I have a hunch that Ben is trying to peddle the services of that link he included, having referred to it as the "best book publishing" options. And he's using a temp email service (mailshan.com), which are often considered suspect by admins, and hasn't done a single review on this site.
Ben, if this is legit, please refrain from throwing in links that seem so obviously intended to sell, otherwise your account may get suspended.
Thanks
Dirk
Sol, can you please assist member Penfold? He's tried uploading several different image formats for his cover page but none work. Also, please post here what the solution or workaround is as this keeps coming up, and I don't know how to assist people.
Thanks
Dirk
LoL. Yes, I did. He dabbles in a lot of stuff, some of which finds its way into his stories. He's done photography, journalism, writing, internet radio host, etc. and has turned many of them into moneymaking ventures. They obviously did something right because they owned a very large acreage outside of Calgary (just downsized to the townhouse next door) and raised six kids, with lots of pets, chickens, etc. He said his radio gig takes less than an hour of his time and he's able to do it from home. I think it's then bundled together by a media company with the songs he discusses and plays for a good 6+ hours in total each week. He's trying to get me to do an interview for his show, also related to music.
christircouchc is a spammer account and is now closed. Buyer beware.
christircouchc is a spammer account and is now closed. Buyer beware.
I'll have some of it in the story itself since many Catholics erroneously think the Left Behind series is also an accepted Catholic interpretation. I'll probably do it as part of a humorous moment involving Moses and Elijah, whom the group encounters yet again somewhere during the Holy Land trip. They'll be sitting on a park bench somewhere reading and comparing two books: one of the books from the Left Behind series and the other a Catholic study guide for Revelation (or an annotated Catholic Bible), and both men will be shaking their heads at the novel. :-)
There is already a moment in the first draft, which I'll keep, where Father Bianchi, the tour guide, explains how Moses & Elijah are working off a non-Catholic interpretation of Revelation; he'll suggest to them that they read a Catholic study guide.
There will still be hints in the book that Moses & Elijah are more than they seem, although I won't show them using any supernatural powers until the final scene of the book, where they appear at St. Peter's Square and stare at Connor from across the square with glowing eyes while drawing lighting into their staffs. Technically, suggesting they may be the real Moses & Elijah is a Protestant interpretation, but I think it's a funny moment for those who know their denominations.
Question: Do you always write Revelations in plural? Gemini says the correct name is the Book of Revelation but that many people use it in the plural despite that.
Congratulations, Randall. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy. :-)
The angels and demons in the series are ethereal beings with (ethereal) wings, and angels can take physical form to make themselves look human, but with wings. Both angels and demons can fly in their ethereal state, and angels can fly in their physical form as well.
Demons lost both their ability to assume physical form and their physical/angelic beauty when they lost the War in Heaven, which many (most?) Catholics believe happened at the dawn of Creation. Augustine believed the separation occurred when God separated the day from the night in Genesis, a metaphor for good and evil.
Demons in physical form are the corporeals, which are dead human bodies, so whatever a living human can do in the story, a corporeal can do too, which excludes walking on water, which is a trick only Connor can do. Corporeals are generally much stronger than humans and perhaps faster (I haven't decided their speed yet). The only time demons in a physical form can fly is if they possess a (non-human) animal that can fly (e.g., the demonic locusts Connor fights at the Sea of Galilee during the prologue, and the demonic birds that attack their vehicle on the road in Israel).
My demons don't heal the sick. But they can heal signs of decay in the dead carcasses they wear as bodies. Also, for corporeals to work in the story, they can access/inherit the memories of the dead hosts if they get to the bodies quickly enough (before the brain cells die).
To ensure consistency across the trilogy, I had to make it that demons can modify the bodies they inhabit. In the case of human bodies, they modify the bodies to "heal" limited signs of rot in corpses; in the locusts, they are able to create scorpion-like stingers at the back of locust bodies. I suspect the author of Revelation didn't intend for demonic locusts to be demon-possessed living locusts with modified tails, but it avoided a big inconsistency of having demons be able to assume the physical forms of lower animals but not the physical form of humans, hence they can "modify" whatever creature they inhabit, rather than changing themselves from ethereal into physical form directly.
