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.

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.

WARNING: This is one of my longer arti­cles, but I think you’ll find it worth the read if you want to see how to out­line a novel. This does con­tain spoil­ers for Cru­sade, obvi­ously, but also for the third book in the series, Jihad, since I have to set stuff up for that book in this one.

Before set­ting out on a long jour­ney, it helps to study a map. Before I start writ­ing Cru­sade in two weeks, I need a map of the novel, what is usu­ally called an outline.

I know a lot of writ­ers hate out­lines. We all have hor­ri­ble, dis­fig­ur­ing mem­o­ries of out­lines in school, all those ter­ri­fy­ing Roman numer­als. But for me, out­lines don’t work that way. For me, an out­line is a bul­leted list of Things That Hap­pen in the story.

I start out small. So lets look at the major things I know have to hap­pen in Cru­sade.

• Team Jack hunts demons with vary­ing degrees of success.
• Susan has a new life on Fox News.
• Texas Sen­a­tor Tim­o­thy Phillips has a plan to take over the government.
• Team Jack learns of the exis­tence of Hell, sets out to find it.
• Phillips holds a rally on the National Mall.
• Team Jack learns the loca­tion of Hell, a con­verted mis­sile silo in Nevada.
• Wash­ing­ton DC is over­run by rioters.
• Team Jack descends into Hell.
• Sandy reveals him­self to be a demon, Batariel of the Grig­ori. “I’m here in case you suc­ceed.” /​ht to Stargate
• In the fight with Batariel, Daniel gets knocked over the rail into the pit, is caught by Lucifer. (“Sym­pa­thy For The Devil” quote)
• Lucifer explains why the demons do what they do, proof of their ulti­mate suc­cess: a world in chaos
• Armored angels, includ­ing Gabriel and Azriel, descend into Hell and start slaugh­ter­ing demons.
• Angels kill Lucifer.
• After­math of the Demonic Crusade.

There are big, gap­ing holes in that, of course. Susan is hardly men­tioned at all. But this gives me a start­ing point, and the gaps will be (rel­a­tively) easy to fill by ask­ing “what has to hap­pen to get from here to there?”.

The next thing I do at this point is fig­ure out where my act breaks are. As I’ve men­tioned before, all sto­ries are, at their core, three act struc­tures. Any­thing that humans rec­og­nize as “a story” will have a begin­ning, mid­dle and end, and as writ­ers we would do well to exploit that struc­ture and get as much value out of those tran­si­tions from one act to the next as pos­si­ble. Each act should end on a major change. In gen­eral, act 1 intro­duces the char­ac­ters and the prob­lem, act 2 com­pli­cates the prob­lem until our pro­tag­o­nists make their final turn into act 3 and resolve the prob­lem. So where to the act breaks fit best in this out­line so far?

Act 1

• Team Jack hunts demons with vary­ing degrees of success.
• Susan has a new life on Fox News.
• Texas Sen­a­tor Tim­o­thy Phillips has a plan to take over the government.
• Team Jack learns of the exis­tence of Hell, sets out to find it.

So here we have the begin­ning of the novel. We intro­duce Team Jack and the largely ad hoc, lead­er­less Demonic Cru­sade. We see how Susan’s life has changed post–Rev­e­la­tion, and we get a new antag­o­nist, a US Sen­a­tor bent on using this new threat to lever him­self into power. We end the act and turn into Act 2 when Team Jack learns that “Hell” really exists: the demons have a cen­tral base where Lucifer calls the shots. If they can take that out, the rest of the Cru­sade should be much easier.

Act 2

• Phillips holds a rally on the National Mall.
• Team Jack learns the loca­tion of Hell, a con­verted mis­sile silo in Nevada.
• Wash­ing­ton DC is over­run by rioters.
• Team Jack descends into Hell.

