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Unfortunately, life intrudes. My mother is in the hospital and needs to go in a care home, so I'm scrambling to find something suitable before they dump her in the first available one. Calgary is a sprawling city, so it could take up to an hour each way if they put her too far away. Also, my car got hit, so I have to deal with that too.

I'm still tweaking the first three scenes since I don't have enough free time to focus on new stuff. Back to semi-normal in a few weeks.

Thanks for hanging in there.
Dirk

I took out the above prayer from scene one and made it a prayer spoken by Connor in scene three, when the fog first tries to approach him from under an exterior door in the chapel. In scene one, Romano uses Psalm 140, but without a direct quote since it's too long:

Kdot, thanks for your suggestions.

Your character doesn't lack for flaws, but they're boring flaws. You've done a good job conveying how pathetic he is, but as Kdot said, he needs something that makes him interesting. Figure out something that is over-the-top interesting and introduce it early in the first chapter before readers have gone much beyond page one. Ideally your first paragraph and first sentence should really hook them. One idea I used in Galaxy Tales is that my two MCs hear voices. In their case it's mostly God, but you could have him talking to just about anyone. Pick your favorite character from history and do an extended dialogue between them, using it to show how lazy he is. Imagine all the inner dialogue your character could have with this mental traveling companion throughout your story.

Or not. :-)

Kdot, how about this for the closing of scene 1 (the healing of Alessandro)?

As Romano turned a corner, he thought he saw a shadowy figure surrounded by swirling fog walking away from him. He blinked to be sure he was seeing correctly. The figure and the fog were gone. He walked down the hallway. It was so cold he could see his breath. Romano decided what he saw must have been an illusion, although the freezing temperature was real. He changed course, headed for the boiler room. Hopefully, whatever was wrong with the furnace could be fixed for little money. However, when he passed an air vent, he found it was blowing warm air. He stopped and frowned. What the devil?

My hobby is asking seemingly harmless questions that mushroom into nuclear war with hypersonic weapons. If that doesn't make the hair on your neck stand/stand up, then I/me don't know what will.

Thanks, Bill.

Nice changes. Thank you. The head-hopping police already nailed me for a few errors. I'll have to fix it before Seabrass sees it. Tsk.

It's amazing how similar Marilyn's and Temple's reviews are. They find the same stuff and even suggest the same revisions. I told them they may have been separated at birth.

As noted in a post in Premium, I keep running into a problem when referring to characters by one name only throughout my story. It's the repetition that reviewers highlight, and rightly so. Temple suggested I use more pronouns, relying on the reader to figure out who I'm referring to based on context. See the example below based on her approach. The other approach, which I used to use, is to refer to characters in more than one way. So, I would refer to Romano as Romano or priest to break up the monotony. JP Lundstrom thought that was fine, although Seabrass has tried to steer me clear of that approach. I've been trying to avoid the latter approach since I think it creates distance between the reader and Romano by referring to him as priest. For those reading this, how do you avoid the repetition?

Thanks
Dirk

Before:

After:

Cool item. According to a new in-canon Star Wars comic, Darth Sidious (aka Emperor Palpatine) impregnated Anakin Skywalker's mother without her knowledge. It would be easy to do for a Force user. This means that Anakin, Luke, and Kylo Ren are all descended from Palpatine. Without access to the comic, I don't know the details, but his tale to Anakin about Darth Plageous the Wise being able to manipulate the midichlorians to create life takes on a whole new level. It's fascinating what you can do when you toss thirty years of canon out the window.