Given how severe the corporeal bishop's reaction to swallowing holy water was, it should cause something far more severe than itching, even in De Rosa. However, I don't yet take advantage of the fact that even Satan is at least somewhat susceptible to holy water. In early version of the book's first draft, I had something similar to itching for De Rosa's reaction to that Christian chain locked around his neck, but readers knew almost immediately that he was a likely bad guy. So, I modified the effect of the chain to cause him stigmata pain/wounds whenever he murders one of the cardinals.
For what it's worth, demons cannot kill the pope, not even Satan. It would be too painful to try since he is the Vicar of Christ (he's protected from demons by God). That's where Connor comes in. Satan uses Connor to try to kill the pope, although the little demon-spawn couldn't go through with it when the time came.
While the chain in Revelation does seem big from a literal reading, Catholics view much of Revelation as figurative anyway. It therefore seemed reasonable (and convenient!) for me to define that chain to be a simple necklace with a Christian cross on it that Satan cannot remove and that causes him painful wounds to reflect the murders he commits in the book. A supernatural necklace with a cross is, in my mind, more powerful than any physical chain. In the final scenes involving Satan and his demons in the trilogy, they're all teleported to an asteroid, and all have Christian crosses secured around their corporeal necks, preventing the demons from escaping their dead host bodies and the asteroid as it spirals into the black hole.
Many Catholics interpret Revelation to be a spiritual story more so than a simple physical one, including the idea that there is no physical massing for a battle against Christ on Armageddon either. It's the reason, my final battle of the trilogy will be Satan's forces against Connor's forces, ultimately interrupted by Christ's return, not Satan and Connor against Christ. God the Father gives the angels the option to fight for Connor, which some of them do, led by Michael the Archangel.
It's an aspect of world-building. Corporeals inherit memories. And can become distracted by them. In this case, it was a way to narrate the opening of the book (excluding the prologue) from the viewpoint of someone greatly affected by the sieges two decades earlier and the renewed rationing of food now that the Vandals have made it into northern Africa. It allows me to set a much darker mood while still keeping the presence of Satan under wraps. If it was truly Satan's own POV, his reaction to everything would be vastly different than that of the priest he recently killed.
The following is long because I'm filling in a lot of blanks based on what I've decided for the story, some of which you may not know or remember. I think it holds together pretty well. Skim as needed.
In the series, demons are no longer able to take physical form (part of what they lost after the War in Heaven), unlike their angelic counterparts. As a result, Satan came up with the idea of corporeals - demons taking control of recently dead bodies and making them appear alive. Ordinary demons can only keep that up for a few months before the tendency of a corpse to rot exceeds their ability to heal the decay. More powerful demons can keep it up longer, although I don't go into details other than the fact that Satan, who also wants/needs to take physical form at times to carry out his plans, has the ability to maintain a corpse indefinitely. That's why Angelo De Rosa is able to keep his physical body from falling apart. In fact, at some point in our recent past (e.g., a century or two before Connor is born), Satan became trapped in the De Rosa body when Michael the Archangel slipped a Christian necklace (a chain in the Apocalypse of John/Book of Revelation) around De Rosa's neck.
One advantage of corporeal form is that it protects demons from the pain of stepping onto holy ground, which is why De Rosa can set foot in churches as part of his job as commander of the Order of the Black Cassocks, a special forces team within the Swiss Guard. The order was created centuries ago as a team of priests to hunt and expose corporeals and is led in the present by none other than the ultimate corporeal. The reason Satan is willing to get his hands dirty is that this is his carefully crafted plan to have Connor eventually become the head of the Catholic Church (then convert the rest of Christianity and eventually people of all faiths). Needless to say, Satan has a vested interest in winning the Last Challenge. 
