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Delusion
#1
Delusion
I have been playing with an idea of writing an atheist fiction novel, since I discovered there is no atheistic genre of fiction available.

Below is a synopsis of the novel, something one would read on the back cover of the paperback or on the inside left jacket of the hardback cover:

Quote:Early one morning people around the world seem to instantly devolve as they attack and kill those around them. Those who have lost their humanity are not attacking each other, but that does not make them any less scary.

What is happening to people? One person, a young sociologist, knows what is taking place because he wrote about it the previous year. Unfortunately, no one had bothered to take his hypothesis seriously because it resembled science fiction.

Some people now are beginning to pay attention to him as he attempts to reassert his theory to the scared masses. If he is right, there may not be a cure for what is ailing a huge portion of the population.

If this young man is correct, the infected population may have to be exterminated to ensure the survival of everyone else. The disease, after all, is not contagious in the traditional sense. In order for those uninfected to continue to survive, they must rely upon reason. Slipping into the dredges of faith will lead them to...


DELUSION

**********************
I figured I would at least share the prologue and the first chapter with everyone.

Prologue



Chapter One
Twenty-two hours earlier



Copyrighted by Roy Ott
"Never trust a fox. Looks like a dog, behaves like a cat."
~ Erin Hunter
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#2
RE: Delusion
Submit it to the evil editor
http://evileditor.blogspot.com/
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#3
RE: Delusion
1) Why do you think there needs to be a atheist genre for novels? Why not just write the novel and if it happens to have atheistic overtones than so be it? I think some of the most successful novels that critique social ideas aren't explicitly in a genre about that social idea, they're just written well and categorized in the literature section. Also, making an explicitly atheist genre might discourage some people from reading your book and accidentally encountering atheistic ideas. If it's shelved in the literature section someone might accidentally pick it up and start reading it and become exposed to ideas they never would have been exposed to otherwise.

But to each their own. If this is the battle you want to fight, go for it.

2) From a writing stand point, I would expand your prologue and write in more character rather than describing your characters. Instead of saying Schae was "old, stuck in her beliefs, and clearly nothing was going to convince her otherwise" make the scene a little longer and show her being stubborn, refusing to concede a point or arguing fruitlessly in the face of overwhelming evidence. You know how stubborn theists behave, show her being a stubborn theist. It would make the prologue more dynamic and captivating, I think, especially since it seems you're using it as an ice monster prologue where these three characters are setting up a conflict, and none of them appear in the first chapter. Writing more characterization into the prologue might also allow you to drop character names and make the prologue more sinister (who are these people? Why are they talking about this? What's going on?) while making the characters recognizable through their mode of expressing themselves, their mannerisms and their motives so you pick up on who they are when they reappear in the story a little later.
Teenaged X-Files obsession + Bermuda Triangle episode + Self-led school research project = Atheist.
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