The Galaxy Tales - Dirk B. (Page 38 of 49)

Thanks. Shiburassu was too different from Seabrass, so I went back to Kobayashi. I'm looking for an excuse to use sea bass in the story in a meaningful way.

Since they are saying "Shi" and meaning "si"... maybe you can get away with spelling it "si". I dunno. Hope a purist can chime in

Chapter 26, Long Live the Regent, is up. Mostly cleanup and minor edits. The epigraph is new. I also reworked the opening to get to Joseph's anguish right away, as suggested by Seabrass. Joseph now has five passengers in his head. That's probably all for this book, although it will become increasingly difficult for him to remain in control, especially in book two.

Quick, go read!
Dirk

No rush. Yoda voice: rest, you must. It may help to tell you I'm only planning to do light edits at this point. Slap me around a little, grab the points, and go back to sleep. Seabrass's final edits are already included in most of the posted chapters, and I'm about to add K's edits, so it should be in decent shape by the time you see it. I'll take a few hours this week and update all the online chapters. Depending on how far back you're reading, I have some late changes to post.

I totally forgot about Acme (not ACME, since that'll get me sued) and Aussie as I was revising my latest chapters. I'll have to go back and see if I can find more use for them. Did you know that I once forgot to use God in an entire chapter? Had to make a chapter checklist after that, which I keep forgetting to look at. I now have five ghosts in Joseph's head, so it's going to be hard to use them all. There's particular overlap between Joseph's mother and Admiral St. James. I knew that might bite me eventually. I'd retire Admiral St. James, but she's his military advisor, which should come in handy in act IV.

I thought Roman history research was hard. Try coming up to speed on the inner workings of the Catholic Church and the Vatican (for my next book about the Antichrist). Especially with my memory. I need notes just for my notes. I've bought two books just to understand Revelation, plus Catholicism for Dummies. :-) Every time I go deep into Catholic documents (e.g., online encyclopedia, the Catechism, etc.), I need a religious dictionary. There is a large DVD set all about the Catholic Church that I will probably buy, but it's $70 used, so I'm holding off until I get over the guilt of how much I've already spent. Had to buy a Blue-Ray drive and software just to watch the damn Exorcist Anthology, which turned out to be mostly crap. If I had thought to check rottentomatoes.com first, I could have saved myself a bundle. The worst of the five films has an 11% freshness rating. I miss having access to US streaming. Netflix Canada is all we've got, and it's relatively slim pickings.

I'm now officially in act III of IV with my revisions (about 15 chapters to polish). Four months or so to completion, allowing plenty of time for Catholic research. However, after some discussions online, I decided not to publish Into the Mind of God until I return to the story (after my next book), which means probably four or more years from now. I'm hoping the Antichrist book will be more polished and make a better first publication. Marketing will be a time-consuming bitch, so I want to wait until I've done a better book.

G'night.
Dirk

Check out BookBaby. They're affiliated with this site, I believe.

Interesting discovery. Apparently no one can accurately estimate the global assets of the Catholic Church, not even the Church itself. Most of the assets/income outside of the Vatican are held by the individual dioceses and religious orders for their own use. They're all separate corporations, most led by bishops. Only a small amount (Peter's Pence) is transferred to the Vatican, which has revenue in the low hundreds of millions, mostly from investment returns and tourism. Many of the assets have never been appraised, because the Church would never sell them (e.g., cathedrals, Vatican artwork from the Middle Ages, etc.). Most are on the books for $1.

One figure puts total Catholic Church spending in the U.S. at $170B annually, but most of that money comes from health insurers who pay Catholic hospitals for covered medical procedures, so it's not exactly charity. University tuition received from students is another big part of that total. The biggest Catholic charity in the U.S. spends about $4B annually. Another interesting number is Church collections. The average weekly donation in the U.S. is $10, although the source wasn't clear if that was per Catholic or per family. That totals at most $36B. That's not even enough for disaster recovery from one major hurricane.

In Germany, church members are actually taxed by the federal government on behalf of the churches, which then get the money. Try that in the U.S. :-)

It's going to be tricky imagining a Catholic Church rich enough to lead much of the world's response to accelerating climate change. I need a Church that grows exponentially 3-4 decades from now as people afraid of the end times return to God, and to the Catholic Church in particular. I was hoping for up to 2B Catholics by the start of the book, which is about 50% more than the current figure. On the up side, 30-40 years is more than enough time to build big companies like Apple, Facebook, or Google. If the Church could build or inherit that kind of wealth, it could make quite a dent and attract more followers.

I could do the story with current numbers, although the Book of Revelation prophecies a worldwide religion, so it would be better if the Church was much larger to justify it becoming the Antichrist's main target.

Thanks. I'm just getting started. I need lots of details about climate change, including potential solutions, such as capturing co2 emissions and turning them into solids, or injecting them into the earth. Even if we started tomorrow, there is still a danger of a runaway greenhouse effect. What we need is a good old-fashioned mega volcano blasting ash into the sky. I may put one in the book.

Thanks for the links, njc. I've only briefly reviewed them, but will do so in detail before I start planning the main story elements. I'm leaning toward keeping climate change out of the book and going with the original, simpler premise of the Antichrist trying to seize control of the Church in the present. It would be far easier to write without having to become well-versed in climate science, not to mention having to project the story world forward 30-40 years. Dan Brown tried to include antimatter physics in his Angels & Demons book and got the fundamentals wrong. Studying Catholicism is hard enough.

My initial impression is that wattsupwiththat.com isn't trying to give a balanced view of climate change, but refute it. Some of the links I followed in your first article showed what appeared to be cherry-picking from the papers. I also saw one reference in passing to Breitbart News, which is not a site I would look to for unbiased opinions. I'll see if I can find it again when I read the articles in depth. I prefer "fair and balanced". :-)

Your last article talks about 413 papers that refute some of the arguments made by climate change supporters, but doesn't say how many papers were published reaffirming the general consensus. It's roughly 13,750 (97%). Below is a link claiming the remaining 3% of papers were flawed.
https://qz.com/1069298/the-3-of-scienti … ll-flawed/

Always good to know what is out there before writing

Thanks, Amy. Somehow I missed your post above from two weeks ago. Posting the research to Facebook is an interesting idea. I've joined a bunch of writing groups, but have yet to join any Catholic groups. If I post on my timeline, do the groups see it?

King of the Salves, is it?
Why not Lord of the Lotion or Baron of the Balm?