The Unification Chronicles

“It is the ques­tion that dri­ves you.” –Trin­ity, “The Matrix”

In my case, the ques­tion was the cen­tral ques­tion of Cru­sade. The ques­tion behind every­thing that hap­pens, that sets up the new world order in Jihad. A sim­ple ques­tion, really.

How do you over­throw gov­ern­ing struc­tures — from two prox­ies removed — while pre­serv­ing cor­po­rate wealth?

The angels have spent the last hun­dred years or so con­sol­i­dat­ing their power in cor­po­ra­tions. They, or their human agents, have con­trol­ling inter­ests in just about every­thing. They are multi­na­tional, direct­ing the flow of wealth around the globe with no restric­tions or bor­ders. And it gives them the con­trol over the humans they need. Want to weed out the weak? Own insur­ance com­pa­nies and direct them not to cover peo­ple with pre-​​existing conditions.

But even so, money is issued by gov­ern­ments, right? So how would they con­tinue to func­tion if the gov­ern­ments of the world crum­bled beneath them? They would need to keep those gov­ern­ments in place — under con­trol by lob­by­ists, but in place — to pro­vide the foun­da­tion on which their empire was built, right? I just couldn’t come up with a good rea­son for them to let the demons have the chaos they strove for. It seemed counterproductive.

I thought it was going to drive me nuts. Then I real­ized the prob­lem was that I wasn’t giv­ing myself the chance to think about it. There is a move­ment afoot to bring back bore­dom, to delib­er­ately insert down­time back into our lives. We’re learn­ing that men­tal stim­u­la­tion every moment of your con­scious life doesn’t allow you to process what you know, to syn­the­size infor­ma­tion into new ideas. As half the IT depart­ment for a medium size com­pany, my job is to solve prob­lems all day long. I don’t have time to think about my story at work. And when I’m not work­ing, I’m read­ing on my Kin­dle, lis­ten­ing to pod­casts, watch­ing TV — only socially, I assure you — or yeah, try­ing to write. I wasn’t giv­ing my mind time to think.

Then, dri­ving home with­out lis­ten­ing to a pod­cast or audio­book or the dig­i­tal voice of my Kin­dle, let­ting my mind mull it over — and over and over — it finally hit me. And as it does so often with me, the answer came in the form of math, an equation.

Money is power, they say. There­fore, power is money.

The wealth the angels pos­sess isn’t in the form of dol­lars or euros or yuen. Their wealth, the wealth of their cor­po­rate prox­ies, is in the resources they con­trol. And those resources will be cru­cial to staving off the dark age the demons are almost allowed to throw us into. Yes, gov­ern­ments will crum­ble. Civil order will fail, briefly. But then, before any per­ma­nent dam­age is done, Black­wa­ter will restore order. Hal­libur­ton will rebuild. Cit­i­group will pro­vide the means for com­merce to resume.

The new world will look much like the old one, but sleeker, more stream­lined. The cor­po­ra­tions will be in direct con­trol, rather than hav­ing to work through the inef­fi­cient prox­ies of “demo­c­ra­tic gov­ern­ments.” Multi­na­tional cor­po­ra­tions will have rid them­selves of what had become an annoy­ing par­a­site, and had the oppor­tu­nity to sweep away smaller com­peti­tors that still relied on that par­a­site to function.

And really, they’ll point out, what has really changed? The same peo­ple — or angels — are mak­ing the deci­sions now that made the deci­sions before. Now they just don’t have to go through the the­ater of “ask­ing permission.”

So now the only ques­tion remain­ing is the detail of how they man­age to play this intri­cate game of chess from two gen­er­a­tions removed. The angels aren’t caus­ing the down­fall of world gov­ern­ments directly. They’re manip­u­lat­ing the demons, who are in turn manip­u­lat­ing the power-​​hungry and eas­ily led. I already have a work­ing model of what that would look like in the mod­ern Amer­i­can Tea Party, a sup­pos­edly “grass roots” move­ment that is funded and sub­tly guided by billionaires.

The scary part is how plau­si­ble it is. How eas­ily multi­na­tional cor­po­ra­tions could sim­ply do with­out nation states. Good thing we don’t have to worry about that in real life, right?

Ah, the dreaded week two. The inevitable slump after the fast and promis­ing start of week one.

I’ve learned a few things. Or learned them again, since after I learned them I real­ized these are things I already knew but had for­got­ten that I knew so that when I learned them again it was like learn­ing them for the first time only it wasn’t. (and know you know what the inside of my head is like when I’m drafting)

Feel free to revise the out­line as you go

Part of my prob­lem was that – as they always do – my char­ac­ters sur­prised me and started veer­ing away from the out­line as they came up with bet­ter, more inven­tive ways to accom­plish what I needed them to do. Daniel is much more thought­ful and proac­tive than I expected, Susan is more ambi­tious and dri­ven, Phillips is more… Phillips-​​y. As I got closer and closer to chap­ter 6 in the out­line, “Dis­rup­tions,” my sub­con­scious kept throw­ing on the breaks, usu­ally by way of enforced nar­colepsy as soon as I opened my world proces­sozzzzzzzz… Yeah, like that.

It finally sank in on me that the rea­son I was so hes­i­tant to write “Dis­rup­tions” was that because of the actions and atti­tudes already con­veyed in the book, that chap­ter was no longer nec­es­sary. The book actu­ally works bet­ter with it entirely cut out. I cut it, tin­kered with act 2 a bit, which is com­ing up even faster now, and I’m back on track. I can type with­out falling asleep.

