Slight change to the end of the exorcism chapter. A little foreshadowing/prophesying.

The nun said, “Connor, the reverend mother is asking for you.”
He walked to where she lay on the floor and knelt beside her.
She took his hands in hers and kissed them, tears streaming down her face. Her irises had turned from red to a natural brown. “Thank you, my child!” She swallowed with difficulty and struggled to continue. “Beware the road ahead… dark… everything depends…” She squeezed his hands. “God is with… Always…” She released his hands and breathed her last.
Connor closed her eyes. “The angels await you, Reverend Mother.”

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Dune & God Emperor of Dune by Frank Herbert
The Heechee Saga by Frederik Pohl

Kill me now. I just learned about the Dagger of Mortis in Star Wars. There's a whole history (dark/light) about it in the Clone Wars, and it may appear in Star Wars 9. I'm really hoping it doesn't play a huge role, if any, in the movie. I'm within a few chapters of introducing one myself, which was always intended to be central to the climax of the trilogy. I'm screwed if it's central to the Emperor's demise.

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I took a look at one of your chapters. They appear to be formatted like everyone else's, so formatting shouldn't be a problem, unless I've misunderstood something. Once you open a specific chapter here on the site for editing, an edit box appears around the text. That's when you use Chrome's Find feature to mark all of the text items that match your search. It actually looks inside the text box for all instances of the search words and highlights them so you can them quickly. Unfortunately, you then have to manually change each one, but you shouldn't have to reformat anything, unless it's to manually apply italics, bold, etc. I don't know of a find-and-replace feature, although I've never looked for one. For minor name changes, it should go relatively quickly.

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I should have added that the two ways I suggested have to be done one chapter at a time.

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If you're using Google Chrome, you can use its Find function to highlight all instances of a word in a chapter, then replace them one at a time.  You have to be in TNBW edit mode for your chapter. The other way is copy your new chapter from your manuscript into the same chapter here in the site. Use Ctrl-c to copy (eg from a Word document), open your site chapter in edit mode, hit ctrl-a in the text box to select the entire old version of the chapter, then ctrl-v to paste in the chapter from Word that contains all your changes. Then save it. Hope that makes sense.

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Ray is right. Don't publish it to the internet if the book is to be sold in stores/Amazon/etc.

njc wrote:

But does this trouble most readers, or only those looking for trouble?

LOL

Violá!

While the senior exorcist continued to pray, Connor clenched his eyes shut. His brows bunched, and he turned his head slowly from side to side, like a radar dish.

That's a combination of mine and Temple's, although I ruined hers by keeping the radar dish ... for now. :-)

My thanks to everyone for an interesting/helpful discussion.
Dirk

My latest attempt. The reference to radar suggests he's scanning, which is confirmed the next time he speaks.

While the senior exorcist continued to pray, Connor closed his eyes and furrowed his brow. He turned his head slowly from side to side, like a radar dish.

Technically, he might still be smelling a fart. :-)

Thanks, Temple. He's actually doing more than concentrating. He's sensing things others cannot. Think of it as scanning from side to side with his mind. I want to avoid "tell" words and realized that the technical POV slip is a reasonable assumption for the POV character to make. Why is it that we can allow the POV character to use all of his senses down to level of minutiae, but don't allow him to use his brain to make a commonsense assumption, allowing for a faster pace? The slip is a little jarring, even to me, because I've had modern POV rules drilled into me. Doesn't mean I always agree with them.

Just thinking of loud...
Dirk

While, technically, the words in concentration are a head-hop, i'm leaning increasingly to the idea that the words are a reasonable assumption by Romano, although not necessarily a guarantee that they're the correct assumption. It's not always possible to show without killing the pace, and I find "tell" words like seemed to, apparently, as if, etc. to just fill the sentences with words that add nothing to the scene, except to demonstrate to the world our understanding of how to avoid head-hops. I'd argue this particular case is clearer without the extra verbiage.

Absolutely. Go for it JP.

I'm curious of what others think about the first example shown below. It includes a potential POV slip, highlighted in bold. My question is: why is it a POV slip? The sentence is from the POV of Father Romano, a priest in the room where an exorcism is underway, and he makes a reasonable assumption as to why Connor has closed his eyes, furrowed his brow, and is turning his head. Connor has healing gifts and was brought into the room to see if he could help explain why the exorcism is failing. Technically, Connor could be smelling a fart or experiencing a migraine, but given the context, those are unlikely. Besides, even if the priest is wrong, it was his POV and he's entitled to make the assumption that Connor is concentrating. Isn't he?

Connor closed his eyes and furrowed his brow in concentration. He turned his head slowly from side to side as the senior exorcist continued to pray.

Compare this to something more classic:

Connor watched the chief exorcist closely as the priest prayed over the reverend mother.