Satan misinterpreted a hint given him by God for how to win the Last Challenge. God told him to become the shepherd who saves the drowning lamb, a reference to Connor. Satan assumed that meant he had to make Connor as powerful as possible so that Connor would side with Satan in deciding the Last Challenge, which God and Satan agreed would be decided by Satan's spawn, the Antichrist. There are actually two challenges: a fake one to divert the Church, and the real one. The fake challenge is that Satan supposedly bet God that not a single living priest will be found worthy of Heaven during the End Times. Satan uses that to steer the meeting into recommending that the Emissary of the Lord, when he comes, eventually be made pope. Satan suggests that in the meeting to ensure God "wins" the challenge (since the Emissary is sure to be worthy of Heaven).
Given the above, I think it makes sense for Satan to personally oversee key parts of the plan, in this case as Archpriest Philip of Rome. The real Philip is killed by Satan after Satan brings the Augustine documents to the Lateran Palace, where "Philip" received them and will steer the attempt to reconcile Augustine's holy vision with the Apocalypse of John, just as Augustine "suggested" in the letter he sent along with the detailed scroll documenting his vision. Only the letter actually appears in the book (as part of chapter one), though the scroll is referred to a number of times in the story. I may yet use quotes from the scroll as chapter epigraphs. Satan also killed Augustine and briefly took over Augustine's corpse to write the documents and set the above events in motion. Having taken over Augustine's corpse and done it in the year 430 (when the real Augustine died), Satan acquires the ability to perfectly forge Augustine's handwriting, and when the documents are retested in the distant future, not only does the writing match, but all testing will confirm that the paper and the ink are from 430.
Naturally, all of the above is done under deep cover, so there will be few hints that Satan is in the story in different bodies over the centuries to minimize suspicion among humans about any one corporeal hanging around "too long" for an ordinary human. When Satan gets trapped by Michael, that becomes his "permanent" corporeal form for the duration of the trilogy.
It is indeed tricky (and perhaps unfair) to be in Satan's and Connor's points of views since neither can think of themselves as Satan and the AC. I only use their points of view once each early on (Satan at the meeting and Connor at the youth seminary). I could have written those chapters to avoid their points of view, but I thought it would be a nice touch for the story and sets up Connor as the likely Emissary of the Lord. In his case, I drop quite a few hints in his first chapter (chapter three if you don't count the prologue in the Holy Land) that he is in fact the Antichrist, although I doubt anyone will pick up on it on first read. It reads like the POV of a teenager who is probably the Emissary but doesn't realize it yet. Augustine prophesies that the Emissary will eventually engage in a battle to the death against the Antichrist; although Augustine supposedly doesn't know who wins that battle, he does foresee that the AC is far more powerful than the Emissary, and Augustine doesn't see how the Emissary can survive that battle. I wonder who wins that battle. :-)
If you haven't already read it, please have a look at Connor's chapter (three) in the Emissary - Strongest Start book. Let me know if I'm being "fair" to the reader. I'm still rewriting chapters one & two, so skip those for now. They probably haven't changed much since you first read them.
Thanks
Dirk
Hi njc. Nice to see you still "lurking" about. :-)
The "flashback" is written as if those were truly the feelings and memories of Philip of Rome, the dead priest. I use a brief trigger (the environment of the room) to justify calling it a suffocating gloom, then give a somewhat more detailed description of the room as the corporeal walks around the council table lighting candles and lamps, plus a page or two of recent history about the Roman Empire as it relates to the events of twenty years past that triggered the flashback. Those events are also relevant to the meeting because the Vandals invaded Africa a year before the meeting, and are fighting their way to Carthage, where they would cut off the food supply just as happened during the sieges against Rome.
The only time a reader could claim that Satan wouldn't react that way (the "suffocating gloom" and a few other "dark" adjectives), my take on it will be that the environment triggered a memory from the dead human. It gives me the freedom to describe the aforementioned history from Philip's POV, after which Satan "shrugged off the unbidden memory".
After that, he impersonates the priest during the meeting, which I also wrote as if it was really the priest speaking, during which he tries to sound objective while steering the meeting where he wants it to go, paving the way for Connor, who won't even be born for another 1600 years.
