I have an interesting idea for a short story that came to me over the weekend. I hope to get started writing it tonight. As a rule, I write very few short stories. Part of the reason is that I simply don’t have many short story ideas. Most of my writing ideas simply run longer, into novel-length territory. I’ve also learned the hard way that short stories are not simply “very short novels”–they have a different structure and cadence to them, and, to be honest, I’m not that good at that length.I’m sure if I wrote more I would get better at it, but I only have so many writing hours in the day, and I’d prefer to use that time for novel stuff.

But this idea is even more different than a normal short story, since it’ll only be two or three pages long. In other words, my first piece of flash fiction. I really like the idea, though, so I’m planning to pound it out this week. Wish me luck!

I’m not a NaNoWriMo participant, but I did just start a new novel. This is a crazy time of year for me at my day job, so between that and the new book, postings will probably be pretty scarce for a while. I’ll do what I can to share what’s going on and post interesting things I find, but there are only so many hours in the day and I need to prioritize the book before the website.

Thanks for being understanding!

For at least six months I’ve had this idea for a short story rattling around my head. I had a pretty clear picture of bits and pieces of it, but the through-story — the actual narrative arc — just wouldn’t gel. I thought it was one thing, started writing, then realized that nope, that idea wasn’t going to work. So I tossed it and started again.

After three or four more false starts, I realized I didn’t have the idea worked out enough to begin writing. I needed to let it percolate a little longer and iron out the story kinks. I thought about this story all the damn time. It was always in the back of my mind, taunting me.

But a few days ago something broke loose and I think (and hope!) that I’ve finally got some of the issues worked out. I’ve written about six pages, which is a good sign since the farthest I’d gotten earlier was a couple of sentences. It feels good to finally be able to work on this and gain some actual traction and momentum.

There’s a longish interview with me over at writer Terry Irvin’s website. It’s a little different from the standard questions most writers get. If you’re curious and have a few minutes, check it out.

For those who may be interested, I’m posting the revised version of the first chapter of The Ruthless Dead, the urban fantasy novel I just shipped off to my agent for the second time after making revisions he and his assistant Lindsay requested (which all made sense once I could wrap my brain around some of their comments).

If you’re so inclined, you can contrast this version with the original outline, or the very early rough draft I posed last summer. Enjoy.

Chapter One

According to the government exorcist I’d spoken to earlier, the demonic presence that had made an unexpected and unwelcome appearance in the Pennsylvania Governor’s Mansion was somewhere on the floor above me. My job, as a government security consultant with special magical abilities, was to get rid of the nasty bugger and, if possible, figure out who’d summoned it, and why.

“Have you made contact?” MCID Special Agent Tony Ramos’s voice rattled into my head through my Bluetooth earpiece. Tony was the guy who’d dragged me into this with a call to my secure cell phone about an hour and a half ago.

“Not yet. Don’t worry, Tony. I’ll keep you in the loop.”

“I still think you should have an agent with you.”

I sighed. “Lavernius ran away from it like a little girl, and he’s your top guy. This kind of thing’s a one-man job and you know it. I don’t want to be tripping over someone else’s spell while I’m dealing with your problem.”

“Simmons, I really think you need –”

“How many guys did you send in with Lavernius? Tell me that.”

The silence that greeted me was all the answer I needed.

“Talk to you in a bit. Now let me get to work.”

I made my way down the dark hallway toward the staircase at the end. MCID — Multiverse Countermeasures and Interdiction Division, a secret bureau within the Department of Homeland Security — and the governor’s security detail had quietly and efficiently cleared most of the building using a cover story about a contaminant in the air cooling system. There wasn’t anyone close to my location, including MCID agents.

I passed what I guessed were offices and conference rooms for the rank and file staff members and household workers. I saw meeting tables with stacks of papers and empty Styrofoam coffee cups scattered across them like corpses abandoned on a field of battle; the gray fabric of office cubicle walls boxing in workstations; lots of laptop computers and desktop PCs; large black speakerphones with gray-green LCD screens; and a handful of small laserjet printers. Pretty much the required components of any office nowadays, government or civilian.

I entered a stairwell and climbed to the next floor. There was an odd smell here. Not from anything people had left behind, like food that had gone bad. There hadn’t been enough time for that. It was from the demon. I could sense the unnaturalness of it, the supernaturalness of it.

