The Unification Chronicles

As I men­tioned over on the main blog, my focus on writ­ing has shifted a bit as a reac­tion to my mom’s health prob­lems. But I’ve also real­ized, in just two days away from writ­ing, that I have to keep doing this. I have to keep writ­ing, if only to stay sane(ish). So this morn­ing I’ve been work­ing on the out­line for Cru­sade, or at least the out­line for act 1. Here’s what I have so far:

1: New Beginning

• Daniel at his family’s graves, refer to “bootcamp”
• Jack’s team tries take down a demon with an EMP, fails

2: The Man Who Would Be King

• Susan inter­views US Sen­a­tor Tim­o­thy Phillips from Texas
• Anti-​​demon hys­te­ria, com­mu­nity witch hunts

3: Recov­ery

• Daniel helps Patrick heal up
• Jack con­fers with Uriel about the effect on pub­lic opinion

4: Impe­tus

• In Hell, Lucifer and Baal dis­cuss out to turn the chaos out­side to their advantage
• Phillips intro­duces legislation

5: Dis­in­te­gra­tion

• Team attacks a demon with acid, scars bystander
• Susan learns of the attack, what Daniel and Jack are up to, calls them out on TV

6: Mal­con­tents

• Jack’s team reacts to being branded terrorists
• Phillips calls for peo­ple to assist in bring­ing demons to justice

7: Dis­rup­tions

• Patrick tries to hack the wire­less com­mu­ni­ca­tion between the nanites
• Susan chases Jack’s team

8: Intended Consequences

• Witch hunts inten­sify, increas­ing pub­lic panic (POV?)
• Susan is at odds with the network

9: Fall­out

• Team attacks a demon hide­out with a dirty bomb

10: Capit­u­la­tion

• Pres­i­dent is polit­i­cally forced to admit that demons exist

I’m fond of the chap­ter titles, and I think I have some good stuff here. The hys­te­ria grip­ping the coun­try — it spreads world­wide in a big way in act 2 — builds slowly, an esca­la­tion on both sides. A lot of the char­ac­ters have to deal with doubts about what they’re doing: Daniel has to deal with civil­ian col­lat­eral dam­age, Susan with the fear-​​mongering the net­work wants her to do, Jack with how inef­fec­tual they are at fight­ing the immor­tals. I’m also pit­ting Susan against Jack and Daniel, at least for a while.

But it still seems like I’m miss­ing some­thing. In this phase of the story, the humans are prox­ies, or even pawns, in a war between the angels and demons. Each side of immor­tals thinks they have the upper hand and fun­da­men­tally mis­un­der­stands the nature of the con­flict waged by the other side.

The demons think that they are close to win­ning the war once and for all, tip­ping the scales to chaos. While the rev­e­la­tion of their exis­tence was unin­ten­tional, they now think it might be the best thing that ever hap­pened to them, because the ram­pant fear can be manip­u­lated to under­mine all the struc­tures of order. Gov­ern­ments and economies will crum­ble, set­ting humans against each other on a global scale. Demons are ulti­mately try­ing to improve the human race by mak­ing it stronger, weed­ing out the weak. And noth­ing does that bet­ter than a post-​​apocalyptic hellscape.

The angels, on the other hand, have stopped fight­ing the war of hearts and minds entirely. They’re no longer com­pet­ing with the demons to see who can out-​​influence the humans. Instead, they’re using the humans as weapons with which to wipe the demons out directly. Once the tide turns, the angels will reveal them­selves and enter com­bat. Until then, they’re giv­ing the demons the illu­sion of get­ting what they want while they have the demons hunted down and destroyed. In the short term, demonic propen­sity for chaos will wipe the slate clean, allow­ing the angels to build an orderly utopia on the ashes later when the demons have been eliminated.

So in the first act of Cru­sade I need to lay the ground­work for all this, show­ing both the steady decline of social order and the ruth­less effi­ciency of the angels in going after their oppo­nents directly rather than by influ­enc­ing humans. All of this sub­text needs to be con­veyed while still focus­ing on Jack, Daniel and Susan, see­ing it all unfold through their eyes.

Which brings me back to the out­line. I see two things wrong with it so far, two things that jump out at me.

1. Where is Daniel in all this? He needs a big­ger role.
2. The angels need to be a stronger pres­ence. So far we have one scene with Uriel in the whole first act. I need some­thing to fore­shadow Gabriel show­ing up in full pow­ered armor in act 2.

I’m also not sure yet why the Pres­i­dent of the United States is forced to admit that demons are real. I sus­pect that will be dri­ven by the pop­ulist upris­ings and the need to try to main­tain peace and pub­lic safety, and to some degree an attempt to defuse Sen­a­tor Phillips’s rhetoric. Josh says I need to have more “man in the street” scenes, some way to show how the ris­ing panic is affect­ing every­day peo­ple. Need to think more on that one.

So what about you? Keep­ing in mind that this is just the first of three acts in the sec­ond book of a tril­ogy, what jumps out to you as miss­ing or out of place?

UPDATE: Okay, here’s what I came up with over the afternoon.

