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?

---

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.

1: New Beginning

[Dante Hicks is now Patrick Russell.]Daniel Cho stood in the frigid bay wind and stared at the graves of his par­ents and his sis­ters. It was Sep­tem­ber, three months after their deaths at the hands of the demons. Their estate han­dling had been done remotely because he’d spent the last three months prepar­ing to avenge them. Today was the first day he’d actu­ally been free to visit their graves.

He hardly rec­og­nized the man he’d been when they died. In the last three months, Jack and Sandy had run him and Patrick through a bru­tal “boot camp” to pre­pare non-​​combatant civil­ians for the bat­tle ahead. They’d been whipped into the best phys­i­cal shape of their lives, taught how to sur­vive in wilder­nesses from the Appalachian moun­tains to South­East Wash­ing­ton DC.  They’d been taught how kill with guns, knives and their bare hands. Daniel was the equal now of the best US Army Rangers, and had also refreshed his skills as a trauma sur­geon. Those were skills his team was likely to need, con­sid­er­ing what they’d be fighting.

Demons. Not the horned and pitch­fork vari­ety, but real, flesh and blood peo­ple who, as the result of nan­otech­nol­ogy no one had fig­ured out yet, healed almost instantly, never got sick, never aged. They’d been liv­ing among humans for cen­turies – mil­len­nia – and inter­fer­ing in the devel­op­ment of soci­ety, cor­rupt­ing and poi­son­ing things for their own ends. Wher­ever there was blood, strife, humans killing each oth­ers, there were demons behind the scenes.

Daniel had stum­bled upon their exis­tence and they’d tried to kill him for it. When that didn’t work, they’d killed his fam­ily. But in the end, Daniel and his friends had been able to get the truth out. The demons weren’t a secret anymore.

But nei­ther were they acknowl­edged fact. The demons had caught the col­lec­tive imag­i­na­tion of the pub­lic, but the United States gov­ern­ment, along with most of the United Nations, still declared them a hoax. Daniel knew that this was because the demons had influ­ence deep within the gov­ern­ments of the world. Even Jack’s for­mer boss at the FBI had been work­ing for them. Offi­cially, an ancient con­spir­acy of immor­tals med­dling with human his­tory was every bit the wacko con­spir­acy the­ory it sounded like.

Only it was real. Jeff had died to bring the story to light, one of many wacko con­spir­acy the­o­ries he had favored. Only this one was real. The demons existed, whether they were acknowl­edged offi­cially or not.

And they would be hunted. Jack’s team but just one of many the angels had started up in the last few months. The angels still hadn’t, for the most part, shown them­selves. Only Uriel had been seen in pub­lic. But they’d thrown their con­sid­er­able resources behind the human effort to seek out and destroy the demons, once and for all.

Daniel knew the mis­sion was impor­tant. He believed, as Jack did, that human­ity needed to be free. But really, he just wanted to destroy the crea­tures that had taken his fam­ily away from him. He wanted jus­tice. If he couldn’t get it from his gov­ern­ment, he’d take it himself.

“Are you ready?” Jack said behind him.

Jack turned and saw his new boss, both of them wear­ing jeans and leather jack­ets against the fall chill. They didn’t look much like sol­diers. But Jack had fought in Iraq, along­side Sandy, before he joined the FBI. And while Patrick hadn’t been tested under fire yet, Daniel had fought the demon Batarel five times before finally killing the bas­tard, the last time just hand to hand, flip­ping the demon off a cat­walk in a steel plant into a vat of molten metal. So far, he was the only human to kill an immor­tal in all of recorded his­tory. That had to count for something.

Daniel didn’t look back at his family’s graves. “Yeah, boss. I’m ready.”

“Let’s sad­dle up, then.” Jack turned and led Daniel to the UH-​​60 Black­hawk they used to move around. They hadn’t come to San Fran­cisco just so Daniel could say good­bye to his fam­ily. They were hunt­ing. After Susan released the data­base given to her by Uriel with all the names and aliases of every demon, includ­ing their cur­rent iden­ti­ties, most of them had gone to ground, assumed emer­gency backup iden­ti­ties. It had taken a lot of leg­work and Patrick’s com­puter skills, but they found one, liv­ing in the bay area. It was time to take him down.