I was in a part of the mansion used for long-term storage. The plush carpeting, rich wallpaper patterns, and detailed trim and moldings from the floors below were missing here. This level of the mansion was plain in comparison. It wasn’t shabby, but it was certainly lacking the finery of the other floors. The carpeting was worn, with shiny ruts visible where wheeled carts, or maybe mop buckets, had passed countless times. Scuff marks and dings showed in the sheetrock that never would have been permitted to remain in the public areas or governor’s living quarters. And forget crown molding, chair rails, or decorative sconces.

The demon was being pretty quiet. Usually these creatures were stomping about like Godzilla on a Tokyo bender, growling, snarling, smashing stuff that got in their way or smashing stuff because they were too clumsy and stupid not to smash it. But this SOB was as silent as a ghost.

I wondered if Ramos was right about what was up here. Lavernius Jackson, one of MCID’s few in-house exorcists, had told me it was a demon, but a species he hadn’t recognized.

“It tore down my Nero Ward like it was paper,” Lavernius had said to me at the MCID command post in the mansion’s security office. He was a wizard with lots of training in African magic and shamanistic rituals. He also had a master’s degree in economics. “I’ve taken down two dozen demons in my time, but I’ve never even heard about something like this.”

“Can you help us out?” Ramos asked me. He was a short guy, maybe five-seven or so, with broad, muscular shoulders and a trim waist that he liked to show off with tailored dress shirts that cost a small fortune (I know; I have some). His suits and shoes weren’t off the rack, either. They were expensive; custom jobs in surprisingly good taste for a cop. When I’d first met him I wondered how he could afford his wardrobe on a government salary. I was worried he was on the take.

So, sneaky bastard that I am, I did some digging into his background.

I found out that Tony came from some pretty serious money that his family earned from a number of hotels and tourist villas scattered across Puerto Rico. Ramos Resorts, Inc., had been started by his grandfather Miguel, who’d inherited a seaside villa from his mother-in-law that he’d leveraged into a small empire.

One time I’d asked Tony why he worked for the government without tipping my hand that I knew he came from wealth. It was one of the few times we’d had a couple of drinks together outside of working hours. I was curious. Had he been kicked out of the family business for some dark, secret transgression? Why wasn’t he luxuriating in the Caribbean, working in some facet of the family business? I mean, if he had a gun fetish he could have always run security for the resorts, or headed up a rifle range. Anything but government work.

Tony shrugged and said, “I’ve always liked law and order. The concept, not the TV show. And I didn’t want local rinky dink shit — I wanted bigger cases, the interesting stuff, which meant going federal. My family’s got a big business back home in Puerto Rico and my father didn’t want me to go stateside, but I was pretty pigheaded and determined, so finally he relented.

“I was in my second year at the FBI academy when they gave me some pretty strange psych tests. Stuff about ESP, did I see angels in this inkblot, what did I think about Heaven and Hell. Weird shit that didn’t make any sense at the time. Pretty soon after that I was quietly recruited by MCID. Apparently I’m open enough to the concept of the paranormal to fit in here. I thought at first it was a put-on, some kind of prank they played on the students to see how gullible we were. But then they showed me some things.” He shook his head and took a sip of his Scotch. “Made me believe. It changed my world.”

I raised my glass to him. “I hear you.”

Tony combed his dark hair straight back from a severe widow’s peak sharp enough to punch a hole in an aluminum can. In some kind of genetic lottery grand-slam, he’d managed to acquire blue-gray eyes framed by olive skin covering the cheekbones of a GQ model. I considered myself a pretty good looking guy — six-two, one-eighty-five, thick dark hair, nice jaw line — but hanging around Tony sometimes made me feel like an inbred Appalachian hillbilly.

I sat on the edge of one of the desks in the mansion’s security office. “Yeah, I can help.” I turned to Jackson. “What’d it look like?”

His gaze dropped to the floor, and he ran a big hand across the smooth brown curve of his shaved scalp. He had the sleeves of his crisp white shirt rolled up above his elbows. His arms were enormous, and as ripped as an NFL linebacker’s. He obviously spent a considerable amount of time at the gym. “I’ve never seen a demon like it before. It was huge, with these sideways horns that tipped up at the end like a bull’s. Black and red scales on its shoulders, and claws like steak knives. I didn’t see much else. It was moving really fast, and I was trying like hell to get away from it. I could feel it gearing up to possess me.”

