Admiral

[Monk]

Thanks!

I see what you mean now. Reading it again there are also perhaps too many "and" links too. "I am but a dull servant with clumsy tools of a dastardly muse!".

Do you reckon this would work better? :

"Then he made the sign of the orthodox cross on his face and prayed loudly, audibly, speaking to this God who - for a minute - seemed ready to listen."

I could do away with the punctuation around "for a minute" altogether, but the intention is to highlight that the admiral doesn't feel God listening to his prayers too often.

I don't believe that the problem can be solved by substituting '-' for ',', I believe the problem at its heart is one that needs restructuring. The sentence just has a lot of things going on, and it might read better broken into two and reworded. That's just my opinion though.

Your intentions are perfectly clear in this sentence, it simply feels very hurried to me and seems to come together a bit unevenly. More a structure and flow nitpick than anything else.