The Unification Chronicles

1 Vows

Daniel Cho stood in the cold San Fran­cisco breeze and stared at the graves of his family.

It had been three months since they died, and yet this was the first time he’d been able to get back home to visit. And even then, he wasn’t here on per­sonal time, but instead here on a mis­sion, or an op, as Jack called them.

He’d spent the last three months train­ing, going through a rig­or­ous boot camp with Dante Hicks, the team’s “triple C” — Communications, Com­mand and Con­trol — spe­cial­ist. Jack and Sandy, the two war vet­er­ans on the team, had run them ragged and drilled with them over and over the kinds of sit­u­a­tions they would face, so that when they got there for real, every­thing would be on automatic.

Only Daniel knew all too well that there was no way to pre­pare for this. Not really. They were hunt­ing demons.

The world had changed since Susan’s rev­e­la­tion about the exis­tence of a thou­sands of immor­tals, beings split into two camps we had come to think of as angels and demons. That these immor­tals had manip­u­lated and guided the devel­op­ment of human soci­eties, pulling the strings behind the scenes for longer than recorded history.

The demons had tried to stop them, of course. And when they couldn’t reach Daniel, they went after his fam­ily. Two demons had entered the apart­ments above the neigh­bor­hood gro­cery store that had been the fam­ily busi­ness, snapped his father’s neck and then raped and mur­dered his sis­ters while they forced his mother to watch. They recorded the whole thing on video and released it to the web. Daniel got to see his mother die as the Cho Gro­cery burned to the ground. There was no doubt what hap­pened, no doubt at all.

Daniel was con­vinced that the deaths of his fam­ily were his fault, ulti­mately. He had pro­voked this immor­tal con­spir­acy into act­ing when he kept pur­su­ing the truth behind a dead man walk­ing away from a fatal wreck. He had killed the immor­tal in ques­tion him­self, fling­ing him into a vat of molten steel in Beth­le­hem, Penn­syl­va­nia. Of course they would respond. Why didn’t he see that com­ing? Not a day had gone by since that Daniel didn’t blame him­self for their deaths.

Now, at least he was ready to make a dif­fer­ence. As he stood alone in the ceme­tery, he was already dressed in the black mil­i­tary fatigues worn by most of the mem­bers of the Cru­sade. It was a loose orga­ni­za­tion, sprung up in the wake of the rev­e­la­tion. They had no lead­ers, and each team was autonomous. There was no way for the demons to track them or dis­rupt them. The Cru­sade against the demons had learned from the best, al Qaida and other ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tions that the demons, iron­i­cally, had sup­ported for so many cen­turies. And now it was time foot fight fire with fire. To take the fight to that enemy.

Most of the demons had gone to ground after the rev­e­la­tion. Some changed their iden­ti­ties, some con­tested the rev­e­la­tion, tried to declare them­selves fully human. Some­times it worked, some times it didn’t.

But the demon they were after now, the demon they’d come to kill, was brazen. He admit­ted what he was and went to ground, start­ing a series of bomb­ings him­self that had the area in shock.

Offi­cially, he was human, just a domes­tic ter­ror­ist. The gov­ern­ment was still deny­ing the exis­tence of demons. But Jack had heard through back chan­nels, old friends in the FBI, that Rufariel had already killed two of the teams sent to cap­ture him. The FBI wasn’t pre­pared for this. Not as long as they believed they were fight­ing a human.

Daniel knew better.

---

Susan Richard­son was in a hurry. She was in the back of a cab, rac­ing across mid­town Manhattan.

And by rac­ing, the cab was speed­ing for half a block, screech­ing to a halt, weav­ing around traf­fic, try­ing to build up speed again, wav­ing some more, et cetera. It was slowly dri­ving Susan insane.

She had a broad­cast to do, dammit. Night had fully fallen in New York, and she was sup­posed to be live on the air at eleven.

The car screeched to a stop, and Susan flung a wadded up twenty at the dri­ver. “Get­ting out here!” she shouted as she jumped out of the cab. She hitched her lap­top bag tight on her shoul­der and started pow­er­walk­ing east, in the direc­tion of Rock­e­feller Cen­ter, and the stu­dios of Fox News.

In truth, her new life felt a lit­tle sur­real to her, even with full acknowl­edg­ment of what she’d been through since June. If any­one had told her in May that six months later she’d be a New York Times best­selling author and have her own show on America’s biggest cable news net­work, she’d have laughed in their face. Then asked for some of what they were drinking.