“And it ripped right through your Nero Ward?” I asked. Neros were heavy-duty protections against Celestials. The magical equivalent of a couple of layers of Kevlar beneath a bomb-squad suit. Nero Wards weren’t impervious, but they were pretty damn hard to take down, especially as quickly as Jackson was implying. I wondered if he’d panicked and was spinning out a line of BS to cover his ass.

He nodded, and a sheen of sweat appeared on his shaved head. “It just hooked its claws into the ward and shredded it.”

I had no idea what kind of demon we were dealing with, which I didn’t like at all. I didn’t get called in for this kind of work very often, but when I did I preferred to know what I was walking into.

“You guys aren’t giving me a lot to work with,” I said.

“It’s more than Lavernius had when he went in,” said Special Agent Amanda Evanston. She was Ramos’s new partner, a slender black woman who kept her thick hair pulled back into a tight, softball-sized sphere at the back of her head. She wore an open-collared lilac blouse, black pants, and low-heeled black shoes. “I thought you’d be up for the challenge.”

I shrugged. “Always, but I’m looking for an angle that’ll give me an edge.”

Ramos’s prior partner, Jim Banks, had been transferred to Chicago a couple of months ago. I had no idea if it was a promotion, demotion, or the kind of routine agent-shuffling the government loved to do on a regular basis.

Evanston was too new for me to have a good read on yet. I’d only met her twice before today. I could sense that she felt she had something to prove and came across as abrasive as a result, even more so than was usual with cops. At least she seemed to know her stuff, which for me was always a plus. I had a very low tolerance for incompetence.

Evanston had come from a sleepy Alabama PD where she’d encountered a couple of vampires who’d been killing folks and dumping the bodies in the nearby bayou. She’d managed to find the vampires’ lair in an abandoned farm through good old-fashioned detective work. When she saw them in their daytime dead states she at first thought she’d found more victims. A closer examination of the “corpses” made her think about her grandma’s stories of zombies as well as vampires, not to mention Anne Rice’s famous Lestat.

She dragged one of them outside into the sunlight, knowing she was compromising a crime scene but too freaked out (and too curious) to stop. When the first body burst into flames she realized she had her killers and promptly dragged the second one outside to burn. She hadn’t even considered arresting them. She wanted them destroyed. “Besides,” she’d told me when describing the event, “I didn’t trust my jail to hold them. I didn’t know if they could turn into bats or smoke or some shit like that, or hypnotize me so that I’d blow my brains out with my gun. I wasn’t going to take the chance.”

(For the record, vampires can’t shapeshift into animals or smoke, though they can cast pretty powerful glamours.)

It didn’t take long for MCID to get wind of her little victory, despite Evanston’s attempt to keep what had happened quiet. A couple of agents had appeared in her station, made her an offer she couldn’t refuse, and taken her into the fold.

“I’m guessing there’s no video surveillance of it?” I asked the agents.

Ramos shook his head. “Typical Celestial signal interference. It passed a couple of the cameras but the feeds turned to static until it was gone.”

Ramos was a straight shooter, another reason I liked him. He knew his head from his ass and had some decent contacts in the Celestial and supernatural communities. He shared intel with me from time to time, which was more than I could say for some of the other feds I’d dealt with.

Lavernius Jackson had a decent reputation in the circles I ran in, but this was the first time I’d met him. I had to admit, I was disappointed that he seemed to have folded like a cheap chair when he went up against this demon. I thought he’d be better than that.

“After the demon shredded your Nero Ward, how did you get away?” I asked.

“I triggered every countermeasure I had and ran like hell. I could feel it gearing up for a possession. I just wanted out. No way I’m getting possessed.” He showed me his rings, charmed watch, silver bracelet, and the countermeasure containers attached to his belt, which looked like flat bands of silver with intricate etchings on them.

Sure enough, every one of them was triggered. I could see the residue of the spells and charms they’d contained. He had high-grade stuff. If he’d really panicked over nothing, he’d set off the supernatural equivalent of a ton or so of TNT. You never set off everything at once.

I didn’t know what to think. I wasn’t so sure anymore that he’d panicked over nothing. The countermeasures were rigidly failsafed against accidental triggering. You really had to want them to go off for them to discharge.

