Zuri

Well, maybe, the text version then:

Congratulations, by the way! 😉🎉

Second half, getting political because it is concerning and concerns many people's everyday life, but—as you said—irrelevant in terms of the story 👍 Rocky accepts the compliment. Well, let's see if he can live up to that

Making sense of it, apparently, the wife didn't have much say in the things that mattered, mirroring the recent development in some US states … no, no, he didn't inherit a goat, he inherited the GOAT 😜

Well, at least, there's lots of potential for drama 😉 And that's what we are here for, isn't it?

One that only produces anti-heroes as protagonists.

to Dublin? Mundane science fiction, to be more precise. Well, you might just call it "Contemporary/Urban Science Fiction" 🤔

Apparently, we are all psychic—maybe, we're all linked? 🤔🤯 That's obvious, Dr. Sawzall a la mode. I was more hinting at the capitalization of Frozen as I'm unable to turn off being an editor as it seems 😅

I really hope, this housekeeper will not become another one of Manny's toys. Walmart-Ashtoria by the way? When being precise, I'd ask what kind of merch food that is 😉

That would explain a lot at least. Or maybe, he's just greedy in general 🤷‍♂️ By the way, by now it's safe to say, that you are technically a Science Fiction author 😜 To quote Rocky:

Good. I hope I can find enough of them to completely confuse you all. If there happen to be not enough of them, I happily to provide some more 😜

Catching beans while fishing sounds kinda British to me … 🤷🏻 Exactly what I was going for. I seem to have left an impression Smelly … No, really, this smells like … (no, not teen spirit, well, maybe)

He sure doesn't need it. Doesn't mean, he doesn't desperately want it. Even that is kinda icky. Orlando essentially prostitutes himself, because the tip is practically payment for sex. Nothing wrong with sex work, just how coldly some people play with others. Well, he's pretty obsessed with female appearances for being gay. Has he been murdered or the like? Sounds like a conspiracy … 🤔 Coming from Manny, that sounds like he sees Rocky more like a thing than a human being, a streaming subscription, perhaps. But I have to say, I can picture Rocky giving Manny a good talking to.

Would be funny if there wasn't any more money 😂 Love is blind. They haven't seen each other in a long time and Boris might have been oblivious to this invention called "Google". He might think, Manny can't have changed that much in all this time. Finally, I'm not alone with such an assessment 😅

Never? Love, peace, and harmony it is, then.

Prologues never give away too much, but the topic itself sets Manny up for lots of trouble—and who wouldn't want to follow that along as a reader?

When only being editor to a story, I usually don't have that luxury ^^ When I'm the author myself, I usually plan the story in my head and rearrange it a dozen times before the first words make it onto paper (real paper, indeed). Once it's there, it already surpassed stages for minor changes and I can focus on more fine-grained changes. Editing whole books in one go can be very stressful, so I usually prefer chapter-wise in terms of communication transparency and stress levels based on what I experienced, working with different authors. Especially in the German community, where I edited and published, I constantly had long discussions with my editor and the author I edited for respectively, which I always enjoyed. In the end, we usually arrived at a result, I was quite satisfied with. Oh, dialogue has so much to offer: What characters say as well as what they don't, their vocabulary and their way of expression—and one quirk of mine: Punctuation. You might say, that punctuation is merely on the page and barely audible in spoken context—and you'd be in good company—however, I think of dialogue as if it was a stage or screen play. Most people get along with comma and full stop well enough most of the time. But I can literally hear a semicolon or an em dash, a nuance in a character's speech, and what they might want to convey with that consciously or subconsciously. As I said, characters could be improved in my case, and that also covers the way they speak. I try to mimic what I envisioned for them, but only to a certain extent. So, it's definitely a considerable amount of work for me to not let some of them sound slightly hard to distinguish at times 😅

One exception has to be made: I have two examples from kinda famous novels: The novelization of Star Wars: Episode III –Revenge of the Sith constantly infodumped pages of backstory, especially in the beginning, that I always had to recall what the characters were doing right before that. In Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Gandalf sends Frodo a letter, explaining, who Strider is, which Barliman Butterbur doesn't deliver, so Frodo manages to arrive at the Prancing Pony in Bree and meet Aragorn without it totally fine. The letter wasn't mentioned before that very chapter and, in the end, doesn't do more than dissipating the last tiny bits of doubt, which sure could have been done on their journey just as well. I haven't dug up a letter or something Tolkien wrote, confirming my theory, but it seems to me that he felt it necessary to be included as a last minute change but didn't bother to go back and adjust the preceding chapters leading up to this point.

It's similar for me, even though, I might find a dozen places, where I could have done better, once it's posted, I don't change it anymore, because it being a snapshot of my writing abilities then as well as the circumstances I was in while writing, make the story what it was. That cannot really be recreated. To me, editing an in progress story for posting chapter-wise here on GA vs editing a completed book for sale (got a taste of each) is vastly different—not only in the communication with the author (been in both one's shoes) differs but also the flow: While the former is, of course, more focussed on the chapters as being somewhat self-contained, the latter allows for seeing the bigger picture, meaning story and character arcs and the like. The benefit is that you can go back and hide hints or metaphors in earlier chapters, or tweak a character a little to make their arc work more naturally. I wish, I could say the same. That probably what my stories are lacking. I'm not necessarily focussed on the story per se, but on its themes and its arcs and the characters grow along the path that is laid out for them by the aforementioned things.

Thank you for your comment, @Headstall! I agree, that's why I included the "'Show Don't Tell' is flawed advice" pic. The balance is really the challenge for some, I guess. It shouldn't be showing for the sake of showing, but show can take many shapes and forms one might not initially see—and that's what can make writing exciting at times. In the end, the chapters have to serve the story lines, the story lines have to serve the characters, and the characters have to serve the story (not necessarily in that order). It's all one big puzzle and it takes some time to get the hang of the current story one is telling to fully understand its characters and dynamics, and in which way these can be utilized to tell this story. Apparently, nobody ever really stops learning, and each and every new story is both a challenge and a learning opportunity to me.

Good idea 👍 Love it already!

By the way, I can highly recommend watching Transatlantic on Netflix (if you have Netflix, of course)

I prefer listening to the new 'The Flying Cranberries.' album. They are not in any way related to 'The Cranberries', are they?

Disney will be delighted, to have such influence on the presidency—especially in Florida

So, if there's a Capitol bombing, you'd want a President Tom Kirkman?