In Act 2, a whole bun­cha stuff hap­pens, most of which we don’t see here, at least not yet. But we do know where we have to end up. Phillips suc­ceeds in fan­ning the flames of para­noia, but what he unleashes isn’t lim­ited to the United States. The sec­ond act sees “demon­hunts” spread world­wide, some­thing that some folks will take to call­ing the “spirit of Salem” in the US and “the inqui­si­tion” in Europe. There’s a lot more here, but we’ll get to that in a bit. Act 2 is gen­er­ally by far the longest of the three acts, and it’s going to take some doing to tip the entire planet into chaos.

Act 3

• Sandy reveals him­self to be a demon, Batariel of the Grig­ori. “I’m here in case you suc­ceed.” /​ht to Stargate
• In the fight with Batariel, Daniel gets knocked over the rail into the pit, is caught by Lucifer. (“Sym­pa­thy For The Devil” quote)
• Lucifer explains why the demons do what they do, proof of their ulti­mate suc­cess: a world in chaos
• Armored angels, includ­ing Gabriel and Azriel, descend into Hell and start slaugh­ter­ing demons.
• Angels kill Lucifer.
• After­math of the Demonic Crusade.

Act 3 almost writes itself. By this point the story is run­ning full-​​tilt and is almost all action. I notice there’s not a lot for Susan to do here, so either I need to come up with a per­sonal arc for her that also leads to Hell, or she needs to wrap up her stuff in Act 2. And hey! Where did the angels come from? Why are they inter­ven­ing now? And how can Daniel play a piv­otal role in act 3, rather than just watch­ing the angels do his job?

Well, actu­ally, that — and Susan’s story — will give me the bulk of what I need to flesh out Act 2.

Angels and demons both do what they do out of a twisted need to help human­ity grow and improve. (As to where these moti­va­tions come from, that will be in Book 5: The Neme­sis War, or you can just look it up in the Wiki.) The demons think that “sur­vival of the fittest” wins the day and that it is their job to stir the pot, keep humans fight­ing, strug­gling to sur­vive. They there­fore sow chaos and death wher­ever and how­ever they can, trust­ing those who sur­vive to be smarter, stronger and bet­ter for the ordeal. Lucifer’s plan, and his manip­u­la­tion of Sen­a­tor Phillips, has been to use the para­noia about the demons to turn every­one against both each other and them­selves, to set the world on fire. And it works.

But why does it work? Why do the angels just stand by and let it hap­pen, only swoop­ing in and destroy­ing the demons rather one-​​sidedly after every­thing has gone to shit?

The answer is that the angels are play­ing the demons for suck­ers. And it works.

The angels are all about order. They believe that what’s best for human­ity is to do what they’re told by their supe­ri­ors, the angels. The angels believe that they can make human­ity bet­ter by con­trol. Con­trolled breed­ing. Con­trolled pol­i­tics. Con­trolled thought. Their ideal sit­u­a­tion would be a global theoc­racy with them in charge. The con­trol the priests, and the priests con­trol every­one else. After all, this strat­egy worked for thou­sands of years and only started to fall apart rel­a­tively recently with the Renaissance.

But the angels are smart enough to know that humans won’t give up their fool­ish notions of free­dom vol­un­tar­ily. As long as the sta­tus quo of indi­vid­ual and sov­er­eign nation states remained, they couldn’t take con­trol. Not openly.

So the angels have spent the last cou­ple of cen­turies build­ing their con­trol not of peo­ple, but of cor­po­ra­tions. The angels run all the world’s stock mar­kets and influ­ence the board of direc­tors of every major multi­na­tional cor­po­ra­tion. They have been the dri­ving force of cor­po­rate glob­al­ism, and they’ve been very thor­ough. So when the demons upend the world’s gov­ern­ments, the angels are stand­ing by with a shadow infra­struc­ture of their own: multi­na­tional cor­po­ra­tions. In a sense, it’s dis­as­ter cap­i­tal­ism, Iraq and New Orleans on a global scale. The angels have their own pri­vate armies, their own builders, their own data net­works. And when the demons top­ple every­thing, the angels are ready to step in, pick up the pieces and keep the trains run­ning on time. The demons give them what they could not achieve on their own: global dom­i­na­tion of a grate­ful humanity.