I decided this situation was stranger than I’d first thought.

“All right,” I said. “Let me get my gear, and then I’ll head in.”

# # #

Demons aren’t really from Hell, the way everyone thinks. Hell isn’t what everyone thinks it is, for that matter. But I’ll get into that some other time.

Demons come from a parallel universe where spiritual energies are more prevalent. We call these spirit-soaked universes Celestial realms.

It takes a lot of energy to effect a translation from one universe to another. Most pre-technological societies couldn’t do much to generate that kind of magic. They didn’t have the option of plugging in an Acme Demon Summoner and waiting for it to charge.

Instead, they used sacrifices. Over time, summoners figured out that certain metals, chemicals, and symbols could assist not only with the summoning but also trap the beings once they were here. But demon-calling was a dangerous sport. They often arrived ornery and aggravated and proceeded to rip the cause of their aggravation limb from limb. Maybe the demon had been in the middle of dinner, or playing with its kids, or having rollicking sex with the Mrs. You’d probably be in a bad mood too if you were unceremoniously yanked from your universe without permission by hairless primates who wanted you to grant them three wishes, or kill their neighbor for stealing a goat.

Anyway, the point of this digression is to make you aware that demons are not agents of Hell, or Satan, do not live in Perdition, and are not Evil with a capital E the way most people think when the word “demon” is brought up in casual conversation. The chaos and carnage that’s often the result of a summoning could be construed as evil by those who didn’t know better, but really, bringing a demon here was like calling a hurricane down on your head, or a tornado. Bad things were bound to happen, but you wouldn’t consider a tornado or hurricane evil. They were just doing what hurricanes and tornadoes do.

# # #

I turned slowly in the hallway, knees flexed, muscles tensed to react at the slightest provocation. My own wards cocooned me in layers of defensive charms.

I heard a noise and ducked just as the demon rushed toward me from a darkened room to my left. It crashed into my wards, which together were far stronger than Jackson’s single Nero Ward had been (though I had a Nero woven in there too — I have a tendency to over-engineer).

The force of the impact was enough to drive me backward into the opposite wall. I hit it with my shoulder, hard enough to dent the sheetrock.

The thing loomed over me and blotted out a lot of the light in the hall. Lavernius had been right — this thing was gigantic. Its head reached almost to the ceiling, and it did indeed have bull-like horns that must have spanned five feet from tip to tip. Overlapping black-and-red scales the size of my palm covered its shoulders and most of its upper body, with a thick leathery hide beneath. It didn’t have wings — it would barely have been able to move through the corridor if it had, even folded up — but there were two lines of bristling black hair running down each side of its back. The demon had thick legs as bowed as a bulldog’s.

It had a flat face with open, skull-like nostrils above an oversized mouth filled with rows of black fangs all out of proportion to the available space. I didn’t see how the thing could close its mouth; then again, maybe it didn’t.

Flanking the nose were bony ridges curving upward toward the broad sockets where the horns protruded. The ridges protected deep wells that housed the thing’s eyes, which burned with a fiery red glow. Yeah, I know, it’s a cliché for demonic and evil things to have red eyes, but it’s a cliché because that’s the way a lot of them look.

I scrambled back as it sank its claws through the outer layer of my defenses and began to tear them apart. Buttery patterns of light rippled and flowed around its claws as its physical and spiritual strength began to overwhelm my wards.

Damn. I was going to have to do something fast.

I pulled my Glock out of my shoulder holster and emptied the clip. Seventeen rounds tore into the demon, pissing it off but not doing any mortal damage. A yellow-white ichor dribbled from the holes. It looked like it was bleeding curdled milk.

The demon fell back, momentarily losing its hold on my wards. It said something in its native language that I didn’t understand but had the cadence of a string of expletives.

“Simmons, what the hell is going on?” shouted Ramos.

“Too busy to talk.” I tore off the earpiece and flung it away.

I dumped the empty clip and slammed in a fresh one with a smooth, polished move. I shot the demon six more times as I ran away from it in an attempt to buy some time.

The thing charged me. The whole place shook with its weight.

“Contineo flammis animos!” I bellowed, holding my hand out to release the energy of the spell.

A rippling sheet of fire erupted from the floor between me and the demon. It wasn’t ordinary flame, which would have been about as effective as spritzing it with flavored seltzer water.