*

Jack sat in the cock­pit of the Black­hawk, going over the mis­sion details one more time. Sandy was pilot­ing, and Daniel was in the back with Patrick, try­ing to get Patrick’s lit­tle sur­prise ready. While he and Sandy had been teach­ing the young ana­lyst to fight, they’d also been pick­ing his brain about how to kill demons more effec­tively. They couldn’t very well carry around a vat of molten steel every­where they went, so they needed another way to kill some­thing that could heal almost any injury in sec­onds. Patrick had come up with a lot of ideas, includ­ing the one they were going to field test today. Just as soon as they found the demon.

Accord­ing to their sources, the demon, true name of Oznael, was holed up in ware­house down in Hunter’s Point. Seemed as good a place as any to test out their tactics.

Sandy sig­naled him. They were almost at the LZ. Out the port side he saw the blue of San Fran­cisco Bay, gray indus­trial build­ings below and to star­board. They were com­ing in fast.

Jack turned and sig­naled to Daniel and Patrick. They moved to turn off all their elec­tron­ics. Jack started shut­ting down every­thing he could in the cock­pit with­out inter­fer­ing with Sandy keep­ing the bird in the air. They’d have to be quick.

Sandy pointed at a build­ing, started a count­down with his hand. Five, four, three…

The instant the Black­hawk hit the roof, Jack and Sandy scram­bled to shut down the remain­ing elec­tron­ics. They had three sec­onds. Two, one…

Dante hit the EMP and Jack heard a loud pop from the back of the Black­hawk. All the con­trol screens were black. He glanced at Sandy. “Did we make it?”

“Won’t know until we try to start it again.”

Jack shrugged. They had other con­cerns at the moment. “Let’s move, everybody!”

The men jumped out of the Black­hawk, rotors still swing­ing above their heads from sheer momen­tum. They ran for the roof access door, Jack spray­ing the door­knob with bul­lets from his MP5. He kicked the door down and they rode it like a surf­board down the first flight of steps before jump­ing off in the land­ing and con­tin­u­ing down. The stair­case opened out into a cat­walk above a ware­house floor. The lights were off, a side effect of the eletro­mag­netic pulse they’d set off. If they were lucky, the nanites in the demon’s blood would be dis­abled as well.

They fanned out across the cat­walks along the north and west sides of the build­ing. Each man was dressed in black cov­er­alls, com­bat boots and bul­let­proof vests. They wore kevlar hel­mets and could have passed for SWAT offi­cers but for the lack of the word POLICE in bright white let­ters on their vests. Each car­ried an MP-​​5 sub­ma­chine gun, plenty of ammo, grenades, and a light back­pack con­tain­ing the tools of their spe­cialty. Sandy car­ried hand­held napalm bombs and other ordi­nance. Daniel had their med­ical kit, Patrick a com­puter that could con­nect to just about any­thing any­time some­one hadn’t just set off an EMP. Jack’s back­pack held sur­veil­lance gear, and he reached into that pack to pull out a light­weight set of night vision gog­gles. He put them on.

The ware­house flared into a mono­chrome gray, brighter and bet­ter detailed than what he’d been able to make out by eye. He was the spot­ter in this sce­nario, direct­ing the other men towards the tar­get. If they could find the tar­get. The ware­house was full of eighty foot ship­ping con­tain­ers, some stacked five high. A sin­gle demon could hide in here for a long time with­out being spot­ted, espe­cially if he could get into one or more of the containers.

Jack saw some­thing dart off to the side on the ware­house floor. He whis­tled to the men, and pointed. “South­east cor­ner!” he said.

Care­fully, they all started down the metal stair­ways towards the floor. Patrick had formed up with Jack, Daniel was cov­er­ing Sandy. With any luck, they’d catch the bas­tard in a crossfire.

Jack turned and glanced at Patrick. “You sure this is going to work?”

