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My thanks to everyone for their well wishes. Whatever I had is pretty much gone. I won't know for a few days if I had Covid. Felt like the flu and food poisoning combined. Thankfully, I didn't need to go to the hospital. I do, however, have to buy new shower doors. Lost my balance and crashed into them a few nights ago. Fortunately, they weren't glass. That would have been really bad. Still managed to give myself some permanent scars, though.

As if my writing wasn't going slowly enough, I appear to have caught Covid in spite of having practically shut myself off from the world. There are practically no cases of this stupid disease in Calgary when compared to the total population count, and I still got it. If the early studies are correct, that having this disease doesn't confer long immunity, we are in for one hell of a decade. A recent camp outing of hundreds of kids under somewhat careless conditions ended up giving the disease to almost half of them in just a few days. How does one reopen schools with a virus like that? Say goodbye to eat-in restaurants, bars, cruises, air travel, gyms, cramped stores, etc.

Oh, I don't know. I would have loved to have had interludes fleshing out the past of the universe he created even in book one. Instead, we have the prequels/sequels by his son, whose characters I rarely warmed up to. Admittedly, I doubt Frank Herbert would have written 13 more novels (and counting) in the Dune universe. I suppose I should be grateful there is a Dune franchise at all, given that FH died before he could finish book seven. There are a lot of people who would pay good money to see the notes he left behind for that book.

Also, you should make the old chapter (v1) inactive, otherwise both versions will show up in the chapter pick list.

Oh, actually it was five novels. Explains why I haven't written anything in a while.

Almost finished with Children of Dune. Not soon enough. The plot is good, but for a very smart man, Frank Herbert couldn't communicate his advanced concepts to be understood no matter how many times I read them. I found myself skimming after too many attempts to understand his  prattle about prescience and time, including his attempt to describe it mathematically. Add philosophy, religion, politics, and genetics, mix them all together, and it's a mess. No wonder I haven't read this book in a long time. As Last Jessica said once, when religion and politics ride in the same cart, the whirlwind follows. I did however discover that Paul never saw the extinction of humans in his partial visions for the Golden Path. I thought in Dune Messiah that that's what he was fighting with his Jihad.

Big disconnect between Winds of Dune (which follows Dune Messiah in the timeline) and Children of Dune, which was Frank Herbert's original sequel to Messiah. In Winds of Dune, Jessica breaks with the Bene Gessirit in a way that seemed irreparable. They tried to destroy her using "guilt-casting", which leaves the victim to suffer severe and irreparable mental suffering in the form of feelings of crippling guilt. Yet, in Children of Dune she returns to Dune at the urging of the Sisterhood to investigate Alia's fall to the Baron's inner presence, and to test Paul's children for the same form of abomination. If I remember correctly, her tests of young Leto (force feeding him spice) actually forces him to merge with a powerful ruler from the distant past to avoid his mind being overthrown by the personalities in Other Memory.

Woohoo! I topped 1000 points. Time write something.

I had to edit the chapter anyway to get rid of the exploding head. I'm going to save that for the last demon in the book. Adding new Level V armor took just a few sentences.

Moving on to rewrite the Vatican Briefing...
Dirk

I'm debating creating a fictitious new level 5 body armor that allows the police officers shot in chapter six to shake off the shotgun blasts to their bodies. They do that now, but it's unrealistic since even level 4 armor would result in a hospital stay if hit by a shotgun.

The other option is to add five more tactical officers to the villa search, holding them in reserve outside the villa in case more officers are needed inside, such as when the first two officers get shot.

Interesting timing. I just reached a point in Winds of Dune where Paul explains to his mother about his visions and the reasons for the Jihad. He tells her that he became trapped by his visions the moment he became Maud'dib in the desert after their flight from the Harkonnens. Had he died before then, the events never would have happened, but then there would have been no saving humanity with Leto's Golden Path in the distant future.