Work In Progress #9: She Seeks Peace #1 (September 12-13)

The next novel I'll be keeping a log on is She Seeks Peace, volume 4 of Ashen Blades.

Why the Long Delay?

It was a long month, working on editing Troll War and getting it ready for the process of querying literary agents.

Editing took longer than I would have liked. Some kind person on Mastodon suggested I use software to read the book to me, because it will read exactly what it finds. That was a third pass of editing I hadn't planned for, but dang, the results were worth it.

I was a little embarrassed to hear my typos read aloud, but I'm going to do all of my final editing this way from now on, because it catches stuff I never will on my own.

Then I got bogged down writing a basic query letter to modify for each agent, including back cover text and a synopsis of the novel.

Changes to My Process

Now that my computer is all setup for reading to me in a fairly pleasant fashion, I'll be listening to the previous day's material at the start of each work session. I tried it out with the prologue and chapter 1 this week and found some nasty typos I couldn't see on my own, so this is definitely something essential for the future.

For the curious, here's the combination of software I'm using:

• Linux Mint - The Linux distribution I use for my operating system
• LibreOffice - Word processor
• ReadText - Extension for LibreOffice
• Speech Dispatcher - Default text to speech system on Linux Mint
• Piper - AI voiced text-to-speech
• Pied - Software to connect Piper to Speech Dispatcher
• Bash - I wrote some shell scripts to customize my experience with ReadText, to ensure pauses between sentences

I've really grown to love Piper, which is a real-time text-to-speech system that uses an AI voice to speak in a rather clear and understandable fashion, which was trained on ethically-sourced voice samples. I've been using the libritts model, which I find to be pleasant to listen to.

Piper only produces 22 KHz audio (half CD quality), so not the best, but it is fast, more or less perfect for reading during the editing process.

Prologue

I actually wrote the prologue during my work on Demon for President!, because writing it was the only way I could get the scene out of my head. Sometimes, I just have to write things out of order, to appease the inspiration.

The novel begins with the Hunter on the dark surface of the moon, picking up where the previous book left off.

She sits on the abandoned lunar rover from Apollo 17, considering the loss of her best friend, Simmons, who died at the end of the previous book.

Simmons was the biggest thing that made her want to save the world, but with him gone, she worries she'll lose her humanity.

Her mind is inevitably drawn to thoughts of Reggie Stewart, the detective she worked with before Simmons, because she holds herself responsible for his death, just the same as Simmons. She's wrong on both counts, of course, but she's has a guilt complex similar to Spider-Man, the reasons for which I'll make apparent through flashbacks on her personal history.

She looks back with longing and sadness, remembering how she met Reggie.

Chapter 1: Reggie

Chapter 1 takes place on May 5, 1922. I looked through historical records and found a sufficiently rainy day for my purposes. The Extreme Weather Watch website has been very helpful for looking up historical weather for Ashen Blades.

Reggie runs through the rain, pistols drawn (twin M1911s), considering how he got into the mess he's in, while his body aches, because he isn't as young as he used to be (48) and his old injuries act up in humid conditions.

He bumped into a demon in the rain, while looking to get a hot meal.

The demon grabbed him by the throat and lifted him into the air, explaining:

"The boss ain’t happy with you, mister. The boss is tired of you killing his guys."

As it turns out, Reggie has been killing demon mobsters that work for a particular demon, who's human name is Michele Popwell, while her criminal persona is 'Silver Dollar'. She got the nickname for her tendency to mark her kills by putting a silver dollar in the mouth of the corpse, as a warning to others.

The "his" in the demon's dialog is intentional. All of Silver Dollar's minions refer to her as "he", to throw investigators off the mark.

Silver Dollar is quite angry to have lost so many flunkies, who are now out for blood.

Reggie shoots the brute in the testicles, then the heart. The demon stumbles away and Reggie aims both pistols at their head as he makes an offer:

"We can do this the easy way, or the hard way. Either you go tell Popwell I want a meeting, or I shoot you in the head a few times, then pin that nice suit of yours to her door, just like I’ve done with the last twenty of her men. It’s your choice, of course.".

Caught between a rock (Reggie) and a hard place (Silver Dollar will be angry at his failure), the demon opts to run, presumably in the hopes of healing and coming at Reggie again.

Reggie reluctantly gives chase.

Meanwhile, the Hunter sits on the edge of a rooftop, enjoying the rain, because while it's pouring, she can hardly smell demons. She's taking the rare chance to relax.

She appears ten years old, though she's really quite short for that age, at 3'11".

Despite the rain, she smells a demon and looks down, seeing Reggie chasing the it, amused to see a little role-reversal between the sheep (her internal monologue term for humans) and prey (her internal term for demons).

She leaps down and scares the demon into turning, because all demons in town know about her, scared crap-less by her existence and strength, because thye have no idea what she is.

She repeats this several times, using shadow steps (she teleports from one shadow to another), giving Reggie a chance to catch up.

Reggie turns one final corner and runs into the backside of the demon, who's finally stopped, leading to this scene:

Reggie charged round another corner and practically barreled right into the demon’s back, who blubbered, “Please, don’t kill me!”

Reggie put one pistol to the brute’s back and the other to the back of his skull, before answering, “Just deliver my message and I’ll let you live.”

“Okay, okay! Whatever you want two want!” The demon raised his hands in surrender!

“Two?” Reggie asked, surprised.

He was further surprised to hear insane, girlish giggling from the other side of the monster, so he peered around the demon, without moving his weapons.

There was a small girl there, with eyes so blue, they practically glowed! She had an elderly butcher’s knife in hand and it finally dawned on Reggie that it wasn’t him the demon was most scared of. The top hat she wore was far too large for her.