So. Know­ing what the major play­ers are doing behind the scenes, what does that mean for Susan and Team Jack? Let’s shift our focus way in and look at some of our per­sonal story arcs, specif­i­cally Susan’s and Daniel’s.

Susan’s weak­ness all along has been her unques­tion­ing respect for author­ity, bal­anced against her jour­nal­is­tic ambi­tions. In Jihad, she will be the inter­na­tional spokes­woman for the angels. So who is the real author­ity in this book? How can she fur­ther her career while stand­ing with those she feels are “right”? Also, we have to keep in mind her evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tian­ity. She believes the demons are exactly what they claim to be, and that the nan­otech­nol­ogy is just the mech­a­nism by which God makes them immortal.

In the orig­i­nal novella, I pit­ted Susan against Phillips, with Susan as the voice of rea­son. That doesn’t work for this ver­sion of her. This Susan would fit bet­ter as Phillips’s media proxy, help­ing him fan the flames. She doesn’t know — and in fact, Phillips him­self doesn’t know — that he’s really work­ing for the demons. She would see Phillips as a patriot speak­ing truth to an indif­fer­ent power that keeps try­ing to con­vince peo­ple the demons aren’t actu­ally real and con­tain the hys­te­ria. So she should be embed­ded — per­haps even in bed — with Phillips as he uses the Demonic Cru­sade to over­throw those above him in power. Phillips’s riot, which seemed implau­si­ble when I wrote it in 1997, doesn’t seem hard to believe at all in 2010. All I have to do here is take the real life Tea Party and really give them some­thing to be afraid of. And after it’s all over, this gives Susan a rea­son to be the mouth­piece of the angels in Jihad: she’s try­ing to atone for the dam­age she helped cause.

Daniel is the rev­o­lu­tion­ary leader of the entire human race in Jihad, so this book has to be his devel­op­ment as a leader, from fol­low­ing Jack in this book to lead­ing him in Jihad. How can we show that pro­gres­sion? That’s a tougher ques­tion. We know from the first book that Daniel is smart, tough and resource­ful. And he starts this book con­sumed with anger over what the demons have done to his fam­ily, and to him. He’s a bril­liant, pissed off guy with noth­ing to lose.

I do know that by the time they hit the silo, Daniel has devel­oped so much as a leader that they’re really Team Daniel. This gives me a nice char­ac­ter dynamic to play on as Jack is caught between Daniel’s insis­tence that they attack and Sandy’s reluc­tance to go. (Quick Socratic brain­storm­ing: Why are they attack­ing Hell with just a 4-​​man team? To sneak in and plant a nuke. How do they get the nuke? They steal it. How do they steal it? Because gov­ern­ments and the safe­guards they pro­vide are already falling apart.)

After the Cru­sade is over, Daniel need not end up inside Heaven, at least not in any offi­cial capac­ity. Maybe Susan gives him a tour. In any case Jack and Dante can be with him from the start as he births the rebel­lion rather than just being adopted by it.

Okay. Let’s incor­po­rate those ideas into the out­line, along with mak­ing things more obvi­ously global. Phillips is lead­ing the charge here, and we see him up close and per­sonal because of Susan, but we have to assume the demons have other pat­sies in other countries.

Act 1

• Team Jack tries to take out a demon with an EMP.
• Susan has a new life on Fox News.
• Uriel con­fers with Team Jack.
• Texas Sen­a­tor Tim­o­thy Phillips has a plan to take over the government.
• Team Jack attacks a demon with acid, scar bystanders.
• Phillips intro­duces anti-​​demon leg­is­la­tion that tem­porar­ily repeals the Bill of Rights.
• Dante tries to hack the wire­less com­mu­ni­ca­tion between nanites, fails.
• Susan inter­views Phillips.
• Team Jack learns of the exis­tence of Hell from Uriel, sets out to find it.