This fire was threaded with all kinds of anti-demon energy. It wouldn’t kill the thing, but it should slow it down.

The demon roared and thrust one hand through the fire. I could tell from its bellowing that the fire hurt. Unfortunately, it didn’t hurt quite enough to deter it.

The demon kept pushing its way through the fire. It wasn’t through the barrier yet, but soon would be.

While I was considering options, the goddamn thing tried to possess me.

I could feel the weight of its spirit slam into me like a low-speed car collision. I had lots of built-in defenses against possession that would keep it from getting into my head, but this kind of all-out assault was a distraction I couldn’t afford.

I tumbled backward and thrust my hands forward. “Prohibeo!” I shouted. The air in the hallway darkened as it became saturated with magic.

My improvised forbidding kept it at bay for the moment, but I was juggling too many things at once. My spells were on the verge of collapse.

The demon shouldered the barrier and roared. The sheet of fire drained of color, then shattered and flared out.

Nothing was holding the demon back. It would be on me in seconds.

In a panic, I slapped my hand on one of my belt loops and released all of the auto-exorcism charms it held.

The demon slammed into the exorcism spells with enough force to crack the walls on either side and break loose some of the ceiling tiles overhead. Three lights exploded and winked out from the concussive pressure. The energy from the impact pushed against me like a blast wave, knocking me off my feet.

An exorcism spell is designed to open a pathway between this world and the demonic universe and force the intruding entity back to its home turf. Exorcism spells worked best at the site of the summoning, since there was a portal already there to the demonic universe. The exorcism spell would pry this open while interfering with the summoning that was holding the demon in the mortal world. Those two working in conjunction were usually enough to unravel a summoning that didn’t have any additional protections and trickeries threaded into it.

The demon smacked into a wall of wobbling reality where the exorcism was attempting to open a path to another universe, but the goddamn thing didn’t disappear. Whoever had called it had made sure it was going to take more than generic exorcism spells to get rid of it.

I was dealing with a highly trained summoner.

The exorcisms flowed around the demon, fighting to open a portal while the summoning magic struggled to keep the portal closed. The two powers were roughly equal at the moment, which meant the demon was effectively paralyzed, hanging in a sort of limbo between the two universes.

I was using my own magical strength to pour energy into the exorcisms to keep them humming along, but that was only going to last another couple of minutes at best before I got too drained to continue. I was already shaky from the magic I’d used. When my strength gave out, the exorcisms would dissipate and the demon would be free again.

I retreated down the hallway a few steps to give myself some space. I reholstered my Glock, then slung my pack off my shoulder and opened it on the floor.

I needed to buy myself some more time.

I pulled out a plastic container filled with salt and a stoppered vial filled with my blood. I used my own blood because (a) it was easy to come by, (b) spells worked better when they had a physical connection to the caster, and (c) since I was the bastard offspring of a fallen angel (that’s where all my powers come from), my blood itself was already charged with magic.

I opened the narrow spout on the salt container, then made my way cautiously but quickly toward the demon, which was snarling at me through the blurry air where the exorcisms and summoning magics were at war.

I barely had enough room to squeeze by it and draw a circle of salt on the floor. When I had it enclosed, I unstoppered the vial and dribbled several drops of blood onto the salt ring, then said, “Per meum sanguinem ego tibi praecipio.”

My Latin was shaky, but it was more than enough to get the job done. Perfect grammar wasn’t required. What mattered most was an adequate supply of magic and the focused intent of the spellcaster. The Latin was more for tradition’s sake than anything else.

A ripple of energy locked the ring closed, binding the demon within it.

And not a moment too soon. The exorcisms failed a few seconds later.

The demon battered its massive claws against the binding ring, but it wasn’t going to break out on its own. At least not yet. Unfortunately, this was another temporary solution, because I couldn’t keep this up much longer either. The ring was drawing its magical energy through me by means of my blood. I was the conduit, the lens, that focused the magic into a prison that was bounded by the salt.

It gave me a little more time to figure out how to get rid of the demon, but when the binding broke down, I was out of options. If I couldn’t figure anything out before then, I was going to have to make a hasty retreat.

I had no problem hauling tail out of a dangerous situation to save my skin. I’d rather be alive to fight another day than the alternative.

But retreating here would also be a pretty big loss of face in front of MCID, and that, quite simply, would suck. I wanted to maintain my impression of invincibleness for my deep-pocketed, infrequent government employer.