I think most people would agree there is no POV slip in the second example. However, how does Romano know that Connor is watching the exorcist, as opposed to Connor admiring the exorcist's shoes or looking at the possessed woman lying right next to the exorcist? There's really no way for Romano to know for sure what Connor is looking at, yet I've seen many stories where a reasonable assumption is made about what a character is watching, listening to, smelling, etc. Romano could be wrong about any of those reasonable assumptions. Why then should we exclude Romano making a reasonable assumption about why Connor is doing what he's doing?

For those who think my first example is not a POV slip, imagine if I simply said Connor closed his eyes. Here, too, Romano could still make the assumption that Connor is concentrating, although it's a more obvious slip at that point.

FYI, I'm not trying to eliminate the POV slip in the first example. There's enough information to simply eliminate the bolded text and allow the reader to make the reasonable assumption. I'm more focused on why Romano can't make the reasonable assumption himself.

Thoughts?

Thanks
Dirk

My Galaxy Tales was loaded with characters and mayhem. I didn't realize it until I looked at the row count in my spreadsheet. Some were historical, though, such as Dr. Amy Ess.

Oops. Misunderstood your last comment on first read. I'm trying to limit the body count, although I'm not doing very well. Alessandro was unplanned, as was the reverend mother, but both seemed obvious once I wrote the scenes. Since they're both destined for heaven, it's not so bad. The dead gravedigger evolved out of a prior version of scene 1.2 (murder of the first cardinal), but I decided it might be useful to keep him dead. Not sure yet.

Technically, there are really only two villains in book one, both of whom are needed in the whole trilogy. Book two adds a third as the Unholy Trinity reaches full strength.

Eek! I've introduced 21 named characters in 12 scenes. Some have only bit parts and then disappear, but still...

Dirk B. wrote:

POV question. Since the following is from Father Romano's POV, Kdot rightly pointed out that the second sentence is a bit of a POV slip. I've since made it worse by adding "in concentration" to the first sentence.

Connor closed his eyes and furrowed his brow in concentration. He turned his head slowly from side to side, as if sensing something that others could not. He shivered.

Interesting. It occurs to me that one could keep the above POV slips based on the fact that these are Romano's assumptions. The rest of the chapter is also written from Romano's POV, and he makes other assumptions that are routine in novels, such as saying 'Connor looked at X.' In the latter case, how would Romano know exactly what Connor is looking at? Connor might be admiring the exorcist's shoes, rather than the exorcist's actions. Romano's thoughts (whether correct of incorrect) could be considered part of his POV as well.

Naturally, this would never get past any experienced reviewers on this site, but it is annoying to have to use words like "as if", "probably", "seemed to", etc.

Dirk

Sol, recently I went looking for mikejackson1127 using the Search Writer function. I couldn't remember his exact user ID, so I searched for mike. I got a match on lots of Mikes, but not his. Fortunately, I was able to find him by scrolling through my reviews. It would be nice if the search function could handle partial matches.

Thanks
Dirk

Note to self: expired diet Pepsi tastes nasty.

I took the easy way and eliminated all references that lead the reader to expect that Connor becomes possessed by Legion. Close enough.

I'm not in the mood to write a new chapter, so I decided to take another crack at Connor becoming possessed by Legion. The damn scene screams for the possession. To differentiate the transfer of the demons from the one in The Exorcist, I can do it by Palermo (the reverend mother) biting into his throat or simply by kissing him.

The tricky part is that once Connor is possessed, there are up to three possible voices coming out of him: his own normal voice, his supernatural commanding voice (deep/reverberates), and the many simultaneous voices of Legion. There will be a conversation between these voices, with Connor on one side and Legion on the other. I could potentially differentiate them by using 'Connor said' and 'Legion said', although that's inconsistent with how I wrote the rest of the scene, where Palermo is identified as Connor's external opposition. Palermo has the many voices of the demons throughout the scene, but Connor can't identify them as Legion until fairly late. Even then, I continue to refer to her as Palermo throughout, for consistency. Does it matter if I shift from 'Palermo' as the external opposition to 'Legion' as Connor's internal opposition? Worse, every physical action Connor takes must be referred to as 'Connor did X', regardless of who (Connor or Legion) caused the action, since the POV character (Romano) can't tell which of the two is acting, only who is talking. This has the potential to be very confusing.

Thoughts?

Thanks
Dirk

Yup. Thanks.

Totally forgot that Romano is supposed to start unraveling because of his guilt at the death of his former lover. Changed the beginning of the chapter to this:

Father Romano returned to Sant’Eugenio Hospital the following morning to pick up Connor. As he walked down the hallway toward the boy’s room, Romano thought he heard someone familiar call his name. He turned around and saw Antonio, his dead lover, lying on the floor, his body broken and blood gushing from his nose and mouth.

Romano ran toward him, but when he blinked, the man was gone. A chill ran down the father’s spine and his heart pounded. He stood there for a time, unsure of what he had seen. Eventually, he dismissed it as resulting from his own guilt. He resumed walking toward Connor’s room, where he found the boy dressed and ready to go. “How are you feeling?”