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>>A few verses in the Bible?
>I found a website claiming 25 verses on the AC. And they are all bad.

Do any of them say he didn't love his mother? :-) Keep in mind, for the second draft, all this will occur on an alternate timeline, so I can mess with things without invalidating the Bible.

>I try to do that BUT I at the core of my Tribe story is something which will possibly piss off large swaths of Christendom.
Interesting. I don't really consider your story to have deviated much from Christian beliefs, although you would know better than I would. Certainly, all of the non-Christian gods in your first draft would have raised eyebrows, although they are mostly demons, so I think you'd get a pass on those, as long as you don't overpopulate the story.

Christians generally don't mind stories that drift a little from accepted beliefs if the changes make it a more uplifting pro-Christian story. For example, Jacob Marley (Scrooge's business partner) appeared as a ghost. Even if one said it was his soul that appeared, what would a soul be doing outside of heaven or hell? The Catholic interpretation treats Marley as someone in purgatory who can't get to heaven until he convinces Scrooge to change his ways. I don't think anyone would have a serious problem with his presence in the story, as written.

Same with "It's a Wonderful Life". An angel took the main character (I forget his name) to see an alternate vision of the future in which the character was present to watch but not interfere, much as Scrooge had to. How many Christians will object to the idea of angels with wings and the idea that an angel has to earn his wings? The idea of wings has been around since the 4th century but it's not in the Bible.

Not liking your own story would turn it into a real chore to write, and you would probably never finish. I had a very hard time finishing Connor v1 because I was burned out and sick of the story as far back as 2022. That's why I was considering making the three books into one, consisting of three novellas. But when I thought about it, book one alone clearly needs to be a separate, full novel. Based on my planning of books 2 and 3, I believe the same will be true for them as well. I was laughing last night as I reread my notes for books 2 and 3 on my cell phone. The notes just scrolled on endlessly. There are some duplicate notes, especially because I would write up notes for certain scenes more than once as I thought of better ways to write them.

To avoid further burnout, I intend to write key scenes of books two and three as short stories whenever I need a break from the 2nd draft of "Rise of Connor".

Because no good idea goes unpunished, having the superweapon fire beams powerful enough to tear fissures into the fabric of space doesn't work since the superweapon fires EM energy, and the biggest objects in our universe give off way more EM energy than a superweapon ever could, without causing tears in space. I'll add that idea to the "kill me now" pile.

However, if the superweapon fires alterphasic energy (i.e., energy out of phase with our universe), that could have as little or as much destructive power as I want, and since alterphasic energy comes from outside our universe, it has a strong tendency to return to its own universe, starting from right after the energy is fired until a second or two later, when it has all disappeared. That's enough time for enough of the fired energy to disappear that what remains is sufficient to severely damage St. James's destroyers but not obliterate them in one shot.

Although energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can be "borrowed" from elsewhere in the multiverse, at least temporarily. However, in order to be able to get energy from another universe, one has to simultaneously inject some of our universe's energy into it. The multiverse dictates how much energy of type X you have to pump into another universe in order to be able to extract energy of type Y from the other universe. As a result, the Hercules has to pump a ton of EM energy into another universe, so it can extract the type of energy from there that it intends to fire. Attempting to generate all that EM energy eventually overloads the Hercules's annihilator, crippling the ship.

I have most of the alterphasic solution written up, and it holds together. Hopefully, I won't think of anything that blows it out of the water.

Good night, Seattle, we love you!

For the scenes to work, Connor would need to be bisexual. He starts with a pair of twin, Goth girlfriends, with whom he regularly has threesomes, which worries Satan because Connor is supposed to be acting Christ-like. This is part of Connor acting outrageously to get even with Satan for creating Connor simply to settle the wager with God. He's also pissed off that Satan raped his mother for sport so Connor could be conceived, which is what ultimately seals Satan's fate.

After Satan send the twins away, Connor ups the ante by seducing a slightly older teenage male and bringing him into the Vatican as a lover.

> This opens up a world of discussions. It's that what you want?
Heck yes!!! Who wouldn't want their story to generate a lot of discussion?

There are two possible ways that a homosexual could come into existence. 1) God creates the soul and makes it gay. That in turn drives the resulting male to be gay. Or 2) God creates the soul, which has no orientation, but random DNA + nurture results in the male becoming gay. I'm ignoring a third possibility, which is that the soul has a "normal" orientation (say heterosexual for a male), but the individual's DNA+nurture somehow overrides the orientation intended by God when he creates the soul.

I extend that argument/question to gender. Do the souls created by God have a gender, or are souls genderless, meaning the gender is determined solely by ones more or less random mixing of DNA? If it's God who determines the gender when He creates the soul, that would mean somewhere in the process, He intervened to determine which sperm cell reaches the ovum. However, if the soul is genderless, then God need merely create the soul and rely on nature (more or less random mixing of DNA) to determine the gender.