But not with­out clos­ing my eyes, because…

Type blind for max­i­mum speed

The other trick I redis­cov­ered is that I can write roughly dou­ble the words in a given span of time if I don’t sweat read­abil­ity. On my PC, I engage the “flow mode” in Write­Mon­key, which dis­ables the back­space and delete keys, forc­ing me to keep typ­ing no mat­ter what. On my iPhone with my Blue­tooth key­board, I just turn the phone over so I can’t see the screen. In either case, I keep typ­ing and don’t worry about typos. If I know I screwed up a word, I just tap the space­bar and keep going.

This is part of the rea­son why I haven’t posted chap­ters 3 – 5 yet. They’re bor­der­line unread­able unless you’re me and know what I meant. But it’s close enough so that I’ll know what I’m doing when it comes time for revi­sion. Speak­ing of which…

No revis­ing (or wire hangers)

This one may be more ger­mane to me than most NaNo nov­el­lers since I’m dumb enough to post my first drafts for the world to see. But another drag on my pro­duc­tiv­ity was unease with my mess of a man­u­script and the need to fix it before I go on. Say it with me: Bad Jeff! No bis­cuit! It is what it is, and if it’s unread­able, it’s a first draft and it’s sup­posed to be unread­able. Keep writ­ing. At this point in the process, you not only have per­mis­sion to suck, but it’s prac­ti­cally expected.

That said I’ll be post­ing chap­ters 3 – 5 later. Some scenes are incom­plete, some need to be rewrit­ten from the ground up, some of them are pretty good if you ignore the typos. But they got me to 13,000, and that’s the impor­tant part.

I’m mak­ing progress on Cru­sade, which cur­rently stands at 4223 words. I’m a bit off the NaNoW­riMo pace of 5,000 words before today, but I can catch up pretty eas­ily. That fact that some of my writ­ing bud­dies are already over 10,000 DOES NOT BOTHER ME AT ALL. REALLY.

Ahem.

The good news is that what I’m writ­ing is sur­pris­ing me with how good it is. I’ll let you be the judge as soon as I get chap­ter 2 fin­ished, of course, but this is com­ing out much bet­ter than what I had in my head. So if the really good stuff comes slower than the aver­age stuff, I’ll take that.

Any­whoosle, my friend Robin, who has always been uneasy with Susan Richardson’s char­ac­ter, sent me an inter­est­ing arti­cle yes­ter­day and said it reminded her of Susan. To sum­ma­rize, it pos­tu­lates that a big rea­son female Tea Party can­di­dates like Sharon Angle, Chris­tine O’Donnel and yes, even the orig­i­nal Mama Griz­zly her­self, Sarah Palin have lost is that there is an inher­ent con­tra­dic­tion between what they say and who they are.

The main prob­lem with Mama Griz­zly can­di­dates is that they present a con­tra­dic­tion, lay­ing claim to fem­i­nism while denounc­ing most fem­i­nist ideals. Sarah Palin, with her pecu­liar genius, cre­ated the term Mama Griz­zly to ratio­nal­ize this con­tra­dic­tion. The Mama Griz­zly could be ambi­tious with­out being fem­i­nist, could be fierce with­out being threat­en­ing, because her fem­i­nist means are in ser­vice of anti-​​feminist ends.

And that really does sum up the Susan that has always existed in my head. I’ve missed the mark sev­eral times now, off on either side, try­ing to pin down her mix of Chris­t­ian con­ser­v­a­tivism and jour­nal­is­tic ambi­tion. But this dri­ves home that my mis­take with Susan was only look­ing at her char­ac­ter within each book rather than over the whole tril­ogy. From that larger per­spec­tive her char­ac­ter just pops. She ini­tially helps Daniel and escapes the FBI with him because she’s after the story. If need be, she can just claim later she was a hostage. After the motel room in Arling­ton, she’s scared, but more deter­mined than ever to get the story. Bal­anc­ing her ambi­tion against her fear works all the way through killing Asemiel.

But when she meets Uriel, we start to see her reli­gion reassert itself. Espe­cially if Uriel pulls her aside and asks her to doc­u­ment the trip to Iraq. The Joan of Arc bit starts here, slowly build­ing through the third act of Rev­e­la­tion and all of Cru­sade. She’s the cho­sen of God to bring the mes­sage of the angels to human­ity. By the time we start Jihad she’s totally bought into this, and it will take some­thing spec­tac­u­lar from Daniel to make her see the truth.

Basi­cally, I’ve finally rec­on­ciled, in my mind any­way, how she can be a sucker for the angels and still be a tough as nails reporter.

And speak­ing of the angels, some­thing occurred to me about them, as well. The angels have spent the last few cen­turies accu­mu­lat­ing absolutely mas­sive wealth and cor­po­rate power. I pointed out to Josh the other day that while it pre­tends to be a grass-​​roots move­ment, the mod­ern Tea Party is funded by a rel­a­tively small hand­ful of bil­lion­aires. And in the UC uni­verse, the angels own the billionaires.

So while the angels are fund­ing para­mil­i­tary squads of demon hunters like Team Jack, they’re also, way, way behind the scenes, dri­ving the “grass-​​roots” people’s revolt that Phillips taps into. One of the things I’ve always thought was a silly defense of the sec­ond amend­ment is that we need guns to pro­tect against a tyran­ni­cal fed­eral gov­ern­ment. It’s silly because even if you have fully auto­matic machine guns, they have tanks. And bombers. And nukes. They win.