I had to think of an alternative solution, fast.

I looked at the creature, trying to remember what I knew of demon lore. It had been a while since I’d studied it. What was making this thing so tough? There were rules governing demonic presence in the mortal sphere. A large part of it was the type of summoning and talent of the summoner, but the kind of demon called also had an effect.

I needed more intel. I got out my iPhone, which I’d jailbroken and packed to the gills with spells, charms, and security programs. I turned on the camera and flipped through a number of custom icons until I found the one I wanted, then pressed it to turn on the seeing charm. I held up the camera and looked at the demon through it.

The charm showed me clearly how powerful the summoning was. The tendrils of magic holding it here were a mad swirl of violet and indigo, efficient and strong. It wasn’t something I was going to be able to easily undo.

I used a slider control at the bottom of the screen to adjust the frequency (for want of a better term) of the magic I was looking at. I’d gone about half the length of the slider when a horizontal vortex of both mortal magic and Celestial energy appeared behind the demon.

That wasn’t what I was expecting to find. When a demon takes material form in the mortal sphere, it usually means it’s largely cut off from Celestial magic. It has some Celestial power inherent in its presence to begin with, but it doesn’t have access to additional magic from its native realm. The portal it came through is usually sealed off in the summoning to make it easier for the demon to be held here.

But this demon’s summoner had managed to leave the door ajar, so to speak. The summoning spell was strong enough to hold the demon here even with a partially-opened portal right behind it — a portal through which the demon could draw additional strength.

That was how it had been able to tear through Jackson’s Nero Ward so easily. It was drawing on magic it wouldn’t ordinarily have access to.

This was a problem.

Expelling the demon from this world was not going to be easy. The normal exorcism charms weren’t going to work. They simply couldn’t draw enough magic to push a demon soaking up this much power out of the mortal plane.

I had to act soon. Not only because I couldn’t make the binding last, but I was sure Ramos was sending his people up here, and if they got here around the time the binding failed, it wasn’t going to be pretty. I certainly didn’t want people getting killed or possessed because I’d blown a job.

“Time for the big guns,” I said.

I put my phone away and took several deep breaths. I was going to speak a Word of Command, which could only be spoken in Yehennu, the Language of Creation. It was a Celestial language, used mostly by the Angelic orders or beings, though there were others who used it from time to time.

But not human beings. Ordinary mortals weren’t able to speak it. A person trying to speak Yehennu would have the same probability of success as if they tried to speak in neutrinos, or radio waves. It just wasn’t possible.

If it could be written down on some material that a human could see (which it can’t; not in this universe), they wouldn’t be able to comprehend it, and there was a good chance it would irreparably mess up their minds. It would be a little like staring into the eyes of a Gorgon and the heart of the sun at the same time. There was no way you were walking away unscathed.

I was probably one of a handful of people on the planet who could speak it, thanks to my father, the aforementioned fallen angel Azuphel. Not that I’d ever met my father, or wanted to. Well, I did want to meet him, but only when I had the means of killing him.

Let’s just say dad and I aren’t on speaking terms.

The problem with using Yehennu was the collateral damage. It couldn’t be helped. It was just too damned strong, and there was no way of dialing it down to manageable levels. It wasn’t designed to be used in the mortal world, any more than a blowtorch was designed to remove fingernail polish, or a Mack truck to thread a needle. Using Yehennu here carried all sorts of unintended consequences, most of them bad.

It also hurt like hell speak it (well, technically, I didn’t speak it since my vocal cords couldn’t make the proper sounds. It was more of a burst of energy originating from my mouth and throat). Even my bit-more-than-human body had a tough time taking the strain.

But I was going to have to. I didn’t see another option.

The binding was starting to break down. I could feel it beginning to crack under each powerful blow the demon was delivering.

The demon glared at me and roared, a deep, really pissed-off sound that shook the whole floor.

“This is going to hurt me a whole lot more than it’ll hurt you, you ugly son of a bitch.”

Then I spoke the Word of Command.

It felt like my bones were set on fire with magnesium flares. At the same time, there was icy agony at the core of my being. White light, the light of Creation itself, filled my vision. I heard a distant roar, but I couldn’t tell if it was the demon or an audible remnant of that long ago moment when all of the universes came into being. The echo of … everything.

