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?

First off, no, I’m not quit­ting writ­ing. But over the past week I’ve had some real­iza­tions that made me rethink what I’m doing.

I started off NaNo this year on a slow pace, and it never really got any faster. And with each pass­ing day, I felt more and more pres­sure to catch up. I was also putting in full, men­tally drain­ing days at work (I’m half the IT depart­ment for a regional HVAC dis­trib­u­tor) and was spend­ing all my off hours time at write ins. It was wear­ing me down, and it showed. In par­tic­u­lar, I started devel­op­ing small ill­nesses and injuries that in the past have been warn­ing signs that I’m push­ing myself too hard.

And then it hit me. I don’t need to do this. I’ve started NaNoW­riMo four times now, and “won” twice. I know I can do it. I also know I don’t have to.

A lot of pro­fes­sional authors like the idea of NaNoW­riMo but don’t par­tic­i­pate them­selves because writ­ing a novel is what they already do every day. And it finally dawned on me that this applies to me as well. When I’m done with Cru­sade, my edi­tor and I are going to tackle get­ting Rev­e­la­tion ready to post on the var­i­ous ebook­stores (Ama­zon, iTunes, B&N, etc.). Then I’m going to write Jihad, the third book in the Between Heaven and Hell tril­ogy. Then I’m going to edit Cru­sade. And so on. I’m going to be writ­ing every day, or nearly so, all year round. So why kill myself to meet an arbi­trary dead­line I’ve already proven I can beat?

So best of luck to all of you still try­ing to beat NaNoW­riMo this year, espe­cially those of you who have never won it. I’m going to plod along at my own speed.

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.

braaaaaaaaaaains…

That’s what I could have used yes­ter­day. For some rea­son, I just couldn’t focus. I slept through the “writ­ing hour” from six to seven AM, and never got time to set­tle in at the office. I dropped by Pan­era after work to write with my edi­tor and her min­ion, and man­aged to eke out a bit over 600 words, but the whole day felt like I was think­ing through jelly. And not in a good way.

I need 2,000 words today to stay on the NaNoW­riMo pace of 5,000 words total. 3k will get me back to my own planned pace of 2k per day. I got up ear­ly­ish this morn­ing (only one snooze) but spent most of the time fight­ing with my desk­top PC rather than writ­ing. So I have to squeeze out what I can at the office (while tak­ing care of my users) and really burn through the write in tonight.

Les­son: Write when you can, because you may not be able to write later.

I started typ­ing at the stroke of mid­night at the Den­ver NaNoW­riMo kick­off party. The 24-​​hour book shop (I know!) where we had it was packed, so I was left typ­ing on my fold­able Blue­tooth key­board on top of the (closed) baby grand piano key­board. My iPhone was off to the side, book-​​style case closed, so I couldn’t see the screen. This works sur­pris­ingly well if you’re a touch typ­ist and don’t need to see what you’re doing. I just stared off into space and let my fin­gers word­barf the first scene all over the keyboard.

Okay, maybe not the best turn of phrase, but you get the idea.

How­ever, after about 800 words in the first 20 min­utes, my brain went into emer­gency OMGMUSTSLEEPNOW shut­down. I’d been up since 7am and I didn’t get around to tak­ing a nap and appar­ently I’m OLD and DECREPIT, so I wan­dered home. Slept until 8ish, got up, watched NCIS on demand, tried to read and zzzzzzzzzzzz until about 2. See above about old and decrepit.

So now it’s 2 in the after­noon and I still have at least 867 words to write to be on NaNoW­riMo pace. And I hadn’t eaten. So I got my butt to Chipo­tle, where I real­ized I still wasn’t func­tion­ing cor­rectly. When they asked me what kind of salsa I wanted, I said, “Red.” Not really helpful.

Once I got a bur­rito in me, though, I started to perk up. I broke out my phone and key­board again, and man­aged to fin­ish chap­ter 1, “Vows”, which came in at 2414 words. I was so happy with myself I spent the rest of the evening read­ing on my shiny new Kin­dle and fin­ished two of the books I’d been reading.

I had every inten­tion of get­ting up this morn­ing at six and pound­ing out a grand or so before get­ting ready for work, but it was really cold and I was so warm under the cov­ers and my cats really didn’t want me to move so… Yeah, I know, I suck. But I’ll still find a way to get at least 2000 words today and hope­fully all of chap­ter 2. Of course, the other half of the IT depart­ment isn’t here today, mak­ing me ALL of the IT depart­ment… This needs to be easier.

So what are YOUR NaNoW­riMo chal­lenges so far?

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?

Or rather, hav­ing Google do the math. I’ve posted my Cru­sade track­ing spread­sheet via Google Docs. Click the link (or type http://bit.ly/CrusadeWC on your own, either way) and you’ll see two tabs. The first is my daily progress in total words, the sec­ond is words per chap­ter and how that adds up against the NaNoW­riMo goal. Feel free to check in through the month of Novem­ber for updates on how I’m doing, and cheer or jeer appropriately.

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.