Yes­ter­day I was floun­der­ing a bit in my writ­ing. I still really had no firm vision of act 2 and all I did know — that Batarel was try­ing to kill Daniel and Jack was try­ing to catch Daniel and Daniel was try­ing to be nei­ther killed nor caught — didn’t seem like it was much to go on. The more I thought about it, the more it sounded like a Benny Hill skit. And that wasn’t what I wanted.

It occurred to me that part of the prob­lem was that I didn’t know how Daniel was actu­ally going to kill Batarel. In the orig­i­nal book, the immor­tals could be killed by reduc­ing them to tiny pieces and then burn­ing the pieces. A run of the mill RPG could do this in one effi­cient step. But this time around, post-​9/​11, with grenade launch­ers so com­monly avail­able around the world, that seemed too easy. But because I was too close to the source mate­r­ial, I couldn’t think of another way to do it. So I asked Twitter.

jef­fkirvin
How would you kill some­thing that had nanites in its blood that repair dam­age (injuries, aging) almost as fast as they hap­pen? #research

kdaleau­thor
@jeffkirvin Pet­rify instead of kill… fig­ure out what the nanites use for fuel and dis­rupt it in a defin­i­tive, fast way… umm *runs out*

nlow­ell
@jeffkirvin suf­fo­ca­tion #research

Alli_​Flowers
@jeffkirvin Sim­ple. Watch Star­gate and see how they finally did it.

kdaleau­thor
@jeffkirvin Com­puter virus vs. nanites… oppos­ing nanites… remove all blood (if they’re only in the blood)

dmc­duck
@jeffkirvin Irra­di­ate the nanites? Large mag­netic force?

instan­te­ter­nity
@jeffkirvin Acid? Emp? Impact? Maybe dis­able the nanites before you can do any­thing else? Depends on how dras­tic an injury they can fix.

crimsonsky76
@jeffkirvin Try­ing to fig­ure out how to kill your immor­tals? I guess the whole “There can be only one” thing doesn’t work here, huh? :)

nick­o­laswriter
@jeffkirvin Seal them in a vac­uum and deny them access to raw materials.

dgawlik324
@jeffkirvin the the new Outer Lim­its addressed this once…shock ther­apy to fry the lit­tle bastards…

crimsonsky76
@jeffkirvin How about a virus — worked against the orig­i­nal Vis­i­tors in V and the Borg. Sounds like you’ve made them too pow­er­ful for less.

Small­medium
@jeffkirvin A wooden steak in its heart or a sil­ver bullet.

Not all of these sug­ges­tions were usable, but they got me think­ing. Some of them, like the EMP idea, were bril­liant, but won’t work in Rev­e­la­tion because our heroes don’t know why the immor­tals are immor­tal yet. They won’t learn about the nanites until they get to exam­ine some demon blood in Cru­sade, the next book in the series. But there were enough valid tac­tics and false pos­i­tives to give me some ideas on how Daniel could have sev­eral try/​fail cycles in Act 2.

Thomas Edi­son once said, “I have not failed 700 times. I have not failed once. I have suc­ceeded in prov­ing that those 700 ways will not work. When I have elim­i­nated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.” Daniel and com­pany will be doing the same in Act 2. They’ll be try­ing to find a suc­cess­ful way to kill a demon. And they’ll be try­ing not to get killed them­selves in the process. Add to that my real­iza­tion that they no longer have any rea­son why they have to stay in DC, and get an Act 2 that looks like this.

  • Daniel and Co. go on the run
  • Jack gets a lead that Daniel is still in the metro area, won­ders why
  • Daniel and co find Batarel’s house emp­tied and for sale, seller is some anony­mous hold­ing company
  • Batarel fol­lows the RV from his house
  • Jack inves­ti­gates
  • Batarel attacks, gets beheaded, puts head back on, heroes escape to Baltimore
  • Jack inves­ti­gates
  • Heroes try to drown Batarel
  • Jack inves­ti­gates
  • Elec­tro­cu­tion in Philadelphia
  • Jack inves­ti­gates
  • Radi­a­tion in New York
  • Jack sees evi­dence that Batarel isn’t human
  • Blow up, but not com­pletely, in Newark
  • Jack finds Daniel just as Daniel attacks Batarel in a Beth­le­hem Penn­syl­va­nia steel mill
  • Dissolve/​Melt/​Burn/​Vaporize
  • Daniel, Jeff and Jack kill Batarel while Susan films it

There’s still a lot of stuff miss­ing from this. I know that Susan needs to play a big­ger part, and I’m think­ing she’ll be blog­ging about the entire expe­ri­ence as well as upload­ing videos to YouTube as soon as I can fig­ure out how she can do that with­out tip­ping off the FBI to their where­abouts (I think this is why they hop from one major metro area to another; it would be too easy to track her sig­nal in a rural envi­ron­ment). I’m also think­ing Jack needs to nearly catch Daniel at some point, shades of that scene in “The Fugi­tive” with Har­ri­son Ford and Tommy Lee Jones in the drainage pipe.

I also like a lot of the lit­tle touches, like try­ing to elec­tro­cute Batarel in the home town of Ben Franklin, and end­ing it and meet­ing the Archangel Uriel in a city called Beth­le­hem (not far from where I went to high school, as it turns out). Lit­tle things like that, which weren’t ini­tially intended, tell me that the story is tak­ing on a life of its own, that it’s an organic thing unto itself. A good out­line doesn’t pre­clude organic writ­ing, it just pro­vides a skele­ton on which to base it.