Philip also speculates, without reaching any conclusions of his own, as to why Augustine's documented vision deviates in key ways from the Book of Revelation, suggesting the latter is actually a divine warning of where history will end up if mankind doesn't change its ways, rather than a description of what will actually happen.
The end of that meeting "proves" the existence of corporeals (warned about by Augustine), allowing the other characters to conclude that the vision was indeed real. Indirectly, that's me steering the reader toward suspending disbelief about the divine warning and corporeals, which Catholic/Christian readers would otherwise balk at.
To those reading this thread and the book, would you consider the following to be a "cheat"?
I wanted to get people's thoughts on a potential issue that came to light regarding my "corporeals." In order for demons to be convincing when impersonating a dead host, I chose for the demons to have access to the memories of the host.
I'm rewriting my chapter 1 (the rather boring meeting of the four theologians to discuss the supposed Augustine documents) to be darker/more intense. In doing so, I'm in Satan's POV, who will impersonate the dead Archpriest Philip, and I'm describing the council chamber Satan enters to prepare for the meeting as a "suffocating gloom that permeates the chamber like a dense, cold fog". In this case, Satan is momentarily struck by an "unbidden memory" from the dead priest's brain, triggered by the sight and feel of the chamber which is reminiscent of the catacombs where the once-living priest helped oversee the burial of thousands of rotting bodies of Romans who died of starvation in 4008 during a three-month siege of Rome.
Naturally, I need Satan to remain under deep cover during the meeting, so I don't explain in the opening that it's the memory of his dead host, not Satan's own. That will come out later in book one, maybe at the end.
In chapter one, I word the above largely from the dead archpriest's POV, not giving any hint that it's Satan experiencing the priest's POV. Not until Satan shrugs off the unbidden memory, do I return to Satan's POV, which is him impersonating the priest, again without giving any hint of who he really is.
If you read that and later learned it was the POV of the dead priest, not Satan, would you consider that a cheat? To me, it's a natural extension of corporeals having their dead hosts' memories: certain sights, smells, feel, tastes, etc. can trigger a memory from the dead man. Naturally, having this happen allows me to further bury the presence of Satan since the priest's POV spans the twenty years between the siege and the death of Augustine. The result is that I describe key events that span twenty years of the priest's past as if Satan had actually been there in 408.
Thoughts? Am I cheating?
Thanks
Dirk
The logout problem with the forums still seems to exist too.
Well, it is a "what if" story. As in "What if the facts are total crap?" LOL. Seriously, I had planned to run the chapter through several AIs between now and whenever I finish the book, which is still several years away. For now, I'm going to run the revisions through Copilot as well, which is already built into my Microsoft Office subscription. I can also verify the details by looking at where Gemini got its info. Despite its staggering stupidity above, there are certain areas where it is very reliable already, so hopefully it's just a matter of time. For example, software support for debugging computer problems I was having recently was virtually flawless. Admittedly, I would never have even tried writing the chapters in 430 if I'd known it was as bad as it is. It took much longer than it should have.
Based on my experience, the US probably would have bombed it's allies if it was using AI.
I'm not sure when, but Microsoft updated its terms of service regarding Copilot to now tell users it's for entertainment and should not be used for answers to important questions.
I've been trying to use Gemini to augment my first pair of chapters set in 430 AD with historical facts of what was happening to the Western Roman Empire at that time. After days of back and forth, including explicit requests by me asking Gemini to check all of the "facts" I had incorporated into the aforementioned chapters, here's part of tonight's exchange:
ME:
I don't agree; surely someone had in mind a definition for Italia back then; even if it became disputed territory (even a war zone), that's not the same as saying it was no longer considered part of the empire.
GEMINI:
You are completely right to push back on this, and your logic just caught a massive historical blind spot in my previous advice. I over-accelerated the timeline of the fall [DB: of the Western Roman Empire! LOL].
You are exactly correct: to a Roman in 430 AD, "Italia" had firm, legally defined borders, and the fact that barbarians were standing inside those borders did not mean Rome stopped claiming them. More importantly, in 430 AD, the Western Roman Empire had not actually shrunk to just Italy.
