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Connect with Janet Taylor-Perry here on the site. English teacher, author, and part-time editor. There are others too. If you can post your request to Premium, you should do so.

Thanks, Karin. The idea of the prophecy being wrong is a good fit. I hadn't considered it since both boys are told about their destinies by God, or at least a voice that claims to be Him. The prophecy is only as real as the deity (as opposed to mental illness). I need to dedicate some time to making that connection more obvious.

It's too bad Google or Apple don't compete head-on with Amazon in the self-publishing space. It would take a Goliath to break Amazon's stranglehold on the book industry. Barnes & Noble should be the obvious competitor, but they can't compete as long as they're weighed down by brick and mortar overhead.

For me, it's inline reviews, especially now that we can see/print all inline feedback at once. Love that!

Dirk

Max, are you aware that the group forum posts shown on the home page come and go without regard to whether you've read them or not? I'm all for a forum concept that brings a sense of community back to the site, but I'd at least like to see, at a glance from the home page, what's happening in the groups that I'm already a member of. That ought to be an easy change.

I agree with Tom. They're like book covers. They're the first impression you make on readers out of a sea of books on Amazon. The next step is to have a compelling book summary for the back of the book. I usually advise new writers on the site to write their TNBW book summary as if it were the back of an actual book, so they capture the interest of more potential readers.

On the home page, if would be very handy to have a checkmark to the left of each work (chapters, shorts, essays, etc.) showing which ones I've reviewed. That way, when I see something in the list of books or my connections, I'll know at a glance whether or not I've already reviewed it. This would probably be most useful for books, where we see that someone has posted a chapter (e.g., 17) but don't readily know if that's the latest of their chapters that we've already reviewed vs. a new one to be read.

Thanks.
Dirk

I hope you find a release from all that stress, Karen. I'd recommend finding a new job, but that can be very stressful too. I know the feeling about not having the energy to write, although for different reasons than yours. I decided to stop writing at least until I get my office organized and my taxes done. So, however long that takes, I'll just be reading for a while. I  don't know about you, but I always find starting a new chapter is the biggest hurdle. Once I've planned it, I can usually write it within a week, but it takes me several weeks to get up the desire to do the next chapter. At the rate I'm going this is going to be a five year odyssey just for the first book.

Dave, thank you very much. That's great to know. Also, cool that memory is passed to our offspring.

I only know Annelie through her FB posts, but I'll keep her in mind.

Thanks
Dirk

Thanks, Vern. I usually research way more than I use. I'm sure we all do. It will probably distill down to just one to two paragraphs, but I'd like it to be at least theoretically possible. I posted my question on a few science forums as well. If the real answer is too complicated to write simply, then I'll probably just write it as a rushed vaccine that caused sterility in the kids.

However, as a result of this exercise, I realized that the human engineering disaster can be the same one that causes civilization to collapse in our century, leading to the future world as I've written it. If I weren't doing the homework and thinking about it, the book would have had two major disasters to describe instead of one.

I went through the same exercise with a future version of an auto recycling plant that allowed me to create a very simple solution that accomplished what the scene needed without totally ignoring reality. Otherwise, I would have had acids, and one-way force fields, huge vents, etc., none of which is needed in the version I eventually settled on.

I can't wait to write the physics for dogfights in space.

Dirk

I think this may be easier than I thought. Most of us are carriers of one disease or another due to recessive genes. It's only when you pair up two recessive genes that you get an actual disease. Given that, I think it would be easy to create an effect with an undertested vaccine. You vaccinate the population in one generation causing recessive gene damage in that generation, leading to a pair of damaged genes in 25% of the offspring, who then have an actual disease. In this case, the disease is sterility.

How's my logic?
Dirk