was that, even though she had the only working weapon, the royal family was outnumbered (4 to 3) and the intruders all wore body armor. There's no way she could have taken them all down with a blaster before they charged, which could have easily given them control of the blaster. She was stalling, waiting for reinforcements.

I've reworked the scene somewhat, but it's still largely as described above, perhaps with better explanations of her motives and a more powerful hidden weapon (a rifle).

Given the above rationale, is the delay in firing reasonable? Basically, the queen waits until there is no other choice.

Thoughts?