>Three of the big religions (Jewish, Christian, Islam), do not support the thesis.
Which thesis?

They do get blown up, but I don't want them pulverized in one shot. The sister ships have roles to fill in the battle. I'm trying to keep the chapter mostly unchanged (since I like it as is), except for the details of the superweapon from hell. It's my own fault for trying to create something more interesting (e.g., firing through hyperspace, firing through time, firing something that shoots right through the shields as if they don't exist, etc.). The mattergy weapon was nothing more than a big version of supernovas using a ridiculous concept for the tech.

I'm going to try revising my latest version such that the energy in the fired shot is so great that it tears fissures into the fabric of space (to God knows where, it doesn't matter), and much of the energy is lost through those fissures, yet enough makes it to the target such that it's still a very powerful weapon, just not insanely so.

Once more unto the breach!
[censored!]

Some variant of mattergy is beginning to sound better all the time. Grrr.

Kill me now. If I convert electromagnetic energy to some other form (call it hokey energy) that can be fired "like" EM radiation (e.g. a beam out of a superweapon), am I not still stuck with the inverse square law? I had hoped that a hokey beam would diverge much more quickly than EM radiation, but now I wonder if that even makes sense given the laws of physics...

Thanks, njc.

"Erupts" is another one, referring to the annihilator. I suppose if the annihilator erupts, one could also say the ship erupted. By this I mean, erupts = implode/explode, although how the concept of an eruption is similar to implode/explode is beyond me.

litbang?
imexes? imxes? (the last one is good, better yet imXes)
imbang?

I think my atreidite is close to shipstones. It started out life as something simply intended to store energy inside a stardrive prior to a jump. I plan to change that so atreidite will be the energy store that serves to store a ship's reserve power, which can then be used for any purpose requiring augmented power (the stardrive, supernova weapons in active combat, augmented shields, etc.).

Cool idea: Satan used a rather unethical geneticist to make the gene changes that were needed to give Connor supernatural powers at conception. Satan somehow (details TBD) helped the geneticist home in on the correct genes, but those had to be tested on other humans to ensure Connor would not be harmed by messing with something as complicated as the human genome, which is a mess of genes that often perform more than one function each, and which are not necessarily related. Those tests went on for decades.

In doing those tests, the geneticist discovered that you could modify the genes that cause baby ducks to follow their mothers, except in Connor's case, Satan took Campagna's place, giving Connor a powerful, unnatural instinct to follow his father, which translates to him doing what Satan tells him, at least until the end of book one, when Satan pisses Connor off by telling him that deciding the outcome of the wager with God is why Connor was born (not love, as Connor had been led to believe).

Well, it turns out that the gene for controlling the aforementioned instinct also plays a powerful role in the human lifespan. You can enable the gene for the required instinct, but if you later try to disable it again, the human carrier of that gene will experience an irreversible decline in health (exact symptoms TBD), culminating in total death in at most two years.

The geneticist documented key parts of his work in a journal because he came to suspect that Satan would eventually kill him. That journal makes its way into Bishop Romano's hands, who shows it to Connor as part of their ongoing effort to turn him away from Satan. Connor decides to have the gene disabled at the end of book two, when he's sixteen, to break free, even though he'll die as a result. Coincidentally, Connor is eighteen in book three. Isn't it cool the way the timing of that worked out?

Naturally, his long-suffering mother is devastated by all this but understands the need for it, and supports Connor's decision. Not sure yet if she falls off the wagon at that point.

So, now, Connor is in danger of being purged by Adam from the soul they share, and even if he somehow avoids that, his body will die anyway. So, he's screwed no matter what.

Gotta keep your main characters suffering. :-)

Sol, since the extra exposure for NextBigWriter members using the new Booksie feature is likely to result in more new members here (yay!), can you please fix the confusing text related to quickees (once on the Profile tab and two times on the Quickees tab)? It's a feature typically used by new members who don't yet have a lot of connections for private messaging, and many of them accidentally send themselves quickees.

The current text has wording roughly like this: "This is where you can leave a message for the writer." However, members who receive new quickees read them on their own Profile tab or their own Quickees tab, then try to reply to that quickee by typing in the quickee text field on that same tab (theirs), thinking they're responding to the quickee when, in reality, they're just sending themselves one and never hear back from the member to whom they intended to send the quickee. Many new members run into this.

A very simple fix would be to replace "the writer" with the member name of the member to whom the quickee will be sent.
If I'm on my own Profile or Quickees tab, I would then see "This is where you can leave a message for Dirk B." and I would know not to use that field from my own Profile and Quickees tabs.
And if I were on, for example, Cathy's Profile or Quickees tab, I would see: "This is where you can leave a message for C.E. Jones."

Thanks
Dirk

peterwilliam too; has a post in Premium