But what if it wasn’t the fed­eral gov­ern­ment ver­sus mil­lions of “Joe the Plumber“s? What if it was really the fed­eral gov­ern­ment ver­sus the pri­vate sec­tor. The National Guard ver­sus Black­wa­ter. Then it starts to look like a real fight. And that’s what we have in Cru­sade. When the time comes for the demons’s ulti­mate vic­tory of chaos over order, they never stop to think where where the chaotic pawns got all that artillery.

Until it’s too late, that is. When the angels, in brand new and gleam­ing white pow­ered armor sim­i­lar to but not the same as the armor all the immor­tals had pos­sessed milen­nia ago, descend into Hell and start slaugh­ter­ing demons, Gabriel is going to point that out to Lucifer. Where did you think all this came from? And then, in mir­ror to John telling Phillips that his ser­vices were no longer required before snap­ping the senator’s neck, Gabriel will tell Lucifer that his ser­vices are no longer required, that the angels can take it from here.

The pol­i­tics and moti­va­tions in this book are com­plex, but if I can pull it off, it’ll be a bet­ter book than Rev­e­la­tion.

Tonight, it begins. All the prepa­ra­tion, all the energy, all the antic­i­pa­tion gets paid off at mid­night. NaNoW­riMo 2010 begins.

And I was ready, excited even. Then my cri­tique group told me what they thought about my out­line for Cru­sade.

They didn’t hate it, under­stand. But I got a resound­ing MEH when it came to Daniel’s and Susan’s char­ac­ter arcs. We’ll get to Susan in a minute. Let’s look at Daniel first.

Daniel starts the story look­ing for revenge, pay­back for what hap­pened to his fam­ily, to him. Over the course of the book, he grows as a leader to the point that he, rather than Jack, leads the assault on Hell. The prob­lem is that when the angels show up and wipe out the demons — a lit­eral deus ex machina—Daniel’s just a bystander.

The sug­ges­tion I got from the group, which fits in with what I was doing so well I kinda feel like a schmuck for not see­ing it myself, is that before the assault Daniel gives Uriel an ulti­ma­tum: if the angels don’t step up and do some­thing to fight the demons, he will. Not only does this mean we can have Gabriel tell Daniel they were fol­low­ing his lead — a nice coun­ter­point to Gabriel try­ing to hunt down rev­o­lu­tion­ary leader Daniel in the next book — but it also sets in motion events that could explain the demons killing Uriel in retal­i­a­tion. So this works and will be incor­po­rated into the over­all outline.

Susan, how­ever, remains a prob­lem. I put my cards on the table and told them how Susan ulti­mately redeems her­self in book three when she becomes the mar­tyr of the resis­tance. The response: “So we’re sup­posed to believe she’s -capa­ble of crit­i­cal thinking…”

Ow.

One sug­ges­tion was that I down­play her evan­gel­i­cal ide­al­ism and make her a more brazen careerist. That makes her choices a lot more believ­able, espe­cially regard­ing Phillips.

Another sug­ges­tion was to make her Joan of Arc. To have her believe that she is cho­sen by God, that help­ing the angels is her calling.

I actu­ally think both of these work, so long as I go back and rewrite her in Rev­e­la­tion. For the first time, Susan’s arc — across all three books — is becom­ing clear. She grew up in a strict evan­gel­i­cal envi­ron­ment, but put that aside when she got into jour­nal­ism. Since col­lege she’s been an oppor­tunist, doing what­ever she could to make a name for her­self. She helped Daniel in Rev­e­la­tion because it was in her own self-​​interest. She wasn’t nearly as sym­pa­thetic as she appeared. And then, after the motel in Arling­ton and def­i­nitely after Bal­ti­more har­bor, she real­ized holy crap demons are real. She stuck with the story because she knew it would make her career. Basi­cally, Susan in Rev­e­la­tion needs to be less sweet and more of a bitch.

In Cru­sade, this con­tin­ues as she keeps milk­ing the rev­e­la­tion for every­thing she can. When she sees what Phillips is doing, she wants to ride that wave. This preda­tory rep­u­ta­tion also helps explain why Phillips at first wants noth­ing to do with her. He knows his own kind when he sees it. And of course, in Cru­sade Susan plays a not insignif­i­cant part in stok­ing the fear and para­noia that ulti­mately destroys civ­i­liza­tion as we know it.

By the time the angels approach her and ask her to be their spokes­woman — keep in mind they own the media, lit­er­ally by this point — she not only sees it as a way to sal­vage and even advance her career, but also as God’s call­ing for her. She digs into the job with zeal and is will­ing to look the other way when she gets wind of rumors that the angels might have a dark side. As evi­dence mounts she gets even more deter­mined to stay the course and put down the lies of the resis­tance. Then Daniel makes sure she gets evi­dence she can’t deny, some­thing so hor­ri­ble that she lit­er­ally has a “come to Jesus” moment.

And it is in that moment that every­thing crys­tal­izes for Susan, that she real­izes what God really needs her to do. She bar­ri­cades her­self in her broad­cast stu­dio and broad­casts both the evi­dence and her own plea for peo­ple to join the resis­tance. And she keeps it up until Michael breaks through and lit­er­ally rips her head off on live TV.

So now we see Susan’s story as an ambi­tious rise to power over three books. She redeems her­self at the end, but redemp­tion comes at a hor­ri­ble price. It’s an old story, but there’s a rea­son why it’s told over and over again. Mix­ing her story in with the over­all tale might work nicely.

