The Unification Chronicles

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.

When I’m not liv­ing the life of a super­star blog­ger and nov­el­ist (/​slurps iced tea from Chipo­tle), I work in IT. I got into com­put­ers in mid­dle school, which for me means shortly after the end of the stone age. My first PC was a Com­modore VIC20, with a whop­ping 20 kilo­bytes of mem­ory. (Its suc­ces­sor, the C64, is much bet­ter known.) When I got out of high school in 1989 with a slacker C aver­age and no hope of col­lege, I went into the Air Farce as a com­puter pro­gram­mer and that, as they say, was that.

I’ve been in IT 20 years now, been tin­ker­ing with com­put­ers for 25, been tak­ing things apart to see how they work for damn near 40. I only man­aged an Asso­ciates Degree in col­lege, mostly test­ing out of courses for the credit hours on Uncle Sam’s dime, but I don’t regret it. Through inde­pen­dent study, innate curios­ity and a love of read­ing, I’m prob­a­bly bet­ter edu­cated than most peo­ple with Bach­e­lors Degrees.

Why am I telling you all this? So you know where I’m com­ing from when I explain why I hired the edi­tor I did. As she men­tioned on her blog, Kath­leen Dale was sur­prised when I asked her to edit the Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles series. She doesn’t have an Eng­lish degree or for­mal train­ing in edit­ing a novel.

But I know from my own life that cre­den­tials don’t mat­ter as much as peo­ple think they do. Cre­den­tials are short­hand for peo­ple who don’t want to find out for them­selves what you’re capa­ble of. I’ve known Kath­leen for a year now, have read one of her nov­els in our cri­tique group and have seen the cri­tique sug­ges­tions she’s already given me for Rev­e­la­tion. I know we work well together and I trust her judg­ment. Kath­leen has great atten­tion to detail, a keen lit­er­ary mind and I know her sug­ges­tions – which she deliv­ers with tact I’ll never have – will make the book better.

And this, in turn, rein­forces my feel­ing that I am On To Some­thing here. I think we’re going to see a lot more part­ner­ships like this in pub­lish­ing, not unlike a musi­cian and pro­ducer, only with­out the omnipresent weight of the stu­dio (pub­lisher) over­head. Between the two of us, Kath­leen and I have most of the bases cov­ered. We’re both graphic artists, I know the inter­net mar­ket­ing and pro­mo­tion parts of the process. Together, we can pro­duce a great SF series that spans gen­res and cen­turies, the way I’ve only seen Card’s Ender series and Asimov’s Robots/​Empire/​Foundation series do. It’s a tall order, and we’re only two peo­ple, but I’m con­fi­dent we can pull it off. With­out a big New York pub­lisher. With­out a pub­lisher at all.

Wel­come to the future.

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.

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.

Writ­ers can be idiots. I know I cer­tainly can.

Until this morn­ing, I had got it in my head that I could revise Rev­e­la­tion entirely and post it to Ama­zon by Hal­loween, clear­ing the decks to write Cru­sade for NaNoW­riMo. In addi­tion to get­ting it off my mind, this would also get Rev­e­la­tion out there mak­ing money. My par­ents got their refi deal for the house, and now it’s time for me to move out and get my own place, and that $1-​​4K from Ama­zon would sure help the mov­ing process. (I have hor­ri­ble credit, and expect to have to pay sig­nif­i­cant deposits.)

Of course, while this might have helped me in the short term, it would have been messy in the long term. Even assum­ing I can get all the exist­ing revi­sions done, my edi­tor still has to do one more pass and I still have to address her con­cern that the story needs more descrip­tion through­out. These things take time.

Then there’s the mat­ter of Sandy. Cap­tain Robert San­darski, Jack’s war buddy, is a major char­ac­ter in Cru­sade. Not only is he “on screen” nearly as much as Daniel, Jack and Dante, but he has an absolutely vital role to play at the Act 3 turn. I should really write all of that and still have the option to go back and change aspects of his intro­duc­tion in Rev­e­la­tion if I need to.

So here’s the new plan. Edit as much of Rev­e­la­tion as I can before Novem­ber, but don’t rush and short­change the work. Also rewrite and flesh out the Cru­sade out­line so I have a solid game plan for NaNo. Then come Novem­ber 1^st, start writ­ing Cru­sade and run it all the way through to the end, even if that – as it did with Rev­e­la­tion last year – puts me well into Decem­ber. Then, and only then, go back and fin­ish the pol­ish on Rev­e­la­tion while I wait for Cru­sade to “cool” enough in my mind that I can revise it objec­tively. If I get done with Rev­e­la­tion and I’m still not ready to revise Cru­sade, I can go back to work­ing on Ghost Ronin, the first book in a dif­fer­ent series.