Act 2

• Susan becomes embed­ded with Phillips to cover “the move­ment” for Fox News
• Anti-​​demon hys­te­ria leads to renewed geno­cide in Africa.
• Phillips and Susan hold a rally on the National Mall.
• Indian untouch­ables rise up against “demon” caste.
• Team Jack learns the loca­tion of Hell, a con­verted mis­sile silo in Nevada.
• Roman Catholics in Brazil hunt “demons” in the streets.
• Team Jack becomes Team Daniel as Daniel devises a plan to sneak a nuke into Hell.
• A sniper shoots Pres­i­dent Cruz in the head to prove he’s a demon. The pres­i­dent doesn’t get back up.
• Team Daniel steals a tac­ti­cal “suit­case” nuke.
• Wash­ing­ton DC is over­run by rioters.
• Sandy tries to con­vince Jack and Dante not to make the trip to Hell.
• Phillips’s assis­tant, a demon, kills Phillips now that he has served his pur­pose. He tries to kill Susan, who man­ages to escape.
• Team Daniel descends into Hell.

Act 3

• Sandy reveals him­self to be a demon, Batariel of the Grig­ori. “I’m here in case you suc­ceed.” /​ht to Stargate
• Susan verbs in riot-​​torn DC.
• In the fight with Batariel, Daniel gets knocked over the rail into the pit, is caught by Lucifer. (“Sym­pa­thy For The Devil” quote)
• Jack and Dante destroy Batariel/​Sandy.
• Lucifer explains why the demons do what they do, proof of their ulti­mate suc­cess: a world in chaos
• Armored angels, includ­ing Gabriel and Azriel, descend into Hell and start slaugh­ter­ing demons.
• Angels kill Lucifer.
• After­math of the Demonic Cru­sade and the rise of Heaven.

At this point I have what I’d con­sider a work­able out­line for a novel. I still need to break things into chap­ters and weave a few more scenes in here and there to fill things out and keep things mov­ing — in par­tic­u­lar, I’m going to have to expand even more Susan’s story in act 2, and fig­ure out what she does while Wash­ing­ton DC burns — but this is a solid foun­da­tion. I’m tempted to go with just this for the NaNoW­riMo draft, to give me that much more flex­i­bil­ity. We’ll see. But for now, I’m ready to start on the book.

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.)

As many of you have prob­a­bly noticed by now, I’m mak­ing heavy use of cur­rent events, trends and tech­nolo­gies in the nar­ra­tive of Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles. Specif­i­cally, Susan is a blog­ger, Jeff used Twit­ter and every­one is on the net with GPS-​​enabled smart­phones. But wait, some of you might be ask­ing, isn’t that going to date the work? What hap­pens in a cou­ple cen­turies when peo­ple are pick­ing the time­less clas­sics of the twenty-​​first century?

The answer, of course, is I’ll be dead, so what do I care?

Okay, let’s dis­cuss this. I tried, when writ­ing the orig­i­nal Between Heaven and Hell novel­las, to avoid things that would freeze the story in a spe­cific place and time. But because my knowl­edge of the future was imper­fect — isn’t it always? — a num­ber of things slipped in any­way that ring out today as hope­lessly anachro­nis­tic. When con­fronted with a car wreck in the very first scene, Daniel doesn’t call 911 on his mobile phone, because in 1996 he didn’t have one. Susan copies the data­base of demons onto a CD-​​ROM. No one filmed these amaz­ing things and put them on YouTube. Even though I tried to avoid such things, they’re glar­ing in their absence when com­pared to our daily lives today.

So my advice is don’t try to make your book “time­less.” You’ll fail. A lot. You can’t pre­dict the future, and instead of mak­ing your work time­less, you’ll make it bland. Go ahead and use real brand names and trade­marks like Twit­ter, Nike, Pepsi, CNN. Done well, they’ll lend your work an authen­tic­ity, a solid­ity, it might not oth­er­wise have. It’s one thing to say your char­ac­ter had a ham­burger, it’s sub­tly dif­fer­ent to say he had a Big Mac.