Ha! Take that, Den­ver Fic­tion Writers.

Susan Richard­son is by far the most dif­fi­cult, com­plex char­ac­ter in the Between Heaven and Hell tril­ogy. I agree with my cri­tique group that I, by and large, whiffed in Rev­e­la­tion and totally got her char­ac­ter wrong. In revi­sions – sched­uled for Jan­u­ary and Feb­ru­ary – I expect to have to rewrite just about every scene that she’s in. Add that to rewrit­ing every scene Asemiel is in as well to remove his POV, and that’s like a third of the gor­ram book.

So I’d like to get Susan nailed down in my mind before I start writ­ing Cru­sade. But here’s my prob­lem. In order to feel real, every one of your char­ac­ters should be a part of you, share a facet of your personality.

Other than being a fel­low mam­mal, I really have noth­ing in com­mon with Susan Richardson.

Okay, that just might be hyper­bole. Slightly. After all, we’re both Cau­casian, we’re both writ­ers, we’re both Amer­i­cans (although her vision of what it means to be an Amer­i­can is a lot closer to Toby Keith and Glenn Beck than it is to mine). We’re both from Col­orado, although the cul­tural dif­fer­ences between Den­ver and her Col­orado Springs can be vast. And the writ­ing – jour­nal­ism, in her case – is a dri­ving force for her, a key motivator.

The prob­lem is that I totally don’t under­stand her other moti­va­tions, and what those mean for her world­view. She hon­estly, lit­er­ally believes that some­day, prob­a­bly soon, Jesus is just going to rap­ture her up to Heaven, à la the Left Behind books. She knows down to the core of her being that an invis­i­ble man in the sky is watch­ing her every move and judg­ing her. And that she can call in favors from Him. And that Fox News is telling the God’s hon­est truth.

Per­son­ally, as a lib­eral athe­ist, I have trou­ble see­ing into her mind. It’s a fail­ure on my part, cer­tainly, of both empa­thy and cre­ativ­ity. But I know real writ­ers, “big boy” writ­ers like Stephen King with Mis­ery’s Annie Wilkes, can do this. They can see into a mind that is noth­ing like theirs and report back faith­fully what it’s like in there.

Part of the issue is that there’s a fine line between authen­tic­ity and par­ody, and I’m afraid I’ll too often end up on the wrong side of it. Susan may be an evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian and an author­i­tar­ian fol­lower, but she still has to be sym­pa­thetic enough for the reader to give a crap about what hap­pens to her. So how do I write about a woman who idol­izes Jesus, Ronald Rea­gan and Ayn Rand in such a way that it doesn’t come across as snippy contempt?

And yes, I under­stand how con­de­scend­ing it sounds even to ask the ques­tion. I’m not say­ing my phi­los­o­phy or pol­i­tics are “cor­rect” and hers are not. I’m just say­ing I don’t under­stand how she can think that way. I know real peo­ple do, and many of them are smarter than I am. I just don’t get it.

But I have to. If I’m going to write Susan cor­rectly, I have to get it, and soon. How about this:

The core of Susan’s char­ac­ter is her author­i­tar­ian sub­mis­sion to Church and Nation on one side, and her jour­nal­is­tic and career ambi­tion on the other. These two moti­va­tions often con­flict. She feels like she has to trust the gov­ern­ment (at least the Repub­li­cans) at the same time she has to inves­ti­gate them. That she should accept the tra­di­tional gen­der role of home­maker and mother at the same time she’s putting that off to fur­ther her career. I think she feels a lot of guilt, and a fair amount of inse­cu­rity. And the only thing she’s found that keeps those con­cerns at bay is the very thing that makes them worse: the work. If she stays busy enough – and since the end of Rev­e­la­tion she’s been very busy indeed – she doesn’t have time to hear the voices of her par­ents in her head telling her to find a nice boy, set­tle down and give her life over to God. She’s dri­ven enough that the voices stay away, mostly, but when they come back they make her feel dirty, like she’s turn­ing her back on herself.

The rev­e­la­tion not only shot her career into the stratos­phere – to the point where she’s now OMG WORKING IN THE SAME STUDIO AS BILL O’REILLY – but also rein­forced her reli­gious doc­trine. The nan­otech­nol­ogy is just the means by which God makes the angels and demons immor­tal. It doesn’t mat­ter. What mat­ters is that angels and demons are REAL and she has met them. She has fought in real life, deadly strug­gle with demons, and helped to kill one of them. She has met and worked with a real archangel, Uriel. The fact that he’s not cur­rently return­ing her calls is beside the point. He’s an archangel. He has impor­tant things to do.

So at the open­ing of Cru­sade, she’s liv­ing in New York and work­ing for Fox News, anchor­ing a late evening (think­ing the 11pm east­ern times­lot) show from Rock­e­feller Cen­ter. Her church is a new one that branched off from other evan­gel­i­cal protes­tants after the rev­e­la­tion, one that accepts angels and demons as real, flesh and blood immor­tals and proof of God’s work on Earth. Susan’s job is to keep up on the demons, tell her view­ers who to look for, which hellspawn are still out there, try­ing to pass for human. In her tele­cast in chap­ter 1, she outs Vladimir Putin as a demon who had been, in pre­vi­ous iden­ti­ties, Vlad “Drac­ula” Tepes and Grig­ori Rasputin.

