The Unification Chronicles

1: Accident

Daniel Cho was on his way home from tae kwon do practice when he heard the unmistakeable collision of steel on steel and shattering glass. Dammit, he thought, this is supposed to be my night off. He dropped his gym bag and bolted towards the sound of the collision.

Pulling his cell phone out of his pocket, he dialed 911. “This is Daniel Cho. Reporting a multicar accident at 17th and M, send emergency units.” Without waiting for a confirmation, he disconnected the call and reached into his back pocket for the latex gloves he kept there just in case.

The accident was a bad one, a three car pileup. As Daniel pulled on the gloves, he could see in the glare of the streetlights what had happened. A heavy Mercedes town car had been barreling down M and ran the light, t-boning a minivan into the pickup truck going the other way. The whole cluster had veered sideways and now blocked off M street in both directions, along with part of 17th. It would be at least half an hour before the ambulance and fire truck got here, if then. Daniel had sat in the back of that ambulance waiting to get to wrecks like this, knew what that wait was like.

Well, now he didn’t have to wait. Why do I even have nights off, he wondered as he approached the nearest car, the Mercedes.

Before he even got the door open he could see that the driver was beyond help. The bastard who caused all this carnage hadn’t been wearing a seatbelt, and the force of the crash had propelled him onto the steering wheel with enough force to break off the wheel itself and ram the steering column through his ribcage. The car predated airbags, so there was really nothing to do. The blood was everywhere in the cabin, even dripping from the ceiling. It looked almost black in the artificial illumination. But what Daniel noticed most was the man’s eyes. They were angry, focused on the road ahead of him, as if determined to continue on their way. That’s odd, Daniel thought. They usually look surprised.

Daniel shook it off and moved to the next vehicle, the minivan. It was sandwiched between the other two cars, and Daniel couldn’t seen much past the shattered windshield. He didn’t hear anything, or sense any movement. Come back to this. He moved on to the pickup truck.

The pickup driver was belted in and conscious, trying to claw his way past the deployed airbag. Daniel opened the passenger door and leaned in to help. “It’s okay,” he said, “I’m going to help get you out of there.” The man was still dazed, but complied with Daniel’s efforts to slide him out of the truck cab.

Daniel quickly palpated the man, looking for hidden injuries. He had several minor cuts from broken glass and would have the dual black eye raccoon mask from the airbag, but fundamentally he seemed okay. No broken bones and his spine looked normal. Daniel guided him to the sidewalk and propped him into a seated position against a building. “Just sit here, and try to stay awake until we can get you to a hospital and check for any head injuries,” Daniel said. The man nodded.

Now Daniel had the hard work to do. He went back to the pickup and crawled through the cab. The now shattered driver side window was matched up with the pylon on the minivan. He couldn’t reach into the minivan, but he could get a better look inside it.

The front seat was just the driver, a woman in her late twenties. She was also slumped over a deployed airbag, and had both blood and tiny cubes of safety glass in her hair. He didn’t see any major bleeds, so she could probably hold on for a bit while he figured out how to get her out. He looked into the back seat and froze. Daniel had seen a lot of horrific things in his career. This was one of them.

Behind the driver was an infant, maybe a year old, maybe less in a car seat. He was covered in blood and broken glass but seemed to be breathing. Thankfully, he was also unconscious. He didn’t have to see what was next to him.

The passenger side of the back seat held a bag of meat that used to be a little boy, maybe six or so. He was dead center for the front end of the Mercedes and took the brunt of the kinetic energy transfer. Every bone was broken, several jutting out through his flesh and clothing, red smeared white shards in all directions. Bits of gray brain matter where dripping from the ceiling, and what the seat belt held in place was crammed into his brother’s car seat.

So three possible survivors, two dead on arrival, Daniel thought. As these kinds of crashes went, that actually wasn’t bad, but the next few minutes would prove critical. And he needed some help.

He backed out of the pickup and looked around. Daniel could hear now the distant wail of the ambulance siren. He couldn’t wait. If the mother and her baby were going to live, they needed to get out of that car as soon as possible. He saw a burly man in a Redskins t-shirt. Daniel jogged up to him.

“Hey!” Daniel said. “Ever been a hero?”

The man started waving his hands in front of him and backpedaling. Daniel reached out and caught him by the forearm. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’m a doctor. I just need an extra pair of hands and a strong back. You in?”

The man gulped audibly and nodded. “I ain’t never done anything like this,” he said. “I was just on my way home.”

“That’s okay,” Daniel said. “I do this all the time. I’ll tell you what to do. Come on.”

They went back to the minivan and looked at the shattered safety glass of the windshield. Daniel hopped up on the hood and checked around the edges until he found what he was looking for, a two inch section where the seam had separated with the crumpling of the pylon. He worked his fingers into it and started pulling. Once he got about a foot free, he waved Redskins over. “Grab this and pull as hard as you can,” Daniel said.

They both pulled, and the windshield peeled away from the metal like a giant band aid. Once it was free, they cast it aside and Daniel was able to get a closer look at the mother.