The white light flicked off like a burst light bulb, and I blacked out.

Interview with Jane Espenson, a writer on the magnificent Buffy the Vampire Slayer series as well as Ron Moore’s re-imagining of Battlestar Galactica.

Choice quote, regarding her work on Buffy with show creator Joss Whedon:

“Joss’ credo was that we needed a reason to tell the story. He would ask, ‘What’s the Buffy of it?’ ” Espenson recalled. “It’s about the journey, and it’s her journey, and we kept coming in and pitching stories which were cool and had a great sci-fi hook, but Joss made clear that Buffy needed the emotional hook.”

Espenson recalls, in one instance, waiting years until Buffy’s right-hand man Xander was ready for an idea she wanted to write for him.

“I remember finding out that Nicholas Brendon, who played Xander, had a twin brother, so I pitched a story on that premise,” Espenson said. “But Joss said Xander wasn’t ready and held off for three years until it was the right emotional time for that character. He brings that kind of discipline.”

Read the whole thing here.

As reported earlier, I finished the first draft of my urban fantasy novel The Ruthless Dead on November 12. I then let it sit and percolate for a while before starting in on draft number two. I finished that rather difficult revision about a week ago. It was difficult because I had quite a lot to fix (moreso than usual). There were a few reasons for this.

The biggest reason was that I changed my usual first-draft writing tactic of making instant corrections to prior portions of the manuscript. For instance, if 2/3 of the way through I change something in the text — say a plot point or character — that would require me to go back and make changes in earlier parts of the manuscript to maintain consistency, I would go back and make those changes at that time and halt forward momentum on the project until the corrections were done. While this made the manuscript a little cleaner in the end, it also killed forward progress, which was sometimes hard to regain.

With The Ruthless Dead, I plowed on despite any errors or inconsistencies that would crop up. I did not go back and make changes at all during the first draft process, which allowed me to complete a 115,000 word manuscript in a little over three months. I was curious which method of working I liked better.

Right now, I’m not sure which one I prefer. The Ruthless Dead has more elements of a mystery novel than anything else I’ve written, so there ended up being a lot of things I missed, or clues I needed to retroactively plant so that later plot revelations didn’t come totally out of left field. The second draft was a real pain in the ass to wrangle into shape.

I’m working on draft number three right now. The second draft I edited on the PC. Now that I’ve corrected most of the large scale problems with plot/narrative/character, I printed out a copy to edit for things like language and tone, which I’ve found I can do much better with a hardcopy than I can on a monitor. I’d prefer not to have to print so much paper, but I really can’t do this effectively any other way (trust me, I’ve tried).

My goal is to have this third draft completed by the end of the first week of January and ship it off to my agent after that.

I finished the first draft of The Ruthless Dead last night around 8:00. Yay for me! This is one of the rougher first drafts I’ve ever written. In the past, I’ve spent a fair amount of “draft one” time going back and fixing things earlier in the book when I realize there are issues, which means forward progress stalls out for a while as I go back to earlier parts and revise them to make everything more congruent.

I didn’t do that this time. I just wrote straight through. There are scenes and characters referenced toward the end of the book that don’t exist — I will need to go back and insert them when I go through the second draft. I have lots of notes and references, so I hope nothing is missed. (That was one of my paranoia points and reasons for immediately correcting earlier parts of the books when I discovered these kinds of discrepancies — fear that I’d forget to fix it later!).

I’m going to let the book sit for a week or two before tackling revisions. My goal is to have a polished second draft shipped to my agent before the end of the year.

I haven’t posted much about my own writing lately because there hasn’t been much to report other than word progress updates, but those are even more boring for me to write than they are for you to read, so I simply haven’t bothered. There’s only so many ways you can report, “Wrote 2,200 words today, total now at 86,540,” and none of them are interesting.

But I’m coming down the home stretch of the first draft of my novel The Ruthless Dead, an urban fantasy that I’ve written about before. I started it at the end of July, and to date have written 404 pages, or about 106,000 words (see, isn’t that kind of dull?). I expect to write perhaps another 5,000 before the first draft is a wrap.

I’ve also previously discussed my need to outline my books before I get started, which helps me immensely when writing the first draft. The outline helps me work out in advance the major plot and character arcs, though it’s not so rigid that I can’t deviate from it (and I invariably do).