That’s the smart, mature way to han­dle this. No goofy dead­lines, no dra­matic pres­sure. Just solid, daily sit­ting at the key­board and work­ing. (This feels weird to me.)

O HAI, Inter­net. I’m back. I know I haven’t posted in a long time, so let me explain… No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

Back in Jan­u­ary, shortly after fin­ish­ing the rough draft of Rev­e­la­tion, I lost both my job and most of my social cir­cle. I retreated into a cozy lit­tle ball of depres­sion, wherein I played a lot of Star Trek Online and not much else.

Fast for­ward ten months. I’ve got­ten a new job, joined a cri­tique group, and let the group get all the way through the first draft. We’re three and half weeks out from this year’s NaNoW­riMo, and I’m get­ting ready to use it to tackle Cru­sade, the sec­ond book in the Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles series. Last week I hired a free­lance edi­tor to work on all the UC books, and she’s done her first pass — really her sec­ond, since she’s in my cri­tique group — over the man­u­script, and taken all together I have a good idea of what I need to do in Rev­e­la­tion for revisions.

I had hoped to get the revi­sions done before Novem­ber, so that I could start on Cru­sade with a clear mind, but as the depth of the changes I need to make really sinks in on me, I’ve come to real­ize that just ain’t gonna hap­pen. And that might be for the best, giv­ing me another oppor­tu­nity to go back and adjust things in Rev­e­la­tion if events in Cru­sade require. At best I’ll get the restruc­ture done and the out­line nicely detailed, so I can pick up after the hol­i­days where I left off.

So. What changed? Peo­ple really liked Daniel, Jack, Dante and Jeff. Espe­cially Jeff, which made the on-​​screen death scene I had to write for him espe­cially painful. (Even in the new one, I still don’t actu­ally show him get­ting killed, but I do make it clearer that it hap­pens. Poor old coot.) Even Sandy, who doesn’t even appear until act 3, was a fan favorite. But peo­ple really didn’t like Susan or Asemiel.

Susan needs major work to estab­lish her both as deeply reli­gious — an evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian from Col­orado Springs — and as an author­i­tar­ian fol­lower. Bor­row­ing from Frank Miller, Susan always says yes, to any­one with a badge, or a flag — or a cross. This is vital to her role in Cru­sade and Jihad. Vir­tu­ally every scene with her needs some­thing changed.

As for Asemiel — the new name for Batarel, now that I have to give that name to Sandy in Cru­sade—I’ve decided that we shouldn’t see into his head at all. He’ll give away things in dia­logue, but he’ll have no POV scenes of his own. Scenes where he appears alone, as when he’s stalk­ing Daniel, will be writ­ten third per­son objec­tive. We’ll see what it does, but not why he does it. This makes the demons over­all remain mys­te­ri­ous and seem much more badass if you’re not actively reminded that Asemiel pretty much sucks at killing Daniel. It also saves reveal­ing why the demons do what they do over­all until Cru­sade, and allows me to play off of that mys­tery for most of that book as well.

And let’s talk about how badly Asemiel sucks at killing Team Daniel, shall we? In the orig­i­nal draft, we had six fights between Asemiel and Daniel: the hotel room in Arling­ton, the behead­ing, Bal­ti­more Har­bor, Philadel­phia, Newark and finally the steel mill in Beth­le­hem, Penn­syl­va­nia. Six tries for a bad-​​ass demon — more bad-​​ass than orig­i­nally thought, now that I’ve decided one of his for­mer iden­ti­ties was Rasputin — to kill a washed up nobody para­medic. And he fails six straight times.

Worse than that, it gets pretty repet­i­tive there towards the end. There’s no sense of esca­la­tion, rais­ing the stakes with each encounter. By Beth­le­hem the reader just wants some­one to die, and doesn’t much care who. Clearly, this must be fixed.

So I’ve cut the behead­ing and elec­tro­cu­tion. We’re down to four try/​fail cycles, which is as tight as I could get it and still have Jack join­ing Team Daniel before Beth­le­hem be remotely plau­si­ble. We’re mov­ing the grenade inci­dent from Neward to Philly, and hav­ing our heroes con­tinue north from Philly to Beth­le­hem rather than west from Newark. (“North, Miss Teschmacher. North.”) Between that and never actu­ally being privvy to Asemiel’s thoughts, I think that will do the trick.

So here’s the new out­line as it exists today. I’m still miss­ing some chap­ter titles, have combined/​cut/​renamed oth­ers, and I’ll still have to shuf­fle scenes around a bit when I add more Susan stuff.