The girl launched herself into the air with inhuman strength, slashing the demon’s neck as part of a twirl! When she finished a complete revolution, she turned it into a forward thrust, ramming the knife into the demon’s eye so hard, the tip cracked through the back of its skull, before her body weight hauled it right back out! Reggie was hit by a splatter of demon blood, which quickly washed away in the rain, then evaporated.

Meanwhile, the girl lightly landed on her feet and took several steps backwards, allowing the demon to splash down into the water at her feet. Reggie met the crazed girl’s gaze, unsure what to do, because she was clearly a demon, though she’d just killed one of her own.

Reggie demands why she killed the other demon.

Naturally, she responds, "It's a secret", the only phrase she can speak, due to the curse she lives with.

Not accepting that, Reggie angrily asks more questions and she flips him the bird, but since he won't let it go, the Hunter produces Mashu'ra from her hat, the kitten demon that lives there.

He explains that she's cursed and the two of them hate demons.

Reggie doesn't believe him, but Mashu'ra also explains that the Hunter is a half-demon, not a pure demon.

He complains about the rain and the Hunter puts him away as he gives a final warning:

"If you’ll take a bit of advice, you should stop pointin’ guns at her, because nothin’ good will come of it."

Reggie reasons any spawn of evil is evil, even if they're partially human, and presses his luck by trying to shoot the Hunter, only for his pistol to repeatedly malfunction.

Getting annoyed, the Hunter decides to take his pistols away and shadow steps high into the air, above him.

She kicks him in the head, knocking him to the ground, while his pistols clatter away. She goes for one, while he goes for the other and they both come up pointing a gun.

There's a long, quiet moment in which neither fires and Reggie lowers his pistol. She does the same.

He was trying to trick her and raises it again, only to see her do the same. He soon realizes she's only mimicking him, with no intention of firing, basically playing a game.

He holsters his pistol in the hopes she'll drop hers, but she instead puts it in her hat, forcing Reggie to conclude:

"Clearly, I’m never getting that back."

She nods agreement.

He explains that she's gotten in the way of his plans for Silver Dollar and his need to send a message. She shrugs and grins sheepishly, the closest she can get to an apology.

Reggie decides (aloud) to go find another of Silver Dollar's minions and walks off, into the rain, having given up on getting a hot meal.

Thinking the sheep (Reggie) is mad to tangle with demons, the Hunter decides to follow him, because she likes him and he's going to need help from the only shepherd available (herself).

Chapter 2: The Assignment

Reggie is followed around by the Hunter for weeks on end. He initially tries to ditch her, but she shadow-steps to keep up, treating it like a game.

After a few days, he calls his boss in the Order of Ash and Smoke, Master Lagrow, telling him everything.

Lagrow acts as if he already knew about the girl and assigns Reggie to keep an eye on her. Reggie doesn't like it, bothered by the unspoken facts.

The Hunter initially won't go into buildings (she lives outside and gets claustrophobic at the idea of heavy concrete over her head) and Reggie pays street kids to watch her, discovering she never sleeps.

After a while, he accepts her as his perpetual shadow and gets back to work.

After a long day of killing demons to tick off Silver Dollar, in the hopes of arranging a face to face meeting, he heads back to his detective agency office to look at his notes on the case.

When they arrive at the building, the Hunter smells demon and growls.

She follows him inside and even rides an elevator with him, though she does have a panic attack, resulting in a half-crushed railing, because the sense of motion terrified her.

Getting out, they walk the hall to his office, the stink of demon getting stronger, because there's at least ten of them inside.

After a brief discussion that confirms the Hunter's opinion of Reggie (totally insane), he goes in alone, because he wants to try talking, before violence.

Future Plans

Next week will being with Chapter 3, 'The Dollar Owed'. That little play on words amuses me. Reggie will end up surrounded by demons and finally come face to face with Silver Dollar, who's so incensed, she's lost all rationality.

There will be some discussion, which will end with Silver Dollar ordering Reggie's death, at which point the Hunter will enter the dark office by shadow step, wielding a baseball bat.

Silver Dollar will take a full-strength hit to the back of her skull, which will destroy both Silver Dollar's head and the bat (this is the reason readers have never seen her wield one, before). After that, Reggie and the Hunter will fight back to back in a scene that will demonstrate the fact they're two peas in a pod (they're both totally insane and love a fight).

The chapter after that will take place twenty years later, though I might try the textual equivalent of a montage, so I can show a few happy memories along the way.

This will show their final mission together, which ultimately resulted in Reggie's death. While parts of that were shown in the prologue of She Hunts Demons, to help establish why the Hunter wouldn't let Simmons go into battle, I plan to show the entire scene, including an amusing bit where one of Vogerath's Hell Hounds bites him in the foot, leading him to stop using them as minions. Readers of the previous three books will definitely remember Vogerath, the Hunter's arch-nemesis.

Once that sad scene is done and Reggie is no more, we'll return to the Hunter on the moon, where she'll encounter a demon that's been living there since the Apollo 17 mission, surviving on the life energy that emanates from the Earth and pools on the surface during the lunar night (incidentally, the same way the Hunter can survive up there). That fight will prompt the Hunter to leave the moon, because it no longer feels like a peaceful place to her.

That will become the theme of the novel: the hunter seeks a place for quiet contemplation, but always finds more demons, wandering from one place to another, until she ends up in the Australian Outback on a walkabout, which is where she'll run into the arch-demon, Wrath, for the climax.

Tags: writing, work-in-progress, ashen-blades