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Thank you, both.

What do you all think of this?

Connor suffers from inexplicable visions that are emotionally and physically painful to him. In book one, they're Old Testament visions. In book two, they cover the past two millennia. In book three, they cover the Book of Revelation. Nice, orderly progression so far.

However, in much of book one, Connor is travelling the Holy Land in Jesus's footsteps because the Church wants to know if he is Christ returned and they're hoping to jog his memory of his former life, of which Connor has no recollection. I should point out that in one of the verses of the New Testament, 12-year-old Jesus already knew to a limited extent that God the Father was His father. Connor is already 14.

In addition to his OT visions, he will also see Jesus's former presence along all the stops they make in the Middle East, mostly in the form of an aura of some kind. Unlike the auras, his involuntary visions are more like real life. It's as if he is actually there in history, a participant in the ancient events.

Do you think readers will be able to keep those two kinds of visions straight? I need both for the story to work. I'm just curious whether it sounds particularly complicated. I'll use consistent terminology for the two: auras vs visions, and he'll never see both at the same time. If I can I'll limit these so there's only ever one of the two in each chapter, although that may not always be possible. The true-to-life visions will be in their own scenes, with Connor as the narrator. The auras will only ever occur when I'm in Father Romano's scenes (Connor's chaperone), with Connor relating what he sees about the auras. I may name the visions "experiences" instead, since he seems to be there for them.

Thoughts?
Dirk

In Space: The Final Frontier. These are the voyages etc.

Candy and Cane

LOL

LOL. I would never use melancholy eyes; got it from a book. I appealed your rules to the Premium court. See Temple's answer there. It's quite good. I usually use expressive eyes in tense situations when showing is too slow. Admittedly, I also like eyes twinkling with mirth. :-)

Thanks, Rachel. Yes, Lehaye is my principle competitor and the primary reason the Protestant Dispensationalist POV dominates the Internet, even among many Catholics. Fortunately, there are 1.2B Catholics in the world who would probably appreciate a Catholic interpretation. I think other Christians might read it too. My story does not follow the Catholic version of Revelation entirely, though. There are plenty of really good study guides if all the reader wants is to understand Revelation. My novels will focus on the Unholy Trinity trying to capture the Church and destroying all three Abraham religions. I still have huge gaps in my outline for books two and the, but book one is coming together nicely. I may put up a trial chapter in a few months, after which I plan to go deep with the rest of my research, probably until early 2019.

Technique question.

My Connor character experiences frequent painful visions. Some are physically painful as he feels the pain of those in the vision, while others are emotionally painful because he has great empathy (one of his supernatural abilities). The visions range from Old Testament violence to Roman Era bloody battles to the Inquisition to gas attacks in WWI and so on. In the spirit of show don't tell, I'm seriously considering showing the visions to the reader as Connor experiences them. He'll narrate the visions. There are enough atrocities throughout history to have one vision per chapter for all three books.

My concern is how disjointed the result will feel. That'll be a lot of page space dedicated to visions that, while connected, won't be revealed as such until the end of the series. The reader will know something strange is going on since the characters will discuss the visions and their possible meaning, but I don't plan to make it easy to figure out before the final reveal.

The reason to have Connor narrate the visions is to create a connection to the rest of the story. For those who saw the original Dune movie, you heard Paul Atreides's thoughts whispered by the actor who played him. Same technique.

Thoughts?