It was worse than he’d hoped. The airbag was mostly deflated and it was clear that the woman’s maternal instincts worked against her. Her right arm was flattened, smashed as she tried to reach back and protect her children at the moment of impact. Right now the bleeding was contained by the pressure, but they’d have to apply a tourniquet before pulling her out. She also had a large gash on the side of her head Daniel hadn’t seen before, and it was bleeding badly. Great, Daniel thought, shouldn’t move her, but can’t afford not to if that head wound is as bad as it looks.

He looked back at Redskins. “Give me your belt,” he said. As the man started to stammer, he added, “I need to use it as a tourniquet or she’s going to bleed out through her arm when we move her. Come on, now!”

The man quickly pulled it belt out and handed it over. “Good, Daniel said. “Now I’m going to need some kind of stick or rod to tighten it. See what you can find.”

Redskins ran off on his quest. Daniel threaded the belt under the woman’s arm and tied it off at the deltoid, making sure he had a grip on her brachial artery. Redskins ran up with a tire iron. “Got this from the pickup” he said.

Daniel grabbed it and slid it through the belt before spinning it to tighten the bind, then tied it down with the other end of the belt. It wasn’t the best field tourniquet he’d ever applied, but it would hold. She might even be able to keep the arm if they got her in surgery fast enough.

“Okay,” Daniel said. “We’re going to have to move her now. Get up here.”

Redskins climbed up on the hood and looked into the cabin. He gagged. “I never seen so much blood,” he said.

“You’re doing great,” Daniel said. “I couldn’t do this without you.” He tried to slide over as much as he could to give the big man room to get a hold, but the Mercedes had crumpled in most of that half of the minivan. “We need to make sure we grab her by the torso, not the arms, and we need to make sure we cradle her head. Her head wound has me worried, so I want to make sure we don’t jostle her any more than we have to.”

Redskins started shaking his head. “You sure you don’t want someone more—”

“You’re doing fine,” Daniel said. “And I need someone strong. You’re strong.”

Redskins nodded. He was psyching himself up, Daniel could see it. He was amazed what people could rise to when given the opportunity. He’d seen it before.

“Okay,” Daniel said. “Let’s do this.” He reached in and took hold of the woman under the tourniquet, guiding Redskins to the other side. He also unlatched her seatbelt and pulled it free. “On three, we’re going to lift her out, and keep her head steady.”

He guided Redskins’s hand to the side of her head and showed him how to brace it.

“On three, he said. “One, two, three.”

Daniel and Redskins pulled and started easing her out. As soon as her arm cleared the wreckage, her eyes snapped oven and she screamed.

Redskins dropped his side and part jumped, part fell off the hood to the pavement. The woman kept screaming, a high keening wail. Daniel reached round and grabbed under her other arm, bracing her head with his own while she screamed into his ear. He pulled slow and steady until he had her out of the car and on the hood. Only then did he notice how her lower leg flopped to the side. Her leg was broken, probably both the tibia and fibula, snapped when the Mercedes crumpled the cabin.

Nothing for it now, he needed to get her stabilized. He pulled her off the minivan and laid her down in the road, trying to make sure at the very least he didn’t make things worse. Her screaming died down to a whimper, then sobbing. She reached up with her good arm and grabbed Daniel’s shirt.

“Russell,” she rasped, “Elijah…”

Must be the kids’s names, Daniel thought. “Everything’s going to be fine,” he told her. “I’m a doctor.” Daniel checked her head wound. it was starting to clot, for once something not as bad as it looked. As Daniel pulled back, he saw that the woman had passed out again. He’d rather her stay conscious until they got an MRI on her head, but frankly, what he still has to do would probably be easier with her out.

Redskins was still sitting on the concrete, shirt stained now with the woman’s blood. He had a blank stare, and Daniel knew he was done. Courageous as he may have been, everyone had their limits, and Daniel knew the signs all too well. He had to get the kid alone.

Without another word, Daniel vaulted up on to the minivan’s hood and pulled himself into the cabin. He reached down and felt for the latch to release the driver seat back, and pulled it forward, trying to get as clear a shot as he could to the baby. Again he shuddered when he saw what was left of the little boy on the passenger side. He felt bile rise in his throat and choked it down. Not now, he thought. Plenty of time to freak out later. Crawling over the driver seat, he got a closer look at the baby and felt gently for injuries. He was still out cold, but otherwise he seemed okay. His brother had absorbed all the punishment for him, shielded the baby from the worst of the impact. Daniel wondered if the kid would ever know that as he grew up.

Reaching around the car seat, he unbuckled the seat belt holding it in place and lifted the whole assembly. Then he realized he couldn’t back out and hold the kid at the same time. “Hey back there!” he called. “Can you pull me out?”

Daniel felt two strong hands grab his ankles and pull him back. He held the car seat as high as he could while he felt the tiny cubes of shattered safety glass digging into his thighs through his jeans. “Whoa!” Daniel said. “Careful.”

Suddenly he was free of the van and back into the harsh glare emergency flares. He turned and handed the carseat with the baby not to Redskins, but to a uniformed police officer. “Thank you, patrolman…” Daniel checked the officer’s nametag. “Fitsimmons. Appreciate the assist.”