1: New Beginning

• Daniel at his family’s graves, refer to “bootcamp”
• Jack’s team tries take down a demon with an EMP, fails

2: The Man Who Would Be King

• Susan inter­views US Sen­a­tor Tim­o­thy Phillips from Texas
• Anti-​​demon hys­te­ria, com­mu­nity witch hunts
• Chaos vignette

3: Recov­ery

• Daniel helps Patrick heal up
• Jack con­fers with Uriel about the effect on pub­lic opinion
• Chaos vignette

4: Impe­tus

• In Hell, Lucifer and Baal dis­cuss out to turn the chaos out­side to their advantage
• Phillips intro­duces legislation
• Chaos vignette

5: Dis­in­te­gra­tion

• Team attacks a demon with acid, scars bystander
• Susan learns of the attack, what Daniel and Jack are up to, calls them out on TV
• Chaos vignette

6: Mal­con­tents

• Team reacts to being branded terrorists
• Chaos vignette
• Phillips calls for peo­ple to assist in bring­ing demons to justice

7: Dis­rup­tions

• Chaos vignette
• Patrick tries to hack the wire­less com­mu­ni­ca­tion between the nanites
• Susan chases Jack’s team

8: Intended Consequences

• Chaos vignette
• Daniel con­flicts with Jack
• Susan is at odds with the network

9: Fall­out

• Team attacks a demon hide­out with a dirty bomb
• Daniel rebels (this is where we see the begin­nings of why Daniel ends up lead­ing Jack in Jihad, that Daniel is more principled)
• Chaos vignette

10: Capit­u­la­tion

• At a pub­lic protest, Baal shows up and reveals him­self to the world, kills protestors
• Daniel “gets with the pro­gram,” is will­ing to keep going for the greater good
• Pres­i­dent is polit­i­cally forced to admit that demons exist

Lots of good changes here.

First, we have a defined char­ac­ter arc for Daniel, where he drifts away from Jack, rebelling at the vio­lence and col­lat­eral dam­age, but is forced to come back at the end of the act.

Sec­ond, I have a series of vignettes planned, lit­tle one-​​shot “man on the street” pieces show­ing how the fear and chaos is affect­ing indi­vid­u­als. I see these as sim­i­lar to the quick lit­tle one-​​off scenes Frank Miller did so well in The Dark Knight Returns to illus­trate what that future Gotham City was like.

Third, we see that the demons force the government’s hand by “com­ing out” on their own, pro­vok­ing an offi­cial response and ratch­et­ing the ter­ror still higher. This forces Daniel to over­come his doubts, forces Susan to get on board with the network’s fear mon­ger­ing, and sets the stage for the angelic response from Gabriel in act 2.

The first 30,000 words or so of Cru­sade is start­ing to look very interesting.

Another bang up week­end, a grand total of 196 words added to Cru­sade over two days. I did, how­ever, do a fan­tas­tic job of orga­niz­ing my Writ­ing Music playlist, all 108 hours of it. Nice that all the tunes are con­sis­tently named, for­mat­ted and all have album art, but it’s not writing.

Why am I blocked? The same gor­ram rea­son I’m always blocked. Because I’m ter­ri­fied. And why am I ter­ri­fied? Because I don’t know where I’m going.

I am a rare and very con­fused species, the Type A Bud­dhist. I want to go with the flow, let go of expec­ta­tions and all that, but I’d feel a lot bet­ter about it if I had an out­line and a set of require­ments to fol­low (yes, this is prob­a­bly a holdover from my days as a soft­ware devel­oper; I have a deep and pro­found fear of scope creep). I need to know not only where the story is going, but I need to have a rea­son­able idea of what I’m going to see on the way.

The prob­lem is that Rev­e­la­tion changed the story and the char­ac­ters so much from the orig­i­nal novella that very lit­tle of the orig­i­nal Cru­sade novella is still usable. Again, I know the basic beats of the story, where it has to end up and who has to die before we get there, but every­thing else is dif­fer­ent, and I find myself floun­der­ing try­ing to put one word after another in the dark.

My writer’s group says I’m just tired, hav­ing just fin­ished a novel in six weeks, and it’s okay for me to slow down for a while, gather my thoughts. They might have a point. In between writ­ing, I’m tran­si­tion­ing from one com­pany to another in my day job, said day job is migrat­ing users from one Exchange server to another, so I’m a lot busier at work than usual, my mom just had (suc­cess­ful) can­cer surgery and I’m des­per­ately try­ing to save up enough money to file bank­ruptcy (which seems coun­ter­in­tu­itive, but there it is). I’m under a lot of stress, and my body is start­ing to break down. I’m in near con­stant pain and have resorted to tak­ing mus­cle relax­ants just to get by. And I no longer have the NaNoW­riMo com­mu­nity to bol­ster my efforts and cheer me on.

All of that is a per­fectly accept­able excuse for why I’m not writ­ing Cru­sade at the same pace as Rev­e­la­tion. But it’s not a rea­son. It’s just an excuse.

Because the real rea­son I’m writ­ing so slowly is that I don’t know where I’m going. Again. My out­line for Act 1 of Cru­sade is a dis­or­ga­nized mess of vague story ideas. No won­der my nar­ra­tive prose sounds like aim­less wan­der­ing. That’s what it is.

So today, in between all the other stuff I have to do, I’m going to really tighten up the out­line for Cru­sade Act 1. I’m not going past the act break, because I want to remain flex­i­ble. But every­thing up to that act break needs to be thought out, delin­eated. Because only when I know where I’m going can I really open up the throt­tle to get there.