This is weird. I’m not actu­ally blocked. I know exactly what comes next in my story, and it should actu­ally be a fun scene to write. I like writ­ing action scenes, and this is the first time we really see what a demon can do in a fight. Basi­cally, he’s going to wipe the floor with Daniel. And what’s bet­ter than beat­ing the crap out of your main char­ac­ter, really?

Only here’s the thing. I’m ter­ri­fied of what comes after the scenes I’m writ­ing now. Here’s the out­line I have so far. It should look at least vaguely famil­iar to folks who read Between Heaven and Hell.

• ACT 1
• Daniel helps at a wreck, freaks out when he sees a man with a fatal injury walk away and gets him­self arrested
• Police inter­ro­gate Daniel, find out why he inden­ti­fied him­self as a doc­tor; Daniel escapes en route to psy­chi­atric eval; cops “make the call” as Daniel “fits the profile”
• We meet Susan, a right wing Chris­t­ian blogger
• Daniel inves­ti­gates the strange life of Hen­driks, the dead man
• Susan looks for Daniel
• We meet Jeff Frankel, a crazy old Viet Nam vet
• Baterel meets with senior demon, told to kill Cho, but make him dis­ap­pear so the police think he’s still out there
• Daniel goes to the library to search the Google, finds Susan’s arti­cle, and con­tacts her.
• Jack gets a lead on Daniel
• Susan meets Daniel
• Jeff arrives in DC
• Susan decides to help Daniel
• Jack finds Daniel; Daniel and Susan go on the run
• Daniel meets Jeff at the Arling­ton Days Inn
• Batarel attacks; Jeff res­cues Daniel and Susan from Batarel
• Batarel kills the motel man­ager in frustration
• Jeff estab­lishes that “angels and demons as flesh and blood immor­tals in the grand­daddy of all secret soci­eties” is an exist­ing meme, attrib­utes what they saw to that
• Jack inves­ti­gates the motel manager’s death and the car­nage from the fight
• ACT 2
• …
• Daniel and Jack kill Batarel while Susan films it
• ACT3
• Jack changes sides
• Our heroes meet Uriel
• Demons kill Daniel’s family
• Susan gets a copy of the database
• Jack takes Daniel, Susan and Jeff to Iraq
• Jeff meets with Mul­lah Has­san Moham­mad, the keeper of the lost gospel
• Moham­mad shows Daniel the lost gospel and the angelic hel­met, an ancient Sumer­ian arti­fact that seems to con­tain microcircuitry
• Demons attack the mosque (to pre­vent the gospel from get­ting out?)
• Our heroes escape from Iraq
• Susan pub­lishes her proof
• The media runs with it, and pub­lic opin­ion wakes up to the immor­tal threat
• Jack recruits Daniel into a force to com­bat the demons

Acts 1 & 3 are strong and make sense. I’ve always been good at begin­nings and end­ings. But the mid­dle, that’s a prob­lem. Act 2 should be the meat of the book, all the com­pli­ca­tions and redi­rec­tion that makes a novel so rich and enjoy­able. It should also, in gen­eral, be roughly half the page count, 50% com­pared to 25% each for Acts 1 and 3. So the fact that my Act 2 basi­cally con­sists of “HERE BE MONSTYRS” is… alarm­ing? ter­ri­fy­ing? scar­ing me out of my gor­ram mind?

I know, in broad strokes, and we’re tak­ing rollers here, what has to hap­pen in Act 2. Batarel, my angry, implaca­ble, immor­tal demon, keeps try­ing to kill Daniel and fail­ing, while Daniel tries to both cap­ture Batarel and avoid being cap­tured by Jack, who is now an FBI agent in this ver­sion of the story. So the first half or so of Act 2 should be a merry chase, with both Batarel and Jack chas­ing Daniel, Jeff and Susan. One of the biggest hit movies of my for­ma­tive years was “Can­non­ball Run,” so I should have an intu­itive sense for chase sto­ries. It could be all I’m miss­ing is to visu­al­ize Daniel as Dom DeLuise. (this is prob­a­bly a bad idea)