The for­mer FBI ana­lyst shrugged. “In the­ory, it should work,” Patrick said. “The nanites are too small to have any appre­cia­ble EM shield­ing. The EMP should have turned Oznael into just another human being, at least for a while. If we shoot him, he should stay dead.”

“That’s an awful lot of “shoulds”, Patrick.”

“I know, sir.”

They crept down the floor. As soon as Jack stepped down to the con­crete, he heard the dis­tinc­tive chat­ter of an AK-​​47. He grabbed Patrick by the scruff of the neck and threw them both to the floor. Bul­lets ric­o­cheted off the metal stair­case behind them.

“I think he’s on to us, sir,” Patrick said.

“Fig­ured that out, did you?” Jack said as heard answer­ing MP-​​5 fire com­ing from the left. Good, Sandy was already try­ing to pin him down.

He slapped Patrick on the shoul­der. “Come on, Patrick. We have a job to do.”

Patrick cov­ered Jack as Jack care­fully side­stepped around the ship­ping con­tainer where he thought the AK shots had come from. Sandy and Daniel were no longer fir­ing, so they must have lost Oznael too, assum­ing they ever saw him and weren’t just shoot­ing at the sound to drive him back.

“Oznael!” Jack shouted, echo­ing in the vast ware­house. “We know who and what you are. There’s no way out of here except through us!”

“Sir is that wise?” Patrick whis­pered. “Taunt­ing him?”

“If he hides,” Jack whis­pered, “and we have to search crate by crate, it’s much more dan­ger­ous and we have a higher risk of los­ing him. He thinks he’s invul­ner­a­ble still, and is only avoid­ing us because it’s eas­ier to pick us off one by one. If we can make him angry enough to charge us…”

“He’ll run right into the bul­lets, think­ing they won’t harm him.”

“That’s the plan,” Jack said. “Now we just need to flush him out.”

Jack turned on the com­link hooked over his right ear. “Sandy, report,” he said as qui­etly as he could.

“Noth­ing here, boss,” Sandy said. We con­verged on where it sounded like the AK fire came from, but there’s no sign of him.”

“Roger that,” Jack said. He waved for Patrick to fol­low and moved down the aisle between the mas­sive con­tain­ers. Bas­tard had to be here somewhere.

“Oznael!” he said. “You’re not get­ting out of this.”

Jack heard the demon speak behind them, a rough Aussie accent. “I beg to differ.”

Oznael opened fire, and Jack felt a cou­ple of the rounds hit the plate on the back of his vest. Patrick cried out and went down immediately.

“Shit,” Jack said and returned fire. He hit the demon square in the chest with at least five rounds. The demon fell down under the hail of gunfire.

“Medic!” Jack screamed. “Daniel, get over here!” Jack saw a pool of blood spread­ing under Patrick, and it was get­ting way too big.

As he heard Sandy and Daniel dou­ble­time over to him, he saw the demon get­ting back up.

*

Daniel saw Patrick slumped against the side of a con­tainer as Jack leaped over him and opened fire on the demon again. “Sandy, I need some help here!” Jack said.

As Sandy and Jack drove the demon back, Daniel whipped off his pack and tended to Patrick. “Stay with me, buddy,” he said. “We’re gonna get through this.”

“F – First time out,” Patrick said. “And I get tagged.”

“Could have hap­pened to any of us,” Daniel said. He saw that most of the bleed­ing was com­ing from Patrick’s left leg. Daniel took a knife and sliced open the leg of Patrick’s pants. The bul­let had gone deep into his thigh, and the blood com­ing out was bright red, arte­r­ial. Prob­a­bly nicked the femoral, Daniel thought.

“Okay, Patrick, this is going to sting a bit,” Daniel said. He grabbed a clamp out of his pack, and a retrac­tor. “Got to do a lit­tle spelunking.”

“In my leg?”

“Just lie back and think of Eng­land,” Daniel said. “Don’t pass out if you can help it.”

“I’m get­ting dizzy, Daniel.”

Daniel reached in with the retrac­tor and pulled the wound open. Patrick screamed and thrashed.