The cop nodded and put the baby down next to his mother, who was still out. Daniel clambered down from the minivan and stretched. His muscles were stiff from tension.

Fitsimmons turned to him. “Sir, could I see some ID?”

Daniel nodded and dug out his wallet. “Sure. It’s okay, I’m a paramedic with the 33rd.”

Redskins, still seated in the middle of the road, seemed to wake up at this. “Paramedic? You said you was a doctor!”

“I am,” Daniel said. “Sort of.”

Fitsimmons continued rifling through Daniel’s wallet. “None of this says you’re a doctor.”

Redskins popped up. “I swear, that’s what he said. I never woulda touched that woman if he hadn’t said he was a doctor. I swear, that’s what he said.”

Without handing back Daniel’s wallet, Fitsimmons turned to Redskins. “ID, sir?”

Redskins had his drivers license ready and handed it over. “Randall Schlotsky, your honor.”

“I’m not a judge,” Fitsimmons said.

“Sorry, your honor. Anyways, this guy said he was a doctor, and that’s why I thought it was okay to move that woman.”

“Oh for Christ’s sake,” Daniel said. “I am a doctor. Or I was. I have an M.D.”

Handing Schlotsky’s drivers license back to him, Fitsimmons turned back to Daniel. The ambulance sirens were louder now, much closer. “You’re an M.D., but you work as a paramedic.” It wasn’t exactly a question.

“I just moved here from San Francisco a few months ago,” Daniel said. “I don’t have a medical license in the District.” He conveniently left out that he had no intention of getting another medical license.

“Um hmm,” Fitsimmons said, handing back Daniel’s wallet. “Sir, I’m going to have to ask you not to leave the scene.”

The ambulance finally broke through the last of the traffic and pulled up. It wasn’t from Daniel’s station, and he didn’t know the paramedics who jumped out.

“I have no intention of leaving the scene,” Daniel told Fitsimmons. “I was the first responder here, I called it into 911, and I saved that woman’s life.” He strode past the cop and addressed the paramedics. “We’ve got a probable concussion to that man,” he said, pointing at the pickup driver, “and concussion and crush injuries to the woman. Aside from minor abrasions, the infant seems fine, and we have two DOAs. A young boy in the van, and the driver of the Mercedes.”

Fitsimmons, walking around the scene, said, “Did you say the driver of the Mercedes was DOA?”

Daniel walked over. “Of course he is. What, you can’t see him through all the blood?”

“I see the blood,” Fitsimmons said. “Just not the driver.”

“Dammit,” Daniel said, almost to the Mercedes, “he’s right…

“There.” Daniel stood silent for a moment. The driver was gone.

“What the fuck?” Daniel started running, looping around the car. There was a faint blood trail for a few steps, but then nothing. But the man had been impaled. Even if someone had pulled him out of the wreckage, there should have been blood everywhere. He started scanning around at the buildings adjacent to the intersection.

And then, despite the heat of the Washington DC summer day, Daniel saw something that made his blood run cold. Walking down a back alley was the Mercedes driver, absently rubbing the still gaping hole in his chest. His clothes were still soaked with blood and gore, but he wasn’t spurting or dripping, and the size of the wound seemed to be smaller than it had been before. The man glanced over at Daniel, grinned, and disappeared behind a Dumpster.

Daniel sprinted into the alley and tried to follow the man, but saw nothing behind the Dumpster but a graffiti scrawled brick wall. He had no idea where the man had gone.

Daniel felt someone walk up behind him and spun around to see Officer Fitsimmons. “Did you see that?” Daniel asked. “Did you see him?”

Fitsimmons took a firm grip on Daniel’s arm. “Sir,” I’m going to have to ask you to come with me.”

People told me real life would intercede, that writing seven books by Labor Day 2010 was crazy. And despite my best intentions, they were right. I’m about 30,000 words behind schedule, burned out and depressed. Part of this is due to external factors. I didn’t expect my mom to get cancer,  I didn’t expect to get kicked back to Old Job and I didn’t expect the holidays to run over me the way they did. And I know a big part of my depression is the direct result of not having written anything in the past two weeks. Writing is a necessary therapy for me if I’m to remain happy and sane, and I haven’t been doing it.

I big part of this grand experiment was to commit myself to writing and see what worked for me. But it’s just as key to acknowledge that something doesn’t work and stop doing it that way. And even though it’s galling to admit it, I bit off more than I could chew. My plan to write seven books in ten months, while simultaneously editing the books I’d just written and then podcasting, publishing and promoting them, was too ambitious. Trying to do all that, and maintain a shred of a social life, and hold down a day job, was just too much.

That said, some aspects of the experiment, like writing every day and blogging about the process here, are definitely worthwhile things I need to keep doing. A lot of this has been really good for me, both personally and creatively, so I’d be an extraordinary fool to walk away from all of it.

So here’s the revised plan.

