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Or this:

How about this?

The only change I made is to convert references of me to us, since he's praying to protect the whole orphanage, and I cherry-picked parts of the psalm.

Will, people work Bible quotes into their novels all the time, although mostly as simple phrases (e.g. turn the other cheek) without including the whole quote. Nevertheless, that's a great question for my Catholic forum. My second prayer borrows from Jesus's prayer to the Father before his arrest in Gethsemane.

On a related note, someone in the forums pointed out that most (all?) modern Bibles are copyrighted and some charge royalties. Some  book publishers shy away from certain Bibles for just that reason. I may have to write a few letters to Bible publishers before settling on a final version. One of them (can't remember which) allows limited quoting (e.g. 500 short quotes). My preferred source of Bible quotes is the New Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition. Say that three times really quickly.

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.