“Patrick! Keep still!”

“Fuck!” Patrick said through clenched teeth.

There was blood every­where, pump­ing hot over Daniel’s hands. But he could see where it com­ing from. He reached in with the clamp, and closed it over the artery.

“Shit!” Patrick said. “Fuck­ing Christ, that hurts!”

Daniel broke an ice pack and put it over the wound. “Hold that there as long as you can. I’ve stopped the life threat­en­ing bleed­ing, but we need to get you to an OR as soon as pos­si­ble.” He wrapped some ban­dages over the ice pack. “I’ll be right back.”

Daniel grabbed his weapon, jumped up and ran towards the gunfire.

*

Jack emp­tied his clip, ejected it, and slammed another one home. Oznael was off bal­ance from the con­tin­ued gun­fire, but he was heal­ing vis­i­bly. They had him backed up and pinned down, but Jack didn’t see how they were going to keep this going. As soon as they ran out of ammo, the demon would coun­ter­at­tack and it would be over. They needed a lot more prac­tice before try­ing to take one of these things down.

Jack heard another SMG open up behind him, and saw Daniel adding his fire­power. He was fir­ing in three-​​round bursts, focus­ing on the demon’s knees.

“Good think­ing!” Jack shouted. “Sandy, we need some heat!”

Sandy pulled back and reached behind him. He pulled out what was essen­tially a small flare attached to a plas­tic con­tainer of jel­lied gaso­line. It was a slightly more sophis­ti­cated ver­sion of a Molo­tov Cock­tail, in that it used napalm instead of gas or kerosene, but it would do the job. Sandy lit it and tossed it just above the demon. The flare ignited the napalm, which melted the plas­tic and rained down on the demon, In an instant, the demon was cov­ered in fire. Oznael turned and ran, faster than Jack thought pos­si­ble, for one of the ware­house exits.

“Won’t kill him,” Sandy said, “but it will take him out of com­mis­sion long enough for us to evac.”

“Let’s do it, then,” Jack said. Daniel already had a col­lapsi­ble stretcher unpacked and unfolded. They set about mov­ing Patrick to the stretcher as gen­tly as pos­si­ble, and then car­ried him to the near­est staircase.

The first bat­tle in the war against the demons hadn’t exactly been a rous­ing success.

You’d think now that I’m start­ing a new book writ­ing would be fun again. You’d be hor­ri­bly mis­taken, and quite pos­si­bly bark­ing mad. I’ve got 793 words today, 1530 for the book over­all, and it’s just tor­ture. Maybe not waterboarding-​​caliber tor­ture, but at least as bad as being forced to lis­ten to Yanni records.

I’ve got a han­dle on my first two chap­ters, and I know my char­ac­ters pretty well (btw, Dante Hicks from Rev­e­la­tion has been renamed to Patrick Rus­sell, as the name Dante was too sim­i­lar to Daniel if the char­ac­ter is going to be stick­ing around a while). Maybe that’s the prob­lem. A big chunk of this first chap­ter is pick­ing up a few months after the events in Rev­e­la­tion and going for­ward. But I still have to do that awk­ward second-​​book-​​in-​​a-​​series thing where I rein­tro­duce the char­ac­ters to peo­ple who just so hap­pened to pick up this book first – the first and only Nar­nia book I’ve ever read was Prince Caspian, the seoond in the series – with­out appear­ing to intro­duce them to the peo­ple who just fin­ished read­ing about them in book one. GAH.

I do need to send out props to my tweeps. A good chunk of the action in the first half of Cru­sade is thanks to them as Patrick and the rest of Jack’s demon-​​hunters try out all the sug­ges­tions I got from Twit­ter about how to kill a nanite-​​infused demon. (very few of them turn out to work, because it still has to be a chal­lenge to kill these bas­tards in book three)

So I might be able to crest a thou­sand before I head not home, but to the com­pany xmas party. I’ve got a cou­ple of iPhone apps that sync with Google Docs, so I might be able to squeeze in a few hun­dred words at the party if the stand up comics turn out to be, well, Yanni.