Write every day

This, more than anything, was the most positive thing to come out of the Maximum Geek Ultimate Writing Challenge for me. Writing needs to be something I do every day, no matter what, for the rest of my life. Even if some of that writing is just for me and never sees the light of day—although given my literary exhibitionism, there’s not really much chance of that—I need to write something consistently. But it doesn’t always have to be drafting, because the second point is

Alternate between drafting and editing books

It’s clear to me that writing long form fiction is a cyclical activity, and that after about six weeks of high-intensity right brain drafting, I need to let that aspect of my creativity rest and spend at least as long allowing my left brain to edit and revise what I just drafted. I think one of they key drags on my attempt to draft Crusade was that part of me really, really wanted to go back and finish Revelation first. There are pros and cons both ways. Before I got into drafting Crusade, for example, I didn’t realize I’d have to fictionalize the President of the United States in Revelation. But overall, I think Scott Sigler’s right. I need to know one book is finished before I move on to the next.

I should also note that this runs contrary to the common writing advice to put aside your first draft for a while and come back to it when you can see it fresh. When I’m done with Unification Chronicles, I might do that and write standalone books in pairs, ie. draft Homeworld and then Titanus before going back to edit Homeworld. But UC is such a known quantity to me that I think I can edit it fairly without the traditional cooling off period. Generally, the cooling off period is so you can get enough distance that you’re no longer so in love with your work that you can make cuts and change things. I’m already itching to change things in Revelation.

Continue to post work in progress and thoughts about the work here

I still think posting drafts has a tendency to slow me down and make me overthink what I’m writing, but I’m convinced that documenting this process has value. Ironically, it doesn’t have all that much value right now. Very few people are reading this blog. I have eight subscribers to the RSS feed and just under five visits to the actual site per day. But, it’s still early. A lot of the value in what I’m doing here might not be apparent until long after I’ve finished all seven books and released them as ebooks and podcasts. Basically, while I’m blogging this live, the real value is as an archive. I’m writing to the future, not to the present.

While this means that a key value proposition for me personally—daily feedback and encouragement from readers eager to get the next installment—turned out to be a bust, it’s still worth doing. In a lot of ways it’s like Pascal’s Wager. Blaise Pascal suggested that it was better to believe in God and be wrong than to be an atheist and be wrong. Similarly, if I end up becoming well-known enough for this archive to help other writers, it will. If I don’t, then I haven’t embarrassed myself by trying since by definition very few people would even know I did this. But if I don’t write this and do become well-known, it’s a hell of a missed opportunity.

Don’t worry about podcasting until have the content and means to podcast

Right now, I don’t have a reasonably quiet place to record, but more importantly, I don’t have the material. Once I’m done with the rewrites on Revelation and have moved into my new place—which has prerequisite conditions of its own, like my job situation stabilizing, filing bankruptcy and saving enough money to move—I’m not going to worry about podcasting or ebook releases. Let’s keep that horse firmly in front of the cart.

Quit trying to be part of a community I haven’t earned my way into

I’ve recently unfollowed a ton of people on Twitter, the vast majority of them other writers. I still have them all in one of my lists, so I can still keep tabs on them, but having them show up in my normal tweetstream was depressing me. It gave me the illusion that I was friends, and more importantly, peers, with people who have achieved something I haven’t and who have no idea who the hell I am. Every time I wanted to reply to people like James Rollins, Maureen Johnson, Wil Wheaton, Caitlin Kitteridge, Mur Lafferty, JC Hutchins, Pip Ballantine, etc., I had to stop myself and remember that while I know them, they don’t know me and don’t care what I have to say. Someday, if I keep working hard, I might earn myself I place at their table. If my life had continued on the path it was on a decade ago, I might already be there. But I fell a long way down in the last decade, and I’m still an unknown. Better that I stop putting on airs and pretending I’m something I’m not.

Don’t worry so much about word count

Going forward, I have a simpler metric to use, one that works just was well for drafting and editing. I want to do a chapter a day. Period. My chapters tend to be around 2,000-4,000 words long, which is also a pretty comfortable daily word count target. And when I’m editing, word count doesn’t really mean anything, as my chapter may end up actually being shorter when I’m done editing. So a chapter a day on the work in progress shall be the rule.

That’s it, folks. Either today or tomorrow I’m going to start rewrites on Revelation, and will post the revised chapter here for comparison to the original draft. And then from then on I intend to keep going through Revelation—if I start today I’ll finish it at the end of the month since there’s exactly 30 chapters—then move on to drafting Crusade again. When I’m done with Crusade, I’ll edit it a chapter a day, then start drafting Jihad. This schedule, if done through all seven books without life getting in my way again, would mean I’d finish the series by April, 2011. So let’s say I have every reason to believe that by the end of summer, 2011, I’ll be done with all seven books and ready to move on to the next big thing. Which might be the 2011 DragonCon, since I’m not going to make it this year after all.

The idea behind this blog was to provide an example of the writing process for other writers. I’ve posted the entire first draft of the first book in my series, outlines, timelines, a wiki, and lots of articles about the kind of thinking and planning involved in writing a novel. But comments have so far been pretty much nonexistent, so I have to ask: is this idea worth it? Is anyone getting something positive out of this, or am I just barking in the wilderness?

I made a mistake today. Already bummed out by getting booted back to Old Job after three months at New Job because of a stupid political pissing contest between management, I read the Turkey City lexicon. This is a vocabulary of common problems or tropes in SF for use in SF writing workshops, so people don’t waste time reinventing terms and can get right down to the business of ripping each other apart. Reading through the whole list with various aspects of UC in mind, I came away thinking, “well, there’s no bloody point in writing anything, is there?”