So where does she go from there? While a cer­tain minor­ity of Amer­i­cans believe her, most do not. Most peo­ple think the rev­e­la­tion was a pub­lic­ity stunt, and the pres­i­den­tial admin­is­tra­tion has been more than happy to back that up. Pres­i­dent Ricardo Cruz him­self has said that the immor­tals “some in the media” have been the­o­riz­ing about sim­ply do not exist. Sen­a­tor Tim Phillips of Texas has been using the demons as a stump issue, and she would gain a lot of vis­i­bil­ity and cred­i­bil­ity to her cause if she could get him to talk to her. But he’s ignored her early entreaties to come on her show.

So what do you think? Is that a solid enough foun­da­tion to start the book?

Ide­ally, we should all be moti­vated to write by the art of it all, the cre­ative expres­sion of our…

Or not. One thing I’ve noticed not only about myself but also every other writer I’ve ever known is that we are fun­da­men­tally a lazy bunch. More suc­cinctly, the only thing a writer enjoys more than writ­ing is avoid­ing writ­ing. Some­times we need an extra lit­tle kick. Espe­cially dur­ing NaNoW­riMo, where the clock is very lit­er­ally ticking.

This year I’m using a car­rot and a stick. The stick is easy. I’m doing this in pub­lic. My daily word­counts will be posted for all to see at http://bit.ly/CrusadeWC. Am I leav­ing myself open to pub­lic jeer­ing, ridicule, pos­si­bly thrown vir­tual veg­eta­bles? Sure. My friends know I am nearly immune to embar­rass­ment, but I do have an ego to protect.

The car­rot is a lit­tle more fun. If I “win” NaNoW­riMo, by which I mean if I get to 50,000 words within the month of Novem­ber, I’m buy­ing myself a Kin­dle. I’ve been want­ing one, and even though I’m sav­ing up to get an apart­ment, I’ll make an excep­tion for this… if I win. If I don’t have 50,000 words by 11:59:59 PM Novem­ber 30^th, no Kin­dle until after I move, if then.

So what are your extra lit­tle incen­tives to write this November?

Okay, now that I’ve done the req­ui­site think­ing to make sure both Daniel and Susan have strong, active story arcs in the first act of Cru­sade, it’s time to weave them together to see if I can make a story out of them.

When I do this, I try to not only weave the sto­ries together so I main­tain ten­sion and good pac­ing as we bounce back and forth, but also have scenes match up so there’s a cen­tral theme or idea in each chap­ter that they both rein­force. It doesn’t always work, but there’s a nice res­o­nance when I pull it off.

1 Vows

• Daniel stands at his family’s graves, vows to avenge them. Jack comes and gets him and they leave for their first field mission.
• Susan races to work though the streets of New York for her nightly broad­cast from 30 Rock (which is where the Fox News stu­dios actu­ally are, there will be no Tracy Mor­gan cameos). Her broad­cast cov­ers the con­tin­u­ing threat of demons and we see some of the unmask­ings in the last three months. (Was Vladimir Putin really Ras putin a cen­tury ago?)

This should be a good chap­ter. We’re reunited with the prin­ci­pals from Rev­e­la­tion three months after the end of that novel, in early Sep­tem­ber 2010. Some good imagery as autumn starts to creep in on San Fran­cisco and New York, respec­tively, and we can see how in such a short time Daniel and Susan’s lives have been com­pletely transformed.

2 Casu­al­ties Of War

• Team Jack tries to take out demon with EMP, Daniel saves Dante’s life
• Jack talks Daniel down about casu­al­ties of war

There’s the­ory, and then there’s prac­tice. This is the first time Daniel has gone into com­bat as a pro­fes­sional sol­dier, and things don’t go well. Dante gets shot in the femoral artery and Daniel only barely man­ages to save his life before he bleeds out in an aban­doned ware­house. After the bat­tle, Daniel has the tra­di­tional new­bie reac­tion: he throws up and freaks out. He’s faced death at immor­tal hands before, but this was dif­fer­ent. Jack talks him down and tries to impart some bat­tle­field wisdom.

3 The Man Who Would Be King

• Texan Sen­a­tor Tim­o­thy Phillips gives a barn-​​burner of a speech to a con­fer­ence of rich Texan busi­ness­men. Go for a mix of McCarthy’s Red Scare tac­tics and ram­pant xeno­pho­bia from today’s Ari­zona, all aimed at demons walk­ing among us.
• Some­thing with Jack

Phillips’s scene should be fun to write, espe­cially in the wake of our upcom­ing real world elec­tion. I think the scene with Jack will be more intro­spec­tive, his per­sonal reac­tion to almost los­ing Dante, in con­trast to what he told Daniel.

4 Faulty Intelligence

• Daniel pumps Uriel for ideas on how to kill a demon, doesn’t get much
• Susan tries to get an inter­view with Phillips, fails.

This is one of those exam­ples of res­o­nance. Daniel and Susan are both try­ing to get infor­ma­tion here, Daniel sug­ges­tions from Uriel, Susan an inter­view with Phillips. And nei­ther of them get what they want. I’m totally not mar­ried to the title of this one, but it’s the best I’ve been able to come up with so far.

5 Col­lat­eral Damage

• Team fights demon with acid-​​loaded squirt guns, injure bystanders. Daniel ques­tions his actions, place on the team.
• Phillips intro­duces new leg­is­la­tion that extends the PATRIOT act even fur­ther, effec­tively repeal­ing the Bill of Rights until the Demonic Threat can be eradicated.