1. Acci­dent

   • Daniel works the car crash, sees Asemiel walk away

2. Inter­ro­ga­tion

   • Sal and Mick inter­ro­gate Daniel
   • Daniel escapes the precinct house
   • Sal turns the case over to the FBI

3. Another Day In The Blogosphere

   • Susan goes look­ing for a story, finds Dante

4. Inves­ti­ga­tion

   • Daniel breaks into Asemiel’s town­house, finds ancient artifacts
   • Asemiel watches Daniel leave the townhouse

5. Dreams and Nightmares

   • Susan goes over her story with Stan
   • Daniel falls asleep, dreams of the ER
   • Asemiel watches out­side Daniel’s motel room

6. Leg­work

   • Jack goes over Daniel’s escape with Sal and Mick
   • Susan searches for Daniel online

7. Leads

   • Daniel emails Susan re meeting
   • Susan goes to meet Daniel
   • Dante catches Daniel’s online pres­ence, inter­cepts email
   • Daniel meets Susan, tells her the story

8. Arrivals And Departures

   • Jeff arrives in DC
   • Susan talks over story with Daniel
   • Jack and his men move in
   • Daniel grabs Susan and bolts

9. Friends and Enemies

   • Daniel meets Jeff
   • Susan con­sid­ers turn­ing Daniel in
   • Jeff surfs con­spir­acy sites, intu­its who is next door
   • Asemiel attacks (make sure his nose is bloodied)
   • Susan films the attack (she sup­plies her own Flip)
   • Jeff dri­ves up, tells Susan to grab Daniel and get in

10. Post-​​Game Analysis

    • Asemiel kills hotel manager
    • Jeff joins Team Daniel
    • Jack inves­ti­gates hotel room, col­lects blood sample
    • While Jeff is out for sup­plies, Daniel and Susan dis­cuss what they saw
    • Jack learns Daniel didn’t leave town

11. Online, Off The Grid

    • Team Daniel checks out Asemiel’s town­house, finds it vacant
    • Jeff teaches Susan how to get online off the grid
    • Jack sees Susan’s arti­cle, talks to Lou
    • Susan and Daniel dis­cuss her upbring­ing, what she thinks of the demons, Daniel’s plan to drown the demon
    • Jack wakes up to YouTube video

12. Req­ui­si­tions

    • Jeff gets sup­plies and weapons
    • Dante tells Jack about the par­ti­cles in Asemiel’s blood
    • Team Daniel rents a boat, sets the trap in Bal­ti­more Harbor
    • Jack is tipped off to the boat rental

13. No Har­bor

    • Asemiel attacks, gets stabbed in the head
    • Jack watches crazed Asemiel attack the police boats
    • Team Daniel res­cues Jack, leaves him tied up on the pier

14. Rep­ri­mands

    • Intro­duce crown vic
    • Susan posts har­bor video, blows up at Jeff
    • Daniel chews out Susan
    • Lou chews out Jack

15. Call It Off

    • Daniel calls his mom, she tells him God has a pur­pose for everyone
    • Jeff tells Susan about what hap­pened to Rose and Jeremy
    • Dante tells Jack about the nanites
    • Daniel declares inten­tion to dis­ap­pear, storms out when Jeff and Susan don’t agree
    • Lou orders Jack back to DC, Jack leaves his phone behind and walks out the hotel room door

16. Reunion

    • Jack tracks the crown vic to the motel, vis­its Susan and Jeff
    • Daniel comes back drunk to find Jack with Susan and Jeff
    • Jack and Team Daniel exchange infor­ma­tion, Jack joins the team

17. Blowup

    • Team Daniel learns more about Asemiel’s back­ground as Hen­driks, Asemiel bursts in on them
    • Daniel plants a grenade on Asemiel
    • Team Daniel breaks for the exit through the motel park­ing lot
    • Team Daniel pulls over in Eas­ton, PA with a bul­let in the engine, stops for breakfast/​planning, Jeff comes up with steel mill idea

18. The Fires of Hell

    • Jeff and Jack scope out the steel mill, we learn how Jeff became a con­spir­acy nut
    • Jack tells Lou he wants all four of them in pro­tec­tive cus­tody, will give loca­tion when Lou gets to the valley
    • Team Daniel waits at Beth­le­hem Steel, runs when Lou pulls up with Asemiel
    • Cor­nered on a cat­walk, Daniel flips Asemiel into the steel
    • Team Daniel is arrested