Honestly, only a few of the things mentioned in the lexicon apply to UC, and most of those can be fixed. Only that scares me even more. I keep thinking, I have never seen anyone write a story like this, spanning settings and genres like UC does. This means either my knowledge of the industry is insufficient, or it means that no one really has done this before.

If it’s the former, I wouldn’t be surprised. Contrary to what some of the folks in my critique group think—one guy hasn’t read a vampire story in a decade because he doesn’t want to “influence” the vampire story he just might get around to finishing some year—most of the advice I’ve seen is that you should read heavily the market in which you intend to write. This is so you know what’s been done, what works, what tropes are accepted and what tropes are tired and stale. It’s good advice. Only I don’t follow it.

I tend to read modern technothrillers (James Rollins, Michael Crichton, Preston & Child) or urban fantasy (Lilith Saintcrow, Christopher Golden). Every so often I’ll mix it up with some far-thinking hard science fiction (Stephen Baxter, Arthur C. Clarke). Unification Chronicles has elements of all of those, but really isn’t any of them. If I had to nail it down to a genre, I’d call it epic space opera. Which means I should be reading Asimov, Heinlein, Weber, Drake, etc. And I have lots of those in the “Unification Chronicles” group in Stanza on my iPhone. But right now I’m reading the third of Saintcrow’s Jill Kismet series, and then it’s on to Rollins’s latest standalone—not part of his Sigma Force series—Altar of Eden. So it’s possible that UC is rife with stale tropes everyone has seen a hundred times, only I don’t know because I think I made them up.

But the alternative possibility is even worse. Maybe no one has done this kind of story because it doesn’t work. I’m a big believer in Occam’s Razor: given a number of possible explanations for something, the simplest tends to be true. And what’s more likely? That I really have come up with a story that no one in over a century of SF (going back to Verne/Wells/Stoker/Stevenson in the late 1800s, though you could go all the way back to 1818 and Shelley’s Frankenstein) has come up with, or that I’ve independently come up with an idea lots of people have tried, but no one could get to work? And if the latter, is it likely I’m the one who will finally pull it off?

This is another reason why I think all the people complaining about the story in “Avatar” are barking up the wrong tree. Cameron uses mythic story structures because they work. They’re a safe platform on which to build what he adds to make the stories new again. Coming up with something completely original, something no one has ever done before, gives you a better than even chance of falling flat on your face. Look at any “avant garde” work. The more original you are, the more chance that the audience just won’t get it. And yet, if you’re not original enough, people complain that they’ve seen it before.

I’m really starting to wonder why I do this.

As many of you have probably noticed by now, I’m making heavy use of current events, trends and technologies in the narrative of Unification Chronicles. Specifically, Susan is a blogger, Jeff used Twitter and everyone is on the net with GPS-enabled smartphones. But wait, some of you might be asking, isn’t that going to date the work? What happens in a couple centuries when people are picking the timeless classics of the twenty-first century?

The answer, of course, is I’ll be dead, so what do I care?

Okay, let’s discuss this. I tried, when writing the original Between Heaven and Hell novellas, to avoid things that would freeze the story in a specific place and time. But because my knowledge of the future was imperfect—isn’t it always?—a number of things slipped in anyway that ring out today as hopelessly anachronistic. When confronted with a car wreck in the very first scene, Daniel doesn’t call 911 on his mobile phone, because in 1996 he didn’t have one. Susan copies the database of demons onto a CD-ROM. No one filmed these amazing things and put them on YouTube. Even though I tried to avoid such things, they’re glaring in their absence when compared to our daily lives today.

So my advice is don’t try to make your book "timeless." You’ll fail. A lot. You can’t predict the future, and instead of making your work timeless, you’ll make it bland. Go ahead and use real brand names and trademarks like Twitter, Nike, Pepsi, CNN. Done well, they’ll lend your work an authenticity, a solidity, it might not otherwise have. It’s one thing to say your character had a hamburger, it’s subtly different to say he had a Big Mac.

But like any narrative tool, don’t overuse it. All those proper nouns can be distracting if you whack the reader over the head with them. And you really want to be careful that you don’t give the appearance that the brand names are paid product placement, unless, of course, you got paid a boatload of money to do it.

What about using real people, not just things? Celebrities are fair game, right?

Sort of.

When writing the first book in the UC series, I assumed I’d cement it in 2010 as solidly as I could, so when it came time to mention people in high government office, I used real politicians. The President was Barack Obama, etc. But as I’m getting into Crusade, I’m realizing I have to take a step back on that. Why? Because I have to kill people.

Specifically, one of the events on the world’s spiral into chaos is a Presidential assassination. Two of them, in fact. First the President gets whacked because some nutjob is trying to prove he’s a demon, and then the Vice-turned-Acting President is killed by a demon during a riot that pretty much burns Washington DC to the ground. I can’t really use Barak Obama and Joe Biden for these roles. At least not if I want to avoid the Secret Service disappearing me off to Gitmo. Using celebrities in your work is one thing, something that could be construed as a threat to a sitting President is another.

