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Yeah, no kidding. My Kindle purchases are driving up Jeff Bezos's net worth, although the order for a plastic storage unit for my office went to Wal-Mart. It's about the size of a mini fridge, weighs ten pounds, yet ships for just $6 via Canada Post. I bought two and got free shipping. How do they make money doing that? I paid almost $15 just to ship my tax papers with tracking.

If you're bored, I put up a cleaned up version of Joseph Meets Jesus in Galaxy Tales.

My latest chapter, Joseph Meets Jesus, is now up. A whole month since the previous one. Tsk. Only seven to go! The latest chapter includes minor edits from reviewers and a little cleanup. This chapter will be heavily rewritten in a future draft when I replace God with archangels. I'll probably replace Jesus with Jacob/Israel, who gave birth to the original Joseph, the favorite son sold into slavery in Egypt by his brothers. Unfortunately, doing so will eliminate some of the funnier stuff in this chapter.

It could be worse. I could be blue.

By "listings", do you mean on the home page? If you publish multiple chapters in rapid succession, the home page only shows one of the chapters (either the earliest posted or the latest posted, not sure which). This is intentional functionality, otherwise everyone's home page would be filled with nothing but chapters from one person who happens to post a lot in rapid succession. When someone clicks on the one chapter listed on their home page, it takes them to the site's chapter view, where there is a pick list at the top of all active chapters that shows which chapters the reviewer has already read and which is one is next. If you published the chapters with points, then your reviewer will get points for reviewing those chapters, even though they don't all show on the home page.

This evening's episode of Gilligan's Island featured a lion whose crate fell off a ship and floated into the lagoon. Naturally, he escapes and the castaways set out to trap him. They must have forgotten to use the machine gun they captured from the ape in an earlier episode. Costumes this week included Mr. Howell as a circus ringmaster and the skipper dressed like a clown, including a fake round nose. At least they didn't give him clown shoes. They probably had to leave those behind to make room for Mrs. Howell's fur coats. Naturally one would bring those to a three-hour cruise in Hawaii. Interestingly, the lion (in a bamboo cage) was pulled out of the lagoon by the tide and was found by a Navy destroyer floating thousands of miles from land, having drifted for less than a day. That puts Gilligan's Island somewhere between Hawaii and Great Britain. Kudos to the actors for filming with a real lion, no matter how well-trained.

I just checked the word count on each of your three-part posting. They're roughly perfect in size, in my opinion (1 to 2 points). I've posted longer chapters (up to 3 points), but I have a very forgiving group of readers. If the material is compelling and polished, then larger chapters are fine. If they need dozens of edits, shorter chapters are better, otherwise the reviewers may begin skimming.

I stumbled on a book called The Single Gospel, which brings together the four gospels into one narrative in chronological order. I couldn't resist. Yet another book to read, Admittedly, this one should make it possible for me to quickly identify and organize all of the key events in Jesus's life, even more so than the brief pdf I noted above.

Turns out the Gospels are not all organized chronologically. Spent half a day hunting for an intelligible chronological ordering online. Finally found this: http://aschmann.net/BibleChronology/Chr … ospels.pdf
As expected, I identified fifty events that I may want to use in book one. Many are in the same place (mostly in Nazareth, Capernaum, around Galilee, and in Jerusalem).

The site provides two ways to handle this:

1. Edit (overwrite) the existing chapter by simply replacing the contents of the chapter. This allows you to put up the changes for those who haven't yet read it, avoiding the hassle of everyone telling you about the same errors. You do not require points to edit an existing chapter, but it also won't appear on everyone's home pages as a new chapter, and it won't pay points to those who already reviewed it. The system sees it as the same chapter, albeit with different text.
2. Create a new chapter with an incremented version number. This requires points and will appear on everyone's home page as a new chapter, and will pay points to everyone who reviews it. You then have the option of making the old chapter inactive (invisible), which is usually advisable to avoid confusion. One time when you may want to leave the old chapter active is if you want people to be able to compare the old and the new. Even though an inactive chapter is not visible to others, you still have access to it and to all of the reviews associated with it. If you're completely done with the old chapter and its reviews, you can also delete the chapter, which will eliminate the old reviews with it.

Most of the above steps you can find by clicking around inside your portfolio from your menu at the top right of the home screen, and from within the chapter view of individual chapters (i.e., where you normally go to view your chapters). One word of caution, there are two ways to edit a chapter when you're viewing it. The white edit "button" will take you to the 5-step publish wizard that you're already familiar with. From within there, you can do anything you like (simple edit, add chapters, publish, make active/inactive, delete, etc.). In addition to the edit button, there is also an edit "link" further down the screen on the chapter view. The edit link is a shortcut to editing your existing chapter text without replacing the chapter (i.e., option 1 above).

Clear as mud? Feel free to post back if you need more help.

Dirk

I finally figured out a way to handle the ton of notes I'm getting from the pilgrimage/tourist guides. Highlight them in Kindle and create a cross-reference by subject in my notes file for each book. There are probably fewer than fifty subjects I want to highlight (key events/miracles and details of their modern locations), so I don't have to spend weeks copying endless notes out of the books, none of which would be organized. I'll probably skip to the Gospels to create the list of subjects first, then come back to the guides to fill in the cross-references. Fortunately, I only recently began copying notes out of the guides, so I've only lost about a week.

I'll edit a chapter of Galaxy Tales before I dive into the NT study guide.

Lynne, if you want a good laugh, check out the beginning of chapter 33 in my book Into the Mind of God v3. It begins with a two-page news broadcast, including Mama's death. I'm told it's my best opening, by far. Fyi, Lady Kay (mentioned in the news briefing) is named for Kdot, who used to go by the screen name K. Most of my regular reviewers have been included as characters in my story (e.g. Dr. Amy Ess, who brings down civilization in the late 21st century). She appears in chapter two in a short Galactipedia entry.

Ugh. One of my books that follows in the footsteps of Jesus is 500 pages on my cell phone. I sure hope it's shorter on my Kindle. So far I've read two of the five books I bought on this topic, although I have yet to transfer the notes into my Word file. Once those are done, I'm left with the Catholic New Testament study guide. I plan to read the whole thing, but I only need notes from the Gospels, which overlap the aforementioned books. Then the story outlines and my first chapter. Allowing for time to finish editing Galaxy Tales, I'm going to need six months. It should make it easier to write more quickly, though, once that's behind me. I'll probably need to research the Jewish Messiah and Islam's Mahdi before writing book two, but not nearly in this crazy level of detail. I'm debating whether the Antichrist can attack all three religions or, better yet, pit them against each other.