19. Dis­ap­peared By An Angel

    • Team Daniel gets led into office build­ing, meets Uriel
    • Uriel tells them they are being “taken off the chessboard”
    • Daniel objects, says the only way for them to be free is to get things out in the open, once and for all
    • Susan objects to Daniel’s impertinence
    • Daniel con­vinces Uriel that it’s time for them to go pub­lic, and on their own terms
    • Uriel offers his pro­tec­tion for them to go to Iraq and retrieve the Gospel of the Angels, hands over database
    • Team Daniel leaves for Baghdad

20. Turn­about Is Unfair Play

    • Demons kill Daniel’s family
    • Team Daniel arrives in Iraq, glide through Cus­toms with Uriel’s help, meet Sandy
    • A demon kills Susan’s editor

21. The Lost Gospel

    • Jack and Sandy dis­cuss the immor­tals, men­tion Grigori
    • Jeff, Daniel and Susan enter Mosque of Imam Ali, Susan through a sep­a­rate entrance
    • Mul­lah Moham­mad shows them the Lost Gospel and the Angelic Helmet
    • Jack notices demons con­verg­ing on the mosque, tells Sandy to call for reinforcements

22. Some­thing Old, Some­thing Older

    • Daniel tries on the helmet
    • Dante checks with Cooper in the lab about the nanites; demons attack
    • Jack and Sandy charge into the mosque chas­ing the demons
    • Dante tries to fend off demons, saved by Uriel

23. The Bur­den Of Proof

    • Daniel won­ders how to get out
    • Jack and Sandy fight their way into the catacombs
    • Susan helps Daniel take off the helmet
    • Jack and Sandy make their way to the cham­ber, demons in hot pursuit
    • Daniel uses the hel­met to find an escape tun­nel, Jeff vol­un­teers to buy time for their escape
    • Jeff holds off the demons long enough for Team Daniel to get out

24. Rev­e­la­tion

    • Team Daniel touches down in Frank­furt, meets Uriel and Dante
    • Daniel comes out of the shower and gets the news his fam­ily was killed
    • Susan posts the final story with Dante’s help
    • Team Daniel lands in DC, Uriel again smooth­ing the way

25. The Hunt Begins

    • Jack (and Dante) resigns from the Bureau
    • Susan starts weigh­ing her job offers
    • Daniel sits in shock in his apartment
    • Jack urges Daniel to join up, Daniel refuses, recon­sid­ers, agrees

Cut scenes from the orig­i­nal chap­ters. Expo­si­tion from these will have to be spliced in elsewhere.

• Jeff reads about Daniel
• Asemiel meets with Zagiel
• Asemiel watches Team Daniel go into cof­fee shop
• Jeff gives Daniel the katana
• Asemiel attacks the RV
• Daniel chops his hand, head off; Team Daniel escapes
  • Daniel tells Susan to call the cops, he’s turn­ing him­self in
• Asemiel recov­ers
  • Blank spots when regenerating
• Jack inves­ti­gates park­ing lot, col­lects blood sample
• Asemiel goes to the Bal­ti­more Basil­ica for help track­ing down Team Daniel
• Asemiel knows it’s a trap, goes anyway
• Asemiel reflects on the Mis­sion, finds out Jack ordered a pizza with his debit card

So we’re five chap­ters shorter and I’m los­ing some of my dar­lings, like Asemiel in the Bal­ti­more Basil­ica. But over­all, I think this makes for a tighter, stronger story. Now the ques­tion is how many of these changes can I make in three weeks, while out­lin­ing Cru­sade at the same time?

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?

This is going to be an exper­i­ment I believe to be unique in pub­lish­ing. As I write my Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles series of books and the follow-​​on sto­ries, I’ll be post­ing absolutely every­thing here. Notes, out­lines, research, even the texts of drafts. And of course final ver­sions of every­thing in both PDF and pod­cast form for free.

Why? Because this is what I wished I could see when I was learn­ing to write. I read every word Joe Straczyn­ski posted on the inter­net dur­ing the pro­duc­tion of Baby­lon 5, but I knew there was so much I didn’t have access to. So much I could learn from if I could com­pare the build­ing blocks to the final prod­uct. Well, now, I’m pro­vid­ing that resource to other writers.

WARNING: There be spoil­ers here, big time. This is an all-​​access behind the scenes look at a work in progress. It wouldn’t achieve what I want if I held any­thing back. So if you don’t want to know how the story ends, who the hid­den trai­tors are, where the immor­tals really came from, etc., head on over to JeffKirvin.net. I’ll keep post­ing there as well, more gen­eral writ­ing and tech­nol­ogy arti­cles, and 100% spoiler free. I’ll post there as well when new fin­ished con­tent is avail­able if you just want the sto­ries when they’re done.

But if you’re a writer, want to be a writer, or ever just won­dered how cre­ative peo­ple come up with all this stuff, wel­come aboard. I look for­ward to our conversations.