So now the President in Crusade is Ricardo Alejandro Cruz. He was a two-term Congressman from Miami before running for President in 2008 and being elected the country’s first Latino President. He was born in Miami to Cuban immigrant parents, and spent a good chunk of his childhood in Cuba. Right wing conspiracy nuts have insisted for years that his birth certificate is a fake, and that he was really born in Cuba, and that he’s been installed here, Manchurian Candidate-style, to communize the United States. In Crusade, one of these nuts goes even further and decides he’s not human at all, he’s a demon, and to prove it, the nut’s going to put a 30-06 round right between his eyes and watch him get back up on live TV…

Which of course, Cruz won’t.

On the one hand, using fictional politicians gives me the ability to do whatever I want with them just like any of my other characters. But I have to admit I do kind of miss the verisimilitude using real elected officials gave Revelation. It was one thing to say that the heat was coming down on the FBI from the Director of Homeland Security, another to day it was coming down from Director Napolitano. But to do what I really want to do in this story, some things have to stay fiction.

But not everything. No way Susan’s giving up Twitter.

I got  a whopping 352 words yesterday, all of it at Chipotle before going over to my sister’s to watch the Broncos lose in the final minute of a game for the second week in a row. But hey, at least it’s something, and I think I’m ready to pull out of this malaise and get back to work. My mom is feeling better, there’s every chance that she’s cancer-free, and if even if she’s not, what she has is easily treatable. The holidays are behind me—I get to work New Years Eve and New Years Day, so nothing to look forward to there, and frankly I’ll be happy just to leave the 2000s decade in the dustbin of history, thank you very much—and my mind is turning back to Unification Chronicles with something that almost feels like eagerness.

One cool idea I’ve been bouncing around for a while is the idea that the supernova triggered by the Guardians to end the Eternal War is actually seen from Earth. This involved doing some math to make sure the dates all worked out. I’d already decided that I wanted Daniel Cho’s final victory over the Archangel Michael to happen on 21 December 2012, really soak that “dawning of a new age” thing for all it’s worth. So what would I need to have that event heralded by a new star in the sky, so bright that’s visible during the day and outshines the moon?

I know that Book 4, Mistaken Identity, takes place about 100 years after Book 3, Jihad. In that book, we meet the Sendeni, the most powerful race to survive the Eternal War. They tell us that the Guardians ended the war a thousand years ago by inducing a star to go supernova with the Nemesis nearby, destroying nearly all of the Nemesis before chasing what was left out of the galaxy. Neither race ever returned. If I want that explosion to be Daniel’s Star, where does it have to be?

According to the Sendeni, the explosion would have occurred in the Earth year 1112 CE. If the star was only 500 light years away, I could make it the supernova documented by Johannes Kepler in 1604. But in order for it to be Daniel’s Star, visible to us in 2012, it has to be 900 light years away. This is feasible, considering the Eternal War ranged all over the galaxy and it’s far enough from us that the detonation wouldn’t affect Sol otherwise (if Alpha Centauri, only 4 light years away, went supernova, it would completely destroy our ozone layer and kill all surface life on Earth).

Who knew writing fiction involved math?

As I mentioned over on the main blog, my focus on writing has shifted a bit as a reaction to my mom’s health problems. But I’ve also realized, in just two days away from writing, that I have to keep doing this. I have to keep writing, if only to stay sane(ish). So this morning I’ve been working on the outline for Crusade, or at least the outline for act 1. Here’s what I have so far:

1: New Beginning

• Daniel at his family’s graves, refer to "bootcamp"
• Jack’s team tries take down a demon with an EMP, fails

2: The Man Who Would Be King

• Susan interviews US Senator Timothy Phillips from Texas
• Anti-demon hysteria, community witch hunts

3: Recovery

• Daniel helps Patrick heal up
• Jack confers with Uriel about the effect on public opinion

4: Impetus

• In Hell, Lucifer and Baal discuss out to turn the chaos outside to their advantage
• Phillips introduces legislation

5: Disintegration

• Team attacks a demon with acid, scars bystander
• Susan learns of the attack, what Daniel and Jack are up to, calls them out on TV

6: Malcontents

• Jack’s team reacts to being branded terrorists
• Phillips calls for people to assist in bringing demons to justice

7: Disruptions

• Patrick tries to hack the wireless communication between the nanites
• Susan chases Jack’s team

8: Intended Consequences

• Witch hunts intensify, increasing public panic (POV?)
• Susan is at odds with the network

9: Fallout

• Team attacks a demon hideout with a dirty bomb

10: Capitulation

• President is politically forced to admit that demons exist

I’m fond of the chapter titles, and I think I have some good stuff here. The hysteria gripping the country—it spreads worldwide in a big way in act 2—builds slowly, an escalation on both sides. A lot of the characters have to deal with doubts about what they’re doing: Daniel has to deal with civilian collateral damage, Susan with the fear-mongering the network wants her to do, Jack with how ineffectual they are at fighting the immortals. I’m also pitting Susan against Jack and Daniel, at least for a while.

