Lessons from week one

Cracked 15,000 yes­ter­day, which is an accept­able pace. I full thou­sand less than the 2k per day I set out for, but no bat­tle plan sur­vives con­tact with the enemy. And so, I thought I’d share the obser­va­tions I’ve already fig­ured out, now that I’ve had a week of writ­ing like a pro­fes­sional writer.

1. I am not a morn­ing person.

This may not actu­ally help you in your writ­ing all that much, but it bears stat­ing any­way. My plan going into this was to wake up at 6am every day and pound out 2000 words before break­fast. Then I could go about my day, and if oppor­tu­ni­ties arose to get some extra word count, well, so much the better.

Well, as it turns out, I haven’t done this once. The alarm goes off at 6am every morn­ing, but not once have I sat down and wrote before leav­ing the house. Some­times I’ll leave the house and write some­where else before work while I eat break­fast. Some­times, too often really, I’ll still be at word zero for the day by the time I set­tle into my cubi­cle. And on those days, I’ve had to grind the words out other ways. Sur­pris­ingly, to me, any­way, I’ve writ­ten very lit­tle while actu­ally on the job. I’ve found that I can squeeze in 500 – 700 words at Chipo­tle on my lunch break, and I’ve found lots of places to write after work. And, as I’ve men­tioned before, I’ve even found that writ­ing can be ener­giz­ing after work, no mat­ter how tired I might be going into it.

I’m going to give morn­ing writ­ing one more shot before adjust­ing my sched­ule to get up later and stay up later, writ­ing at night.

2. You don’t know your char­ac­ters as well as you think you do.

I assumed going into this that I knew my char­ac­ters pretty well. I should, given that they’re based on char­ac­ters I’ve known for 15 years. But as I get into this book, I’m learn­ing that this Jeff Frankel is a very dif­fer­ent per­son than the orig­i­nal, that this Susan Richard­son is more inter­est­ing and more dri­ven than her coun­ter­part in Between Heaven and Hell, that this Jack Har­ris, intro­duced just 12,000 words into Rev­e­la­tion rather than the begin­ning of Cru­sade, is a more thought­ful and resource­ful guy than I expected, and that yes, even Daniel Cho, the man who changes the world for­ever, who sets in motion a series of events that changes the Milky Way galaxy for­ever, is not quite who I thought he was. This Daniel is more somber, more tor­tured by the fail­ures of his past, and yet stronger and more directed than the original.

In every case, I have stronger, more inter­est­ing char­ac­ters. Char­ac­ters who have already sur­prised me as a writer and set the plot mov­ing in a slightly dif­fer­ent direc­tion. Which brings me to…

3. The map is not the territory.

I’ve talked before about how I don’t write detailed out­lines any­more. And yet, the bare bones bul­leted list I started this project with has already changed a lot. I’ve deleted scenes that are no longer nec­es­sary. I’ve added new scenes dic­tated by the actions of the char­ac­ters. And I’ve also been forced to rip a major set piece out of the mid­dle of the book when I real­ized that it was what was mak­ing me afraid to get past the next few chapters.

In the orig­i­nal book, Daniel and com­pany find out about a big meet­ing of all the demons and arrange to be there and film it. It was a major turn­ing point and thus was part of the out­line for this ver­sion. I moved the meet­ing to Den­ver instead of D.C., but kept the idea. I wasn’t sure how our char­ac­ters, hunted by both the demons and the FBI, would make it to Den­ver, but I was con­fi­dent the story would tell me. Early on in the week, I felt vin­di­cated by the fact that the char­ac­ters were telling me things about the story I didn’t know going in.

But one of the things I learned was that the demons are orga­nized like ter­ror­ist cells, with a very decen­tral­ized and “need to know” struc­ture. In fact, in the book, mod­ern day ter­ror­ists got that idea from demons in the first place. (why do you think we keep report­ing that we killed the same num­ber 2 al Qaeda guy over and over? because he’s immor­tal) So it fol­lowed from that that they would never have a big demon pow wow. But if they don’t have the meet­ing, then Daniel can’t go, and if he doesn’t go HOLYCRAPIAMLOSINGMYBOOK

Then I took a step back and thought about it. I went back to the end of the book. What has to hap­pen at the end? Susan goes pub­lic with her data prov­ing that immor­tals exist, that we know them as angels and demons and they’ve been mess­ing with us since before recorded his­tory. Jack leaves the FBI and heads up a new UN orga­ni­za­tion to root out and destroy the demons, and he recruits Daniel to the cause. This all has to hap­pen to set up the sec­ond book, Cru­sade.

But how I get there is entirely fluid. I don’t have to keep any­thing from Between Heaven and Hell that no longer makes sense. So in order to have that end­ing, what do the char­ac­ters need?

They need video­graphic proof of an immor­tal shrug­ging off and heal­ing a mor­tal wound, some­thing they can post on YouTube (and yes, Google, blogs and Twit­ter have already been fea­tured in the book). Susan needs a data­base of all the known demons, their cur­rent iden­ti­ties and all the aliases they’ve used through the cen­turies. And they need the Lost Gospel, an ancient scroll detail­ing in ancient Hebrew the war between the angels and demons, includ­ing the fall of Lucifer, in much more detail than we’ve ever seen before, includ­ing details on how an immor­tal can be killed permanently.

As I looked over that list, it occurred to me that I didn’t have to stick to the orig­i­nal path, and a new way to get there started form­ing in my head. I had always thought the data­base came from the demons them­selves, because it did in the orig­i­nal. But now I real­ized that not only would the demons prob­a­bly not have such a record at all, but that the angels, with their almost OCD devo­tion to order, almost cer­tainly would. So the data­base and the loca­tion of the Lost Gospel (cur­rently for­got­ten under a mosque in Iraq) would prob­a­bly come from the angels, prob­a­bly from Uriel, the archangel who has been watch­ing them. And when would he give them this infor­ma­tion? After they prove on their own that they’re wor­thy of it by killing Batarel, the demon that’s stalk­ing Daniel.

And poof! Just like that, the book popped back into place, the out­line rewrote itself and just about every­thing about my act 2 got stronger. And, most impor­tantly, I’m not sub­con­sciously dread­ing going past the next few chap­ters, into the void in my orig­i­nal out­line that just read “here be mon­sters”. Now I know that Daniel, Susan and Jeff have to run from both Batarel and Jack until they can turn the tables on Batarel and destroy him, an effort Jack finds him­self help­ing with. After that, Uriel can swoop in (as angels are wont to do) and send them off in a new direc­tion. I can see, in vague, loom­ing shapes, all the way to the end of the book now, and it looks solid. It looks good.

Of course, I real­ize that any and all of this is sub­ject to change if the char­ac­ters, yet again, find a bet­ter way to get there. But I’m start­ing off week 2 much more con­fi­dent in the book as a whole than I was before, and that’s a good feeling.