But like any nar­ra­tive tool, don’t overuse it. All those proper nouns can be dis­tract­ing if you whack the reader over the head with them. And you really want to be care­ful that you don’t give the appear­ance that the brand names are paid prod­uct place­ment, unless, of course, you got paid a boat­load of money to do it.

What about using real peo­ple, not just things? Celebri­ties are fair game, right?

Sort of.

When writ­ing the first book in the UC series, I assumed I’d cement it in 2010 as solidly as I could, so when it came time to men­tion peo­ple in high gov­ern­ment office, I used real politi­cians. The Pres­i­dent was Barack Obama, etc. But as I’m get­ting into Cru­sade, I’m real­iz­ing I have to take a step back on that. Why? Because I have to kill people.

Specif­i­cally, one of the events on the world’s spi­ral into chaos is a Pres­i­den­tial assas­si­na­tion. Two of them, in fact. First the Pres­i­dent gets whacked because some nutjob is try­ing to prove he’s a demon, and then the Vice-​​turned-​​Acting Pres­i­dent is killed by a demon dur­ing a riot that pretty much burns Wash­ing­ton DC to the ground. I can’t really use Barak Obama and Joe Biden for these roles. At least not if I want to avoid the Secret Ser­vice dis­ap­pear­ing me off to Gitmo. Using celebri­ties in your work is one thing, some­thing that could be con­strued as a threat to a sit­ting Pres­i­dent is another.

So now the Pres­i­dent in Cru­sade is Ricardo Ale­jan­dro Cruz. He was a two-​​term Con­gress­man from Miami before run­ning for Pres­i­dent in 2008 and being elected the country’s first Latino Pres­i­dent. He was born in Miami to Cuban immi­grant par­ents, and spent a good chunk of his child­hood in Cuba. Right wing con­spir­acy nuts have insisted for years that his birth cer­tifi­cate is a fake, and that he was really born in Cuba, and that he’s been installed here, Manchurian Can­di­date–style, to com­mu­nize the United States. In Cru­sade, one of these nuts goes even fur­ther and decides he’s not human at all, he’s a demon, and to prove it, the nut’s going to put a 30 – 06 round right between his eyes and watch him get back up on live TV…

Which of course, Cruz won’t.

On the one hand, using fic­tional politi­cians gives me the abil­ity to do what­ever I want with them just like any of my other char­ac­ters. But I have to admit I do kind of miss the verisimil­i­tude using real elected offi­cials gave Rev­e­la­tion. It was one thing to say that the heat was com­ing down on the FBI from the Direc­tor of Home­land Secu­rity, another to day it was com­ing down from Direc­tor Napoli­tano. But to do what I really want to do in this story, some things have to stay fiction.

But not every­thing. No way Susan’s giv­ing up Twitter.

I got  a whop­ping 352 words yes­ter­day, all of it at Chipo­tle before going over to my sister’s to watch the Bron­cos lose in the final minute of a game for the sec­ond week in a row. But hey, at least it’s some­thing, and I think I’m ready to pull out of this malaise and get back to work. My mom is feel­ing bet­ter, there’s every chance that she’s cancer-​​free, and if even if she’s not, what she has is eas­ily treat­able. The hol­i­days are behind me — I get to work New Years Eve and New Years Day, so noth­ing to look for­ward to there, and frankly I’ll be happy just to leave the 2000s decade in the dust­bin of his­tory, thank you very much — and my mind is turn­ing back to Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles with some­thing that almost feels like eagerness.

One cool idea I’ve been bounc­ing around for a while is the idea that the super­nova trig­gered by the Guardians to end the Eter­nal War is actu­ally seen from Earth. This involved doing some math to make sure the dates all worked out. I’d already decided that I wanted Daniel Cho’s final vic­tory over the Archangel Michael to hap­pen on 21 Decem­ber 2012, really soak that “dawn­ing of a new age” thing for all it’s worth. So what would I need to have that event her­alded by a new star in the sky, so bright that’s vis­i­ble dur­ing the day and out­shines the moon?

