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?

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 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.

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.

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 1st, 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.)

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.

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?

3765 words!

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.

[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.

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.