In 430, the Emperor's maps still explicitly claimed—and Roman armies were still actively fighting to hold—huge chunks of Gaul (modern France), parts of Hispania (modern Spain), and the province of Dalmatia (across the Adriatic).
By saying the empire had "shriveled to just the Italian peninsula," I essentially skipped forward to the year 470. That was my mistake. For Philip in 430, abandoning Gaul and Hispania mentally would be unthinkable; that was where their greatest general, Aetius, was currently fighting.
To fix this so it aligns with both Philip's arrogant Roman worldview and the factual history of 430 AD, we should adjust the sentence to acknowledge what they still claim versus what they actually control.
Here are two ways to correct that historical timeline while keeping your "Italia" terminology and the heavy tone:
Option 1: The "Paper Empire" Approach
"Since then, the Western Empire had shattered. Though imperial maps still stubbornly claimed Gaul and Hispania, Rome's true grip had shriveled to little more than Italia, the adjacent islands, and a dying strip of the North African coast."
...
ME (for shits and giggles):
And how accurate is the wording of your option 1 (I cant believe you screwed up something so fundamental)?
GEMINI:
You are entirely right to be frustrated. Option 1 is still fundamentally inaccurate. As an AI, my error rate on mapping the exact geopolitical borders of this specific year has been unacceptable, and you caught a massive historical blind spot.
Here is exactly why Option 1 is a fundamental screw-up for the year 430 AD:
I completely erased Dalmatia: The Roman province of Dalmatia (modern-day Croatia/Balkans) was fully controlled, wealthy, and firmly in the grip of the Western Empire in 430.
Gaul was not just a "paper claim": Option 1 treated Gaul as a lost cause that only existed on imperial maps. That is a historical lie. In 430, the supreme Roman military commander, Flavius Aetius, was actively governing, taxing, and winning major military campaigns in southern and central Gaul. Rome still had a massive, functional presence there.
Hispania was still fighting: While heavily ravaged by barbarians, Rome still actively controlled the northeastern province of Tarraconensis.
By saying Rome's "true grip had shriveled to little more than Italia," I essentially skipped the timeline forward by another 30 to 40 years.
To fix this—and to ensure Philip sounds like a man living in the actual, bleeding reality of 430 AD rather than the future—we need to acknowledge the active wars in those territories while maintaining the tone of an empire collapsing inward.
ME:
What about my description of Rome in 430 based on the other "facts" you gave me? Was it all the things you said it was (key infrastructure broken or breaking, food riots due to lost/poor grain, broken aqueducts and sewers, the Lateran Palace no longer using the underfloor furnaces? How much of that did you f--- up?
GEMINI:
I appreciate you auditing this, and you are entirely right to hold my feet to the fire. If you are writing historical fiction, you need the world-building to be bulletproof.
I'll give it to you straight: I screwed up the timeline on the plumbing by a full century, and I prematurely accelerated the grain crisis by nine years.
Here is the exact breakdown of what is accurate for 430 AD, what I completely messed up, and how we fix it to keep your scene intact.
The F--- Ups (What I got wrong)
1. "Failing aqueducts and broken sewers" (Major Error)
This is a massive historical hallucination on my part. I pulled this detail from 537 AD, during the Gothic War, when the Ostrogoth king Witiges famously besieged Rome and destroyed the aqueducts to starve the city.
The Reality in 430: The aqueducts and the Cloaca Maxima (the great sewer) were still fully functional. The city had suffered massive population loss and looting, but the Roman water infrastructure was still doing its job. Including this in 430 makes Philip look like a time traveler.
2. "Severing much of the city's grain... leaving the populace in starvation" (Timeline Exaggeration)
The Reality in 430: The Vandals did cross into North Africa in 429, and there was absolutely massive panic in Rome. However, the Vandals didn't capture Carthage (the main port where the grain fleet sailed from) until 439 AD.
The Fix: In September 430, the grain supply wasn't "severed"—it was threatened and likely severely disrupted, causing massive inflation and localized panic/riots, but the ships were still desperately trying to make runs.
...