At roughly the halfway point, Daniel has to turn the tables on the demon and become the chaser, or at least start fight­ing back. At some point in there Jack has to see Batarel for what he is, and real­ize there’s a lot more going on here than just a ter­ror­ist fugi­tive on the run. And then after Daniel fig­ures out how to kill a demon, Jack has to arrive at that final bat­tle between Daniel and Batarel and join Daniel’s side. I’m not sure how Daniel’s going to fig­ure out how to kill a demon, which was explained by the lost gospel in the orig­i­nal book, given that the Archangel Uriel doesn’t show up and give them the data­base and the loca­tion of the gospel now until after they prove them­selves wor­thy by killing Batarel, but I’m will­ing to accept that the story will me that. There was absolutely noth­ing in my orig­i­nal out­line for Home­world, my Mars novel, that sug­gested the char­ac­ters fly to Kaza­khstan and buy an old Soviet nuclear sub reac­tor on the black mar­ket, but when the story called for one and they couldn’t get one from NASA, well, a character’s gotta do what a character’s gotta do. So I can take a leap of faith on that. My char­ac­ters have proven time and again that they’re smarter than me, so I can trust that.

But I still have to have some idea of where they’re going. Let’s see, based on my ram­blings above, I have:

• ACT 1
• Daniel helps at a wreck, freaks out when he sees a man with a fatal injury walk away and gets him­self arrested
• Police inter­ro­gate Daniel, find out why he inden­ti­fied him­self as a doc­tor; Daniel escapes en route to psy­chi­atric eval; cops “make the call” as Daniel “fits the profile”
• We meet Susan, a right wing Chris­t­ian blogger
• Daniel inves­ti­gates the strange life of Hen­driks, the dead man
• Susan looks for Daniel
• We meet Jeff Frankel, a crazy old Viet Nam vet
• Baterel meets with senior demon, told to kill Cho, but make him dis­ap­pear so the police think he’s still out there
• Daniel goes to the library to search the Google, finds Susan’s arti­cle, and con­tacts her.
• Jack gets a lead on Daniel
• Susan meets Daniel
• Jeff arrives in DC
• Susan decides to help Daniel
• Jack finds Daniel; Daniel and Susan go on the run
• Daniel meets Jeff at the Arling­ton Days Inn
• Batarel attacks; Jeff res­cues Daniel and Susan from Batarel
• Batarel kills the motel man­ager in frustration
• Jeff estab­lishes that “angels and demons as flesh and blood immor­tals in the grand­daddy of all secret soci­eties” is an exist­ing meme, attrib­utes what they saw to that
• Jack inves­ti­gates the motel manager’s death and the car­nage from the fight
• ACT 2
• Daniel and Co. go on the run
• Jack chases Daniel
• Batarel chases Daniel
• Daniel eludes Jack
• Daniel goes on the offensive
• Jack sees evi­dence that Batarel isn’t human
• Daniel dis­cov­ers how Batarel could be killed
• Jack finds Daniel just as Daniel attacks Batarel
• Daniel and Jack kill Batarel while Susan films it
• ACT3
• Jack changes sides
• Our heroes meet Uriel
• Demons kill Daniel’s family
• Susan gets a copy of the database
• Jack takes Daniel, Susan and Jeff to Iraq
• Jeff meets with Mul­lah Has­san Moham­mad, the keeper of the lost gospel
• Moham­mad shows Daniel the lost gospel and the angelic hel­met, an ancient Sumer­ian arti­fact that seems to con­tain microcircuitry
• Demons attack the mosque (to pre­vent the gospel from get­ting out?)
• Our heroes escape from Iraq
• Susan pub­lishes her proof
• The media runs with it, and pub­lic opin­ion wakes up to the immor­tal threat
• Jack leaves the FBI to join a UN anti-​demon task force
• Jack recruits Daniel

Act 2 is still thin, and I’m obvi­ously miss­ing some scenes, but at least’s it’s coher­ent, and it fol­lows causal­ity. I can see how the char­ac­ters get from A to Z, rather than A to G, then a whole bunch of hiero­glyph­ics, then Q to Z. It’s not per­fect, but it might be enough to over­come my screamin’ willies (Nel­son being the most dis­turb­ing) and get me back to writing.