This is an exam­ple of a chap­ter title just jump­ing out at me once I saw which two scenes – or sto­ry­lines, as I’m likely to bounce back and forth between them rather than write them com­plete one at a time – were in the chap­ter. Both of these sto­ry­lines involve col­lat­eral dam­age. Lit­er­ally in Team Jack’s case, via the acid super soak­ers, and legally in Phillips’s case, as he pro­poses some­thing that seems ratio­nal on the sur­face, espe­cially to a scared con­stituency, but has hor­ri­ble consequences.

6 Dis­rup­tions

• Team fights demon while Dante tries and fails to inter­rupt wire­less nanite communication
• Susan ambushes Phillips on the steps of Capi­tol Hill, forces him to agree to a sit down interview.

Another title that seemed obvi­ous once I knew the sto­ry­lines. This chap­ter could just as eas­ily been called “Ambushes” as both sto­ry­lines involve that as well. “Dis­rup­tions” sounds better.

7 A New Lead

• Daniel and Jack go back to Uriel, try to get him to help. Uriel slips up (or does he?) and implies the exis­tence of Hell as a real, phys­i­cal place, the strong­hold of the demons.
• Phillips makes some fundrais­ing calls, and we see he’s mov­ing resources into place for some­thing big. He also decides he can use Susan to his advantage.

This is a title I’m reusing from the orig­i­nal novella, and it works for both of these sto­ry­lines, and I didn’t think it would. After avoid­ing Susan because he didn’t want her to put him on the spot, Phillips saw some­thing in her on the Capi­tol steps he thinks he can use.

8 Impe­tus

• Susan has her inter­view with Phillips and they build on each other. Phillips invites Susan to travel with him, show Amer­ica the fight from the front lines.
• Jack brain­storms with the team on how to find Hell.

And lastly we have the act break chap­ter, where both sto­ry­lines start mov­ing in a dif­fer­ent direc­tion, chang­ing momen­tum. Hence the title, a word that also has a cer­tain grav­i­tas of its own, which is nice.

So that gives me a solid, fast-​​moving first act that intro­duces the char­ac­ters, sets up con­flicts and gets us cruis­ing into act 2. I don’t want to start out­lin­ing act 2 yet in this kind of detail because char­ac­ters – espe­cially when done right – sur­prise you. I expect things to hap­pen in the actual draft­ing that I don’t expect, things that will influ­ence the plot in act 2. So if I’d have to redo it any­way, I’ll just hold off. Still, Rev­e­la­tion aver­ages about 3,000 words per chap­ter. If I hit the same pace on this one – and actu­ally these chap­ters seem a bit meatier to me – we’re talk­ing 24,000 words for act 1 and this gives me writ­ing fod­der out through Novem­ber 14 if I write the NaNoW­riMo min­i­mum of 1,667 words per day. I won’t, but it’s nice to have that buffer.

I feel so much bet­ter about this now, and really can’t wait to get started.

Now let’s take a look at Susan’s arc in act 1. Here’s what we had in the over­all out­line. I’m mix­ing Susan’s arc with Phillips since they’re intertwined.

• Susan has a new life on Fox News.
• Texas Sen­a­tor Tim­o­thy Phillips has a plan to take over the government.
• Phillips intro­duces anti-​​demon leg­is­la­tion that tem­porar­ily repeals the Bill of Rights.
• Susan inter­views Phillips.

That’s it. Doesn’t seem like much. We need to give Susan some screen time here, see how the events of Rev­e­la­tion have affected her and how she’s cop­ing with her new life. We know she works at Fox News, which means she has likely moved from DC to New York. Who does she know there? Has she made friends? Ene­mies? There’s a whole chap­ter right there, just fol­low­ing her around NYC and see­ing what her life is like.

As far as I’ve plot­ted so far, Susan’s arc is reac­tionary, react­ing step for step to Phillips, who is in turn being manip­u­lated by the demons. How can I make her more assertive, drive her own part of the story?

The first obvi­ous answer is to have Phillips avoid her at first, make her work to land that inter­view. Why would a man exploit­ing the fear and para­noia the rev­e­la­tion of immor­tals has caused avoid the cause celeb reporter who started it all? Maybe he’s afraid his nar­ra­tive won’t match up, that she’ll con­tra­dict some of his more explo­sive rhetoric.

And I like bounc­ing back and forth between view­points, never hav­ing back to back scenes from the same POV. And even though I know I’ll be mix­ing this back into Daniel’s arc, it still galls me to have those back to back Phillips scenes. Need to break that up. So how about this:

• Susan races to work though the streets of New York for her nightly broad­cast from 30 Rock (which is where the Fox News stu­dios actu­ally are, there will be no Tracy Mor­gan cameos). Her broad­cast cov­ers the con­tin­u­ing threat of demons and we see some of the unmask­ings in the last six months. (Was Vladimir Putin really Ras_​putin_​ a cen­tury ago?)
• Texan Sen­a­tor Tim­o­thy Phillips gives a barn-​​burner of a speech to a con­fer­ence of rich Texan busi­ness­men. Go for a mix of McCarthy’s Red Scare tac­tics and ram­pant xeno­pho­bia from today’s Ari­zona, all aimed at demons walk­ing among us.
• Susan tries to get an inter­view with Phillips, fails.
• Phillips intro­duces new leg­is­la­tion that extends the PATRIOT act even fur­ther, effec­tively repeal­ing the Bill of Rights until the Demonic Threat can be eradicated.
• Susan ambushes Phillips on the steps of Capi­tol Hill, forces him to agree to a sit down interview.
• Phillips makes some fundrais­ing calls, and we see he’s mov­ing resources into place for some­thing big. He also decides he can use Susan to his advantage.
• Susan has her inter­view with Phillips and they build on each other. Phillips invites Susan to travel with him, show Amer­ica the fight from the front lines.