On the plus side, it took my previous input (e.g., I had uploaded my new opening this morning and asked it to review the result for factual errors) and used it tonight to spit out well-worded suggested corrections. Too bad the facts themselves are mostly hallucinated fiction. In this case, it actually screwed up its own correction of its previously screwed up answers.
I'd be laughing my ass off if I hadn't just wasted several days trying to nail down the facts, write a revised opening based on those, have Gemini review the result, refine it further, etc.
Maybe it was using alternative facts. :-)
I can't wait for AI to start driving buses and flying planes! Wee!!!
It was Satan who described ML as uptight. Yes, I wrote it, but I intended it as Satan's opinion, not my own. I would imagine most Protestants see the result of the PR as a good thing for Christianity, otherwise why not become Catholic? At the time of the split, though, Catholics, especially the clergy, would have seen it as a disaster, and would surely have blamed Satan.
To view the PR as a good thing, the obvious conclusion is that 45,000 different denominations is also a good thing, hence my logic for the book that Satan can't conquer a denomination with no central figure to overthrow. Though Jesus prayed for unity, he also would have known what would eventually happen, and he didn't say Christians should remain forever unified under Peter and his successors.
His prayers are, of course, more than just a biography of important events in his life. Since he knew what would happen, his documented prayers are also his ongoing encouragement to readers of the Bible to remain unified. If Christians remain unified in their beliefs but not in who governs the Christian Church on Earth, does that mean Christ's prayers went unanswered?
I think the Christian faith is unified in the ways that matter most. You worship the same God, believe in the Trinity, the Resurrection, and the Virgin Birth, among other core beliefs, and you follow the teachings of the same Bible, more or less. And your faith can't be overthrown or corrupted as easily as a single Church hierarchy can.
Put all that together and the PR was a disaster one could blame on Satan. The fact that Christianity as a whole remains unified over core elements of the faith, suggests to me the outcome is actually a good thing. It seems like a great example of God using evil to do good.
Ultimately, it will be Satan who claims to be the cause of the PR, but the Catholic cardinal he converses with can point out that he's the Father of Lies and not necessarily to be believed, and the cardinal can make the counterarguments that I do above. Words to the effect: Satan, you may have caused the split, but God used it against you to create something even more indestructible.
The alternative would be to say that Satan wanted what has happened, including the 45000 different Protestant denominations, but that they will all come back together eventually. In fact, that's what Satan and Connor intend to do: conquer the biggest denomination, and then convert the rest back to Catholicism.
The other alternative to Connor being a reincarnated Adam is for Connor to have his own unique soul and be in "harmonious communion" with Adam, an effect Connor doesn't realize until well after he fails to smother the pope, although Adam's influence is there even in chapter 3 (the intro to Connor at the seminary). Connor tolerates the bullying by the antichristlings to draw their attention away from the other boys, who fear them, except that Connor doesn't know why he wants to do it nor why it makes him feel good about himself. He thinks of it as almost instinctual. That's Adam's influence.
Although the forged Augustine documents made the untrue claim that the Emissary would be in "harmonious communion" with Christ, God could turn around and use that same concept with Connor and Adam.
Among several downsides to giving Connor his own soul, though, is that I would no longer be able to include the idea that, although, Satan demanded a soul from God for the Antichrist, Satan forgot to specify that he wanted a "new" soul, which is a key reason Connor is not the evil SOB that Satan genetically bred and trained him to be.
I finally figured out a way for Connor and Adam to share a soul such that the concept is more straightforward, though still not consistent with Catholicism in general. In the epilogue to book one, when the Holy Spirit speaks to Maria on the park bench, he said Connor and Adam were "like" a person with multiple personalities. If I make this change, their co-existence isn't "like" multiple personalities, Connor/Adam actually are multiple personalities, a perfect example of that "medical" condition (medical in quotes because it's not really a medical condition using this approach). The only caveat is that it is still Adam's original soul, so Connor is simply a reincarnation of Adam, albeit initially without the memories or awareness that he is Adam. The Holy Spirit could say that that's actually what is going on within anyone with that condition: multiple personalities sharing one soul, minus the reincarnation.