But here she was. Her book, The Rev­e­la­tion: Proof That Angels And Demons Walk Among Us was still sell­ing out. Her show didn’t have O’Reilly or Beck rat­ings — yet — but it was on later, oppo­site brain-​​numbing late night talk­shows on the major net­works. She’d move up. Choos­ing to do a story on Daniel Cho had been the best deci­sion of her life.

Susan blasted past a knot of home­less on and , get­ting a firmer grip on her bag and veer­ing out of arm’s reach as she did. She checked her phone. Four­teen mes­sages from her pro­ducer ask­ing where she was. She pecked out a quick “OMW” on the key­board and broke into a jog past the grid­locked cars.

Not that every­one believed her report­ing, she reminded her­self. She still had a long way to go to get to what she wanted. She was going to be the next Glenn Beck, the next Rush Lim­baugh. Her agent was still nego­ti­at­ing the deal for a nation­ally syn­di­cated radio show, but had made it clear to Susan that before that was real­is­ti­cally going to hap­pen, she had to break into the main­stream. Her fol­low­ers were a vibrant and vocal minor­ity, but still a minor­ity just the same. Too many peo­ple were still in denial of the truth, no mat­ter how much proof she’d provided.

The gov­ern­ment wasn’t help­ing, of course. Not con­tent to let his flunkies trash her, even Pres­i­dent Cruz him­self had said on national TV that there was no such thing as immor­tals, that Susan’s ros­ter of demons was just a pub­lic­ity stunt. She’d been tempted to start a rumor that Ricardo Alessan­dro Cruz was him­self a demon, given that a quar­ter of the nation already believed the Miami-​​born politi­cian had really been born and raised in Cuba as a sleeper agent. But no, that would have been coun­ter­pro­duc­tive. Ther­a­peu­tic, but coun­ter­pro­duc­tive. The truth was on her side, and that should be all she needed.

In fact, the truth was why she was run­ning late today. An old man had con­tacted her through her web­site and said he’d had some­thing she should see, some­thing the Russ­ian gov­ern­ment had so far been able to keep off of YouTube. She found him in a run down apart­ment in , the place smelling of borsch and old sweat. He showed her a video clip that had been smug­gled to him by rel­a­tives in Rus­sia, and Susan had rushed to get a copy on her USB drive. She texted her pro­ducer that she’d be run­ning late, and to leave the first seg­ment of the show open that night. She had a surprise.

It was great, but first she had to get there. Susan darted across , flip­ping the bird at a cab that nar­rowly avoided hit­ting her, and saw the out­lines of 30 Rock in the dis­tance. Almost there. Let’s see the Cruz admin­is­tra­tion deny this, she thought.

---

Night had fallen in San Fran­cisco, and still Daniel stood motion­less at his family’s graves. He heard a famil­iar thwup­ping of rotors behind him, the wind shift­ing as the black UH-​​60 Black­hawk heli­copter he didn’t have to turn and see set­tled down behind him.

He heard a sin­gle set of foot­falls walk up behind him. Must have left Sandy and Dante in the chop­per, Daniel thought.

With­out a word, Jack Har­ris stopped next to him, stand­ing at a respect­ful parade rest. Jack had been an Army offi­cer in Iraq before he’d been an FBI agent, and some things never changed.

After a minute or so, Jack spoke. “I’m sorry we didn’t get you out here sooner.”

“The mis­sion comes first,” Daniel said. It had been one of the first things they’d all agreed to. The Demonic Cru­sade they were a part of was a move­ment, not an orga­ni­za­tion. Some things, like their gear and travel, was bankrolled by the Archangel Uriel, or more specif­i­cally one of his shell cor­po­ra­tions, but they had no lead­ers, no hier­ar­chy. Jack was the de facto squad leader in com­bat, but that was because of expe­ri­ence rather than author­ity. They all bought into the mis­sion, that the demons had to be exter­mi­nated, and the gov­ern­ments of the world weren’t pre­pared to do that. Daniel believed that. But that didn’t mean he had to like it.

“Still,” Jack said, with­out adding any more. There wasn’t much to say. Daniel’s fam­ily hadn’t had a funeral for him to miss, as they all deemed that too entic­ing a tar­get for demons to go after Daniel as well. They were ded­i­cated to fight­ing the demons, but it wouldn’t be on the demons’ terms.

“We’ve got a lock on . Tracked him to a ware­house in . But we don’t know how long he’ll — ”

Daniel turned on his heel and strode towards the chop­per. Jack didn’t fin­ish his sen­tence and followed.

It was time to kill a demon. The first they’d located since fin­ish­ing their train­ing. The first of many.