But it still seems like I’m missing something. In this phase of the story, the humans are proxies, or even pawns, in a war between the angels and demons. Each side of immortals thinks they have the upper hand and fundamentally misunderstands the nature of the conflict waged by the other side.

The demons think that they are close to winning the war once and for all, tipping the scales to chaos. While the revelation of their existence was unintentional, they now think it might be the best thing that ever happened to them, because the rampant fear can be manipulated to undermine all the structures of order. Governments and economies will crumble, setting humans against each other on a global scale. Demons are ultimately trying to improve the human race by making it stronger, weeding out the weak. And nothing does that better than a post-apocalyptic hellscape.

The angels, on the other hand, have stopped fighting the war of hearts and minds entirely. They’re no longer competing with the demons to see who can out-influence the humans. Instead, they’re using the humans as weapons with which to wipe the demons out directly. Once the tide turns, the angels will reveal themselves and enter combat. Until then, they’re giving the demons the illusion of getting what they want while they have the demons hunted down and destroyed. In the short term, demonic propensity for chaos will wipe the slate clean, allowing the angels to build an orderly utopia on the ashes later when the demons have been eliminated.

So in the first act of Crusade I need to lay the groundwork for all this, showing both the steady decline of social order and the ruthless efficiency of the angels in going after their opponents directly rather than by influencing humans. All of this subtext needs to be conveyed while still focusing on Jack, Daniel and Susan, seeing it all unfold through their eyes.

Which brings me back to the outline. I see two things wrong with it so far, two things that jump out at me.

1. Where is Daniel in all this? He needs a bigger role.
2. The angels need to be a stronger presence. So far we have one scene with Uriel in the whole first act. I need something to foreshadow Gabriel showing up in full powered armor in act 2.

I’m also not sure yet why the President of the United States is forced to admit that demons are real. I suspect that will be driven by the populist uprisings and the need to try to maintain peace and public safety, and to some degree an attempt to defuse Senator Phillips’s rhetoric. Josh says I need to have more “man in the street” scenes, some way to show how the rising panic is affecting everyday people. Need to think more on that one.

So what about you? Keeping in mind that this is just the first of three acts in the second book of a trilogy, what jumps out to you as missing or out of place?

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UPDATE: Okay, here’s what I came up with over the afternoon.

1: New Beginning

• Daniel at his family’s graves, refer to "bootcamp"
• Jack’s team tries take down a demon with an EMP, fails

2: The Man Who Would Be King

• Susan interviews US Senator Timothy Phillips from Texas
• Anti-demon hysteria, community witch hunts
• Chaos vignette

3: Recovery

• Daniel helps Patrick heal up
• Jack confers with Uriel about the effect on public opinion
• Chaos vignette

4: Impetus

• In Hell, Lucifer and Baal discuss out to turn the chaos outside to their advantage
• Phillips introduces legislation
• Chaos vignette

5: Disintegration

• Team attacks a demon with acid, scars bystander
• Susan learns of the attack, what Daniel and Jack are up to, calls them out on TV
• Chaos vignette

6: Malcontents

• Team reacts to being branded terrorists
• Chaos vignette
• Phillips calls for people to assist in bringing demons to justice

7: Disruptions

• Chaos vignette
• Patrick tries to hack the wireless communication between the nanites
• Susan chases Jack’s team

8: Intended Consequences

• Chaos vignette
• Daniel conflicts with Jack
• Susan is at odds with the network

9: Fallout

• Team attacks a demon hideout with a dirty bomb
• Daniel rebels (this is where we see the beginnings of why Daniel ends up leading Jack in Jihad, that Daniel is more principled)
• Chaos vignette

10: Capitulation

• At a public protest, Baal shows up and reveals himself to the world, kills protestors
• Daniel “gets with the program,” is willing to keep going for the greater good
• President is politically forced to admit that demons exist

Lots of good changes here.

First, we have a defined character arc for Daniel, where he drifts away from Jack, rebelling at the violence and collateral damage, but is forced to come back at the end of the act.

Second, I have a series of vignettes planned, little one-shot “man on the street” pieces showing how the fear and chaos is affecting individuals. I see these as similar to the quick little one-off scenes Frank Miller did so well in The Dark Knight Returns to illustrate what that future Gotham City was like.

Third, we see that the demons force the government’s hand by “coming out” on their own, provoking an official response and ratcheting the terror still higher. This forces Daniel to overcome his doubts, forces Susan to get on board with the network’s fear mongering, and sets the stage for the angelic response from Gabriel in act 2.

The first 30,000 words or so of Crusade is starting to look very interesting.

Another bang up weekend, a grand total of 196 words added to Crusade over two days. I did, however, do a fantastic job of organizing my Writing Music playlist, all 108 hours of it. Nice that all the tunes are consistently named, formatted and all have album art, but it’s not writing.

Why am I blocked? The same gorram reason I’m always blocked. Because I’m terrified. And why am I terrified? Because I don’t know where I’m going.

I am a rare and very confused species, the Type A Buddhist. I want to go with the flow, let go of expectations and all that, but I’d feel a lot better about it if I had an outline and a set of requirements to follow (yes, this is probably a holdover from my days as a software developer; I have a deep and profound fear of scope creep). I need to know not only where the story is going, but I need to have a reasonable idea of what I’m going to see on the way.