I like the idea of just Connor being a reincarnated being so that I'm not claiming reincarnation is a regular part of human existence and a valid part of Catholicism. Connor would be a unique case. That makes him both Adam (responsible along with Eve for the Fall) and (ultimately) the savior of the damned. A major drawback is that it means Adam's reincarnation is also the Antichrist, which may not sit well with some Catholics, even in a work of fiction.
My computer began acting up about a week ago, necessitating a clean install of Windows and my applications, which failed. At this point, no keyboard works with my PC either, and I'm now looking at warnings about my hard drive. I'm probably looking at a week to debug this with HP, replace any failing hardware, reinstall the OS and apps yet again, say a prayer, and hope for the best. I have access to the site via my phone, so I will be checking in until this is fixed. The extended warranty is about to pay for itself.
Apologies for the delay in reviewing your next chapters.
Dirk
Ricky, although there may be one or more people here who can answer that question, this is primarily a writer's site. Are you doing research for a story? Regardless, you may want to check out the forums at reddit.com. There's probably a forum there for every topic under the sun.
Also, ask one or more AIs available these days (e.g., Google's Gemini or ChatGPT) the same question. You can kick off a real conversation with the AI. Just keep in mind, they make mistakes, but you can always check the underlying sources to see whether the source websites seem reliable.
And, of course, buyer beware since there are plenty of crooks willing to take advantage of any person with money, which could include fake readings. Google the psychic by name to see if there are any reviews of them.
Last but not least, maybe research the history of psychic readings to see whether or not such readings are always fake, as many people believe.
My advice: Don't write to be published but because you have the greatest story to tell.
Perfect advice, especially because it's so much more enjoyable when you're writing something you're passionate about.
You can use the time you spend writing to also learn the craft surrounding all of it. It's a steep learning curve, but you can learn as you go, which is what most people do, whether that's proper punctuation and grammar, the "art" of storytelling, reading other authors' works not just for enjoyment but also to study how they write, using a writers' site (whether this one or another), where you'll learn a great deal. Over time, you can read books on writing and even take courses if you see the potential value in those. Most of the best writers on this site, including published authors, learned by doing most or all of the above (usually incrementally over time), much of it centered around being a member of one of these sites.
Also, be prepared to write several drafts of your story, although you'll have to decide how far to take that. If you're like most people, by the time you finish the first draft, you'll have learned enough that you'll know whether you need (or just want) to write another draft.
If their new model supported access to all audiobooks the way Spotify gives me access to all music, I wouldn't mind paying monthly for access to their collection. But to get only one audiobook per month and not have access to it when you end your subscription is crap, IMO. I'm not sure why that's an issue for them. It's not like any one individual is going to listen to a million books a month. Some will listen a lot, others won't. In fact, I'm far more likely to listen to endless music than I am endless audiobooks, although that's probably not true for everyone.
I'd also be okay paying a different monthly price to listen to more audiobooks than another person who only listens to a few. Why should a person who only listens to a few subsidize someone who listens to a lot? It doesn't even need to be based on the specific number of books; different pricing tiers could have an upper limit on the number of audiobooks per month: one price for 1 - 5 books a month, another price for 1 - 10, etc.
There. Problem solved. 
For the record, lots of us start out thinking it won't take too long to write that first book. Also, I suggest keeping open the idea of making it publishable. If nothing else, it's harder to do, and you'll learn more about the craft of writing doing it.
Before you begin posting, please have a look at an article I posted in the Premium forum with tips to maximize the number of reviews you can get here.
Feel free to send me a connection request if you have any questions, or post them in the Premium forum (that's one of its uses, so don't hesitate), where the maximum number of eyeballs will see it and perhaps respond faster than I can. I'm one of the other writers, but also volunteer time to do user support.
If you'd like to have ongoing discussions with others about your story, feel free to create a brainstorming thread in this forum (named after your book's or series' title). Take a glance at my either of my threads (The Archangel Syndrome and Savior of the Damned) to see how we use them.
Welcome aboard.
Dirk