Much stronger first act for both char­ac­ters, with ris­ing ten­sion and more detail into their moti­va­tions. Susan is being played, of course, but she thinks she’s onto some­thing, the next big step in her career. Mean­while Phillips has found a sym­pa­thetic mouth­piece who can reach peo­ple who might be resis­tant to his bom­bas­tic style.

This is one of my “brass tacks” arti­cles. Yes, it’s won­der to pon­tif­i­cate about plot and theme and what­not, but you also have to pay the rent. And you can’t do that if you hard drive crashes and takes all your work with it. So let’s talk about where you keep your stuff, and why it had bet­ter be more than one place.

It’s trendy to talk about “the cloud” these days. Keep your stuff in “the cloud” and you can always get to it, for­ever and ever. Well, maybe, maybe not. It seems unthink­able now, but Google could go out of busi­ness and shut down Google Docs. Remem­ber when AOL was the inter­net for most peo­ple? I rest my case.

But keep­ing it just on your laptop’s hard drive is just as bad, if not worse. Hard dri­ves crash. Yes, even that nifty all-​​flash-​​chip-​​no-​​enclosure-​​soldered-​​right-​​onto-​​the-​​motherboard drive in the new Mac­Book Airs can get cor­rupted. If you only have your data in one place, you have it nowhere.

A wise and pop­u­lar the­ory mak­ing the rounds on the inter­nets is called 3−2−1 Backup. In short:

• You should have at least 3 copies of your stuff
• In at least 2 phys­i­cal locations
• And at least 1 of them should be off-​​site/​cloud-​​based

And note that all of those include the words “at least.” More is bet­ter, assum­ing you can keep them all in sync. If you can’t, don’t try. Mul­ti­ple incon­sis­tent back­ups can be more con­fus­ing than help­ful. But it’s really not that hard to have total piece of mind that your data is safe. Here’s how I do it.

First, I keep all of my files in Drop­box. If you haven’t heard of it, Drop­box is a ser­vice that keeps any­thing you put in your “drop­box” folder on your hard drive in sync with a copy on their servers. It’s encrypted, so you don’t have to worry about secu­rity. The really amaz­ing thing about Drop­box is how flaw­lessly it works to keep mul­ti­ple PCs in sync with each other. If I make a change to a file on my PC at work, that file will change on my PC at home almost instantly. Add that to how many of my iOS apps also work with Drop­box, and not only do I have access to the same files no mat­ter which PC I’m on, but they’re also all redun­dant back­ups of each other. And in a pinch, you can always down­load a copy from Dropbox.com. So by itself, Drop­box sat­is­fies 3−2−1 as soon as you sync it to two PCs in dif­fer­ent loca­tions (like home and work, assum­ing you don’t work at home).

But I’m more para­noid than that. So I also backup my home PC with Car­bonite. This is straight up cloud based backup, not sync­ing like Drop­box. But it gives me unlim­ited stor­age to backup what ever I need from my home PC. I use it not only for my Drop­box con­tent, but also my whole iTunes library of music, movies and TV shows.

Okay, so I’ve got my data on two PCs, var­i­ous iOS apps, Dropbox.com, Carbonite.com and will have a third local copy when I buy the Mac­Book Air I’m drool­ing over. But wait! Still not done!

Microsoft makes a pro­gram they give away for free called Sync­Toy. The name is a lit­tle mis­lead­ing. It was part of Microsoft’s Pow­er­toys col­lec­tion of unsup­ported util­i­ties, but it’s been through many revi­sions and works like a champ. What it does is sync or backup any folder to any other folder. So I have it set to “echo” my Drop­box folder to a 4GB USB drive. Any changes I make to the Drop­box folder will be mir­rored on the USB drive the next time I run Sync­Toy. So as long as run this reg­u­larly – I’m think­ing weekly, but no more in case I need to restore some­thing that has already been changed across the net­work – I have a third (or fourth) local copy of my data as well as the two copies in the cloud. And those copies exist on two (three) hard dri­ves, a USB drive, two server farms from dif­fer­ent com­pa­nies and my iPhone. Short of a full-​​on apoc­a­lypse, my data is secure, and every file can be recov­ered no mat­ter what bone head thing I do.

I think part of what I’m hav­ing trou­ble with regard­ing the Cru­sade out­line is that the indi­vid­ual char­ac­ter arcs are fuzzy. I’m not get­ting a strong sense of pur­pose from our prin­ci­pals. I need to have solid char­ac­ter devel­op­ment arcs for Daniel, Jack, Susan and Phillips, and I think if I had those, I’d know what was miss­ing from the over­all outline.

Now of course, I could just start writ­ing on Novem­ber 1^st and let the chips fall where they may. No bat­tle­plan sur­vives con­tact with the enemy, and no out­line sur­vives con­tact with the first draft. And if all four of my major play­ers had strong, defined pur­pose, I might go with that. But the one thing I don’t want to deal with in Novem­ber is one or more of my major char­ac­ters wan­der­ing around Hamlet-​​style.