I know that Book 4, Mis­taken Iden­tity, takes place about 100 years after Book 3, Jihad. In that book, we meet the Sendeni, the most pow­er­ful race to sur­vive the Eter­nal War. They tell us that the Guardians ended the war a thou­sand years ago by induc­ing a star to go super­nova with the Neme­sis nearby, destroy­ing nearly all of the Neme­sis before chas­ing what was left out of the galaxy. Nei­ther race ever returned. If I want that explo­sion to be Daniel’s Star, where does it have to be?

Accord­ing to the Sendeni, the explo­sion would have occurred in the Earth year 1112 CE. If the star was only 500 light years away, I could make it the super­nova doc­u­mented by Johannes Kepler in 1604. But in order for it to be Daniel’s Star, vis­i­ble to us in 2012, it has to be 900 light years away. This is fea­si­ble, con­sid­er­ing the Eter­nal War ranged all over the galaxy and it’s far enough from us that the det­o­na­tion wouldn’t affect Sol oth­er­wise (if Alpha Cen­tauri, only 4 light years away, went super­nova, it would com­pletely destroy our ozone layer and kill all sur­face life on Earth).

Who knew writ­ing fic­tion involved math?

Day three of Cru­sade was a suc­cess. I got 2005 words, the first time I’ve crested 2k on this book. (Day 1 was 737 words, day 2 was 1023.) It’s been much, much harder build­ing up speed on this than it was on Rev­e­la­tion. The first day of Rev­e­la­tion was 3200 words, just a bit under my total word count on Cru­sade.

Part of this, I think, is fatigue. I fin­ished writ­ing a novel and plunged right into a new one. Not only did I not take a day off, I didn’t even sleep on it. I started Cru­sade the same day that I fin­ished Rev­e­la­tion. No won­der I’m tired. Frankly, this is Josh Curry’s fault. I had to jump into Cru­sade right away, lest I give him an even big­ger head start on our word war.

But also I think it’s that Cru­sade is a fuzzier story to me. I knew where Rev­e­la­tion was going, or at least I thought I did. I turned out to be wrong, and the char­ac­ters came up with won­der­fully unex­pected ways to get to the endgame of book 1, ways com­pletely dif­fer­ent than what I had in mind. But hav­ing some­thing in mind gave me the con­fi­dence to barge into the writ­ing, sure of where I was going (even if I was wrong).

With Cru­sade, as the result of the unex­pected twists in Rev­e­la­tion, I find myself in largely uncharted ter­ri­tory. I have an out­line, of sorts, and know where the first act has to end up, but how to get there is a com­plete mys­tery to me. To some writ­ers, this “thrill of the blank page” is a won­der. To me, it’s ter­ri­fy­ing. As I write, I’m find­ing out where my “sweet spot” is between plot­ting and pants­ing. Too much rigid plot­ting (what I ended up with on Ghost Ronin) and I’m too bored by the story to write, but too much pants­ing and I’m par­a­lyzed by inde­ci­sion, unsure of where I’m going. I need just enough out­line to give me a map, but not enough to tell the story for me. I think this is what I have with Cru­sade, but it’s still prob­a­bly a lit­tle too far to the pants­ing side for comfort.

The solu­tion, obvi­ously, is to do a lit­tle bit more out­lin­ing, work­ing back­wards from the act 1 break. I might do that tonight. But for the most part, I’m going to enjoy hit­ting my word count and watch me some of the TV machine. Maybe even eat some­thing tasty. And tomor­row, we’ll see if I can match what I did today.

1: New Beginning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Are you ready?” Jack said behind him.

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I know, sir.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

“In my leg?”

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

“I’m get­ting dizzy, Daniel.”

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

“Patrick! Keep still!”

“Fuck!” Patrick said through clenched teeth.

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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