The problem is that Revelation changed the story and the characters so much from the original novella that very little of the original Crusade novella is still usable. Again, I know the basic beats of the story, where it has to end up and who has to die before we get there, but everything else is different, and I find myself floundering trying to put one word after another in the dark.

My writer’s group says I’m just tired, having just finished a novel in six weeks, and it’s okay for me to slow down for a while, gather my thoughts. They might have a point. In between writing, I’m transitioning from one company to another in my day job, said day job is migrating users from one Exchange server to another, so I’m a lot busier at work than usual, my mom just had (successful) cancer surgery and I’m desperately trying to save up enough money to file bankruptcy (which seems counterintuitive, but there it is). I’m under a lot of stress, and my body is starting to break down. I’m in near constant pain and have resorted to taking muscle relaxants just to get by. And I no longer have the NaNoWriMo community to bolster my efforts and cheer me on.

All of that is a perfectly acceptable excuse for why I’m not writing Crusade at the same pace as Revelation. But it’s not a reason. It’s just an excuse.

Because the real reason I’m writing so slowly is that I don’t know where I’m going. Again. My outline for Act 1 of Crusade is a disorganized mess of vague story ideas. No wonder my narrative prose sounds like aimless wandering. That’s what it is.

So today, in between all the other stuff I have to do, I’m going to really tighten up the outline for Crusade Act 1. I’m not going past the act break, because I want to remain flexible. But everything up to that act break needs to be thought out, delineated. Because only when I know where I’m going can I really open up the throttle to get there.

I got a paltry 267 words yesterday, bringing the total wordcount for Crusade to 4032. Needless to say, this is not what I had in mind. Partially, my performance yesterday was fatigue. I was hella tired, and wasn’t motivated to do much of anything. I also didn’t get my daily dose of Chipotle, which I’ll discuss in a separate post.

But it wasn’t all fatigue. This morning I listened to the latest I Should Be Writing podcast, and Mur absolutely nailed it. I’m overthinking things. I’m second guessing myself because I know that I’m going to be posting my rough draft, and I don’t want it to suck or even worse, be boring. And I’m at the beginning of the book, so I’m doing a lot of laying groundwork right now (although I have already had one bloody shootout). And if I feel like what I’m about to write is going to be boring, I freeze, and don’t write anything at all.

This is horrible, and I damn well know better.

The first commandment of writing is Thou Shalt Suck. It’s okay. That’s what first drafts are for. I love a drafting and editing like children, I can’t really pick between them. There is magic in each. But I do know that one of the things I like best about editing is finding new and exciting ways to improve the stuff I wrote while drafting, playing with the craft of storytelling rather than the art. First drafts should be art, even bad art. They should be pure storytelling, just blue-sky daydreaming.

And the fact that I’m posting my first draft has got my stymied. I realize at this point only a dozen or so people stop by, and even they don’t read everything, so my rough drafts aren’t really being seen by the judgmental hordes I imagine, but that’s reason. Fear, by definition, isn’t reasonable. So the big question is, how can I keep my promise to provide the whole kit and kaboodle as an example to other new writers, remain transparent about the entire process, and yet write the rough draft fearlessly?

Day three of Crusade was a success. I got 2005 words, the first time I’ve crested 2k on this book. (Day 1 was 737 words, day 2 was 1023.) It’s been much, much harder building up speed on this than it was on Revelation. The first day of Revelation was 3200 words, just a bit under my total word count on Crusade.

Part of this, I think, is fatigue. I finished writing a novel and plunged right into a new one. Not only did I not take a day off, I didn’t even sleep on it. I started Crusade the same day that I finished Revelation. No wonder I’m tired. Frankly, this is Josh Curry’s fault. I had to jump into Crusade right away, lest I give him an even bigger head start on our word war.

But also I think it’s that Crusade is a fuzzier story to me. I knew where Revelation was going, or at least I thought I did. I turned out to be wrong, and the characters came up with wonderfully unexpected ways to get to the endgame of book 1, ways completely different than what I had in mind. But having something in mind gave me the confidence to barge into the writing, sure of where I was going (even if I was wrong).

With Crusade, as the result of the unexpected twists in Revelation, I find myself in largely uncharted territory. I have an outline, of sorts, and know where the first act has to end up, but how to get there is a complete mystery to me. To some writers, this “thrill of the blank page” is a wonder. To me, it’s terrifying. As I write, I’m finding out where my “sweet spot” is between plotting and pantsing. Too much rigid plotting (what I ended up with on Ghost Ronin) and I’m too bored by the story to write, but too much pantsing and I’m paralyzed by indecision, unsure of where I’m going. I need just enough outline to give me a map, but not enough to tell the story for me. I think this is what I have with Crusade, but it’s still probably a little too far to the pantsing side for comfort.

The solution, obviously, is to do a little bit more outlining, working backwards from the act 1 break. I might do that tonight. But for the most part, I’m going to enjoy hitting my word count and watch me some of the TV machine. Maybe even eat something tasty. And tomorrow, we’ll see if I can match what I did today.