The mis­sion was on.

---

“Where the hell have you been?” Marty asked Susan as she raced across the studio.

“Doing my job,” she said as she tossed the USB flash drive to him. “Get that ready to broad­cast on my cue.”

She sat down at her anchor’s desk in front of the cam­era, just a few min­utes before eleven. The makeup artist, who had been chas­ing her since she walked in the door, hur­riedly tried to make her look like she hadn’t just run across mid­town Man­hat­tan. It was a los­ing bat­tle, and he harumphed at her until she shooed him away.

She got her notes set in front of her, includ­ing the ones she’d scrawled in the cab, then looked up to see Marty wav­ing wildly at her. He held up a count. 3… 2… Showtime.

“Good evening,” she said into the cam­era. “I’m Susan Richard­son and this is Demonwatch.”

The red light dis­ap­peared off Cam­era 1 and lit over Cam­era 2. She turned to face it.

“Tonight we’re going to lead with some break­ing news, a sur­prise the pow­ers that be don’t want you to see. In my book,” she knew Marty would be fast enough to put up an over­lay of her book cover and a link to her web­site where peo­ple could buy it, “I revealed that one of the demons wasn’t hid­ing at all, but run­ning a first world coun­try right out in the open. I revealed that Vladimir Putin had once been known as Vlad Tepes, or Vlad the Impaler, the inspi­ra­tion for Drac­ula. And that he had, in fact, been Grig­ori Rasputin before the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion of 1917.”

Back to Cam­era 1. “The Russ­ian gov­ern­ment, of course, has flatly denied these alle­ga­tions. The Cruz admin­is­tra­tion here in our own coun­try has denied these allegations.”

Marty cut to a clip of Pres­i­dent Cruz. “I’ve met Prime Min­is­ter Putin sev­eral times, and there’s noth­ing demonic about him. He is a heck of an ath­lete, though.” The pres­i­dent chuck­led, laugh­ing off the mere thought that a world leader could be an immortal.

Back to Susan. “Tonight have star­tling footage to show you, recently smug­gled out of Rus­sia. The pow­ers that be don’t want you to see this, but you deserve the truth. I’m obliged to warn you, how­ever, that what you’re about to see is graphic and disturbing.”

She nod­ded almost imper­cep­ti­bly at Marty, and he played the clip she’d spent the after­noon and evening track­ing down.

The clip was jumpy and ragged, clearly taken from a cell phone and covertly. The Russ­ian Prime Min­is­ter was clearly vis­i­ble, walk­ing across an air­port tar­mac sur­rounded by aides and per­sonal secu­rity, pri­vate jets vis­i­ble in the back­ground. One of the secu­rity men looked directly at the cam­era, nod­ded, and see­ing the ver­i­fi­ca­tion he was clearly look­ing for, drew his weapon and shot Putin in the head, point blank.

The other secu­rity men tack­led the shooter, but the cam­era­man kept his cell phone pointed at Putin. The Prime Min­is­ter had dropped, of course, when half his skull blew off, but even as the shooter was wres­tled to the ground, the cam­era­man caught Putin’s head vis­i­bly knit­ting itself back together. The cam­era­man was pushed back by secu­rity along with the other aides and exec­u­tive per­son­nel. The audio was shout­ing in Russ­ian along with sta­tic and rustling sounds as the cameraman’s phone was jos­tled in his cloth­ing. The view swung away sharply, show­ing empty tar­mac with the open plains of Siberia in the back­ground, then back to Putin, whose head was nearly reassembled.

The Russ­ian Prime Min­is­ter gasped a huge lung­ful of air and rose to his feet, his hair grow­ing out of the newly reformed skin. He walked over to the scruff and shouted some­thing in Russ­ian. One of the secu­rity men not hold­ing down the shooter unhol­stered his pis­tol and handed it to Putin, who shot a sin­gle round into the orig­i­nal shooter’s fore­head. Just as he started to turn towards the cam­era, the video stopped.

Marty pointed at Susan, indi­cat­ing that the cam­era was back on her. “What you’ve just seen,” Susan said, “is hid­den cam­era footage prov­ing, with­out a doubt, that Vladimir Putin is in fact an immor­tal demon. We ask our friends in Rus­sia to do what’s right and take their coun­try back from this God­less mon­ster. And we ask our own Pres­i­dent Cruz to finally acknowl­edge the threat immor­tals pose to our own free­dom and secu­rity, before some­thing like this hap­pens here.

“We’ll be right back.” The net­work cut to commercial.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.