The Ruthless Dead has been pretty tough in a few spots. Once I began writing the draft, I realized I, ahem, hadn’t thought some things through as well as I thought I had. Details that were simply glossed over in the outline suddenly became major headaches. There are several major plot points I’m going to have to go back and fix, and some characters don’t work the way I want them to. On top of those problems, right now I’m stuck at a point during the climax where I need to interject some exposition, but the way I’d written it in the outline simply doesn’t work, so I’m stuck starting over from scratch. I’m not really happy with how it’s going, but at this point I want to get it written so I have something to go back and work with.

I suppose I have to make the mess first before I can clean it up.

I already went back and heavily revised the first couple of chapters based on feedback from my agent. I wanted to get a proposal out to my editor and sent the first 50 pages and an outline to my agent for review. He (rightly) wanted me to tighten up a few things, flesh out a few things more (like the demon, which has been totally rewritten from what I showed in the first chapter), and change some of the secondary characters to make them more fresh. That revision gave me more ideas that changed things later on in the book. So I have a somewhat polished first 50 pages, a big fat middle section that doesn’t reflect these changes at all, and then a final 20% or so that does reflect the changes from the first part because I wrote it afterward.

Like I said, it’s kind of a mess at the moment.

The second draft is going to take a lot of work to polish. I’m also going to have to let it sit for a while after the first draft is complete before diving back in. I’m at that point where I have no idea if anything is working. It feels like a giant mess — but then, that’s how all my books felt at this point, and from talking to other writers, this is a pretty common feeling. You lose all sense of objectivity after a time, and the only way to get it back is to get away from the work for a while to regain some distance and perspective.

This isn’t the place to start reading this series. If you’re interested in how I develop ideas into stories, and then into outlines, and then into drafts, head back and start at part one, then work your way forward until you end up here. Kind of like the snake swallowing its tail thing, the beginning is also the ending. Or maybe not.

Anyway, I wanted to use this post to talk about the differences between the outline and the draft of chapter one of The Ruthless Dead. It helps if you’ve read them both (and I want you to read the draft, because I think it’s kick-ass cool and hope you feel the same), but it’s not necessary as I’m going to spell out the differences here to be thorough, because I’m kind of OCD like that.

The outline is just a list of facts, spelling out what happens, in roughly chronological order, with other stuff thrown in that I need (like the notes about Yehennu, or clear tattoo ink). There’s no dialog, no urgency, no style to the writing — it’s just there.

The draft is obviously the start of a story. There’s tension, character insights, details about the environment and the world John inhabits.

But those are the obvious differences when going from outline to draft. I also don’t hold myself rigidly to the outline. I have to be adaptable and flexible to go with the flow if the momentum of the story (and yes, stories do have a momentum of their own) heads off on a tangent, or different direction than where I thought it was going.

So what else is different?

For one, there’s a discussion with the governor mentioned in the outline that never occurs in the draft. There just didn’t seem to be a need for it when I got to writing, and trying to shoehorn in a character who would never been seen again wasn’t a good idea, so it got jettisoned.

Lavernius Jackson, the ICE agent who first takes on the demon, gets fleshed out. In the outline, I don’t think I had ever planned for us to “see” the character of the agent who almost got possessed. He was going to be mentioned, but not on stage. But as I was writing, I realized that to increase the stakes — to make the danger seem more real to John — we had to hear in more detail what happened to the first guy who battled the demon. Hence the need for Lavernius to have a name, physical description, a slight bit of background, and some dialog.

The other change you’ll notice is that the chapter doesn’t end in the draft where it does in the outline. That happens with me a lot. What seems like a good place for a chapter break in the outline doesn’t work at all when I get down to writing. As I said, I have to follow the momentum of the story.

I’ve written up to chapter eleven in the outline, but in the draft I’m on chapter seventeen, so you see what I mean when I say this happens a lot. Chapter breaks are hard to figure out in advance, so they’re usually the change I make most often.

The details are the fun part to write when I get to the draft. I get to fill in all the blanks — how people look, where they live, how magic and demons function in this world, snappy dialog. That, to me, is where the real joy is, and getting lots of the plot mechanics worked out ahead of time allows me to really focus on those things as I write.

As I said, this works for me, but for other writers this method is a step below DEATH. They would hate to know so much detail in advance. But that’s why we’re all different, and have different stories to tell.