So let’s start with Daniel.

• Stands at family’s graves
• Tries to take out demon with EMP, save’s Dante’s life
• Talks to Uriel (about what?)
• Tries to lure demon into acid
• Fights demon while Dante tries and fails to inter­rupt wire­less nanite communication
• Learns of exis­tence of Hell from Uriel
• (things hap­pen)
• Learns loca­tion of Hell
• (more things happen)
• Steals a suit­case nuke
• Argues with Sandy about nuk­ing Hell
• Arrives at Hell, descends
• Fights Sandy/​Batariel, knocked into pit
• Res­cued by Lucifer
• Lucifer explains demonic pur­pose, offers proof of their success
• Watches armored angels destroy Lucifer
• Cleanup, the rise of Heaven

There are some giant holes here. We start off with a strong image, a good open­ing scene for the entire book. Daniel, clad in black com­bat cov­er­alls, stand­ing at the foot of his family’s graves, the first time he’s had the chance to visit them since the end of Rev­e­la­tion. Since then, he has gone through a sort of boot camp that has tough­ened him (and Dante) into pro­fes­sional sol­diers. They’re ready to start hunt­ing, right here in San Fran­cisco. Daniel’s ready to start mak­ing the demons pay for what they’ve done, both to him and to the human race.

Neat, right? So where do we go from there? They cor­ner a demon in a ware­house, zap the area with an EMP and try to see if that pre­vents the nanites from heal­ing com­bat dam­age. It doesn’t work, and Dante takes a bul­let in his femoral artery. Daniel oper­ates on the spot while Sandy and Jack defend, and saves Dante’s life (and leg).

Still good. Lots of action, strong emo­tion, Daniel doing heroic deeds.

After that, though, things start wan­der­ing. The point of their lit­tle band of extra-​​legal demon hunters is to wipe out the demons, and their first out­ing was not only inef­fec­tive, it nearly got one of them killed. How does Daniel feel about that? What can he do about it?

I think this is why they have to talk to Uriel. Not for a pep talk, per se, but try­ing to get the tac­i­turn angel to tell them some­thing they can use. Note that Uriel isn’t likely to give them any­thing truly use­ful because any­thing that can reli­ably kill a demon can also kill an angel. So they won’t get much, but some­thing, enough to keep going.

Their next idea is to essen­tially load up beefed up Super Soak­ers with HCl and try to dis­solve a demon. This nearly works, but the col­lat­eral dam­age, in both prop­erty dam­age and pos­si­bly even hor­rific burns to inno­cent bystanders, is too high to make this a viable option going for­ward. Again, how does Daniel react to this? Not only the set­back, but dam­age he inflicted on inno­cents who were in the wrong place at the wrong time? Does this tie into his “I am death” meme?

Dante is still recov­er­ing by this point, so he’s doing his hacker stuff remotely. Daniel is going into com­bat with just Jack and Sandy. Does he feel like a mem­ber of the team? Even after boot camp, he won’t have the easy rhythm that they have from years of side-​​by-​​side com­bat in Iraq.

The team returns to ECM tac­tics after the acid débâ­cle, this time try­ing to actively jam the wire­less com­mu­ni­ca­tion between the nanites. This also doesn’t work, and they barely escape with their lives. I think this is as far as I can go with try/​fail cycles. They know now that hunt­ing the demons one on one, even if/​when they dis­cover a reli­able way to kill them, isn’t get­ting it done. The team is get­ting frus­trated, and I think they’re going to start tak­ing that out on each other.

Ide­ally, this is the point, at the end of act 1, that Uriel should point them towards Hell, give them some­thing to strive for. In act 2, they need to learn the exis­tence of Hell – which I don’t think Uriel will give them, they’ll have to earn that by get­ting a demon to give it up – and then fig­ure out how to take it out. Uriel or one of the demons can tell them that roughly half the demons are hid­den there, so they’ll know if they can destroy that one tar­get, com­pletely and cleanly, they’ll make far more of an impact on the cru­sade than hunt­ing demons one by one. And I think that real­iza­tion will point them to a tac­ti­cal nuke as the ideal weapon. Some­thing that will vapor­ize the entire tar­get and every­thing in it, and a weapon they couldn’t use any­where else because of the like­li­hood of col­lat­eral damage.

But, given that this is the act break, I don’t want Uriel to just give it to them. They have to earn it, and keep in mind that Sandy has been sub­tly sab­o­tag­ing them and steer­ing them down blind alleys the entire time. So how do they learn about Hell exist­ing in the first place, nev­er­mind where it is? Is it from Uriel? Or does a demon let it slip via com­bat ban­ter? And if they do learn it from Uriel, does he do so intentionally?

So let’s take all of that think­ing and flesh out Daniel’s arc through act 1.

• Daniel stands at his family’s graves, vows to avenge them
• Tries to take out demon with EMP, save’s Dante’s life
• Daniel pumps Uriel for ideas on how to kill a demon, doesn’t get much
• Team fights demon with acid-​​loaded squirt guns, injure bystanders. Daniel ques­tions his actions, place on the team.
• Team fights demon while Dante tries and fails to inter­rupt wire­less nanite communication
• Daniel and Jack go back to Uriel, try to get him to help. Uriel slips up (or does he?) and implies the exis­tence of Hell.

Not much of a change in terms of adding scenes, but I’ve added a lot to scenes and given Daniel a stronger, firmer pur­pose through­out. He’s act­ing, not react­ing, which is a key to good fiction.