"Once it's gone, it's gone."

I stared into the crackling chamber, trying in vain to see through the flickering light at the small block of aluminum that had been placed within.  "This isn't bad for my eyes, is it?" I asked, probably too late.

But behind me, the scientist standing at the control panel just chuckled.  "Nah, it's fine," he told me.  "These goggles are really just for the over-zealous safety people.  They spend most of the time protecting my forehead."

The Perfect Murder

"I gotta say, in terms of being a scumbag, you're actually doing really well."

I started at those words, spinning around and nearly jumping a foot in the air.  I could have sworn that I was alone!  There was no one else in the building at this hour - I knew that the janitors wouldn't be here for forty minutes, still, and I'd seen the last person leave the office a good two hours previously!

Yet nonetheless, there was a man sitting at one of the desks, two away from me, leaning back in the chair with his feet propped up on the faux wood in front of him.  From under his hat's brim, the man's eyes looked curiously dark.  Dressed in a dark charcoal suit, nearly black, and a black hat with a white ribbon around the brim, he grinned at me, briefly flashing his teeth.

"Wh-who are you?"  For a moment, I couldn't even find my own voice, but I managed to get the words out without sounding too strangled.  As I spoke, I managed to get a slight hold on my surprise.  "You don't belong here!"

Indeed, I didn't recognize him.  And considering that I'm the boss of this corporate division, I ought to recognize anyone who has access to the building.

"How did you get in here?" I continued, the shock in my voice finally starting to be replaced by anger.  "You know that you're trespassing, don't you?  I could call Security!"

Instead of answering my questions, the man waved one hand towards the open drawer at the desk in front of me.  "See, it's a really great plan," he said, not sounding especially concerned about my threat.  "Maybe if someone was really looking for it, they might find some trace, but no one's going to bother.  Well done!"

This man knew what I was doing?  No, he couldn't.  I stared back at him, blinking like a fish out of water, as I tried to readjust.  I had too many questions in my brain, all of them shouting at once and drowning each other out.

As I tried to find some sort of mental line to grab, the man stood up, swinging his legs down from on top of the desk and strolling over to me.  He reached past me, snagging one of the small candies out of the drawer open in front of me, unwrapping it with a surprisingly loud crinkle as the plastic came apart.

"I mean, unfortunate allergy plus sweet tooth is basically asking for disaster in the first place," the man continued, popping the candy up into the air with a flick of his thumb and catching it perfectly in his mouth.  "Everyone will assume that a couple peanut ones got mixed in at the factory.  Probably won't be an investigation at all."

Outwardly, I was still keeping it together, but inside, I could feel myself folding, collapsing.  This stranger, whoever he was, somehow knew all about my dark, twisted, evil plan!  He would turn me in, and I'd go to prison, and probably be forced to be some burly inmate's-

"Relax, I'm not going to turn you in!" the man called out, chuckling in a good-natured sort of manner.  He leaned over, clapping me on the back, and I nearly choked.  "Hell, I'm here to congratulate you!"

"Who are you?" I asked again, staring at him.  There was something really off-putting about his eyes, but I couldn't pinpoint what it was.  "How do you know about my plan?"

Again, he chuckled at me, like a parent watching a small toddler fail to build a tower of blocks.  "Why, I'm a devil, of course!" he said, as if this should be obvious.

I stared at him.  "The Devil?"

"A devil," he corrected.  "Asmodeus is my actual name.  Not as big as good ol' Lucern himself, but pretty high up on the chain, if I do say so myself."  The man straightened his suit lapels, preening a bit.

I just stared back at him.  Devils were real?  And one of them was here talking to me?  "Are, are you taking me to Hell?" I asked him, wondering if I should run away.  Probably not.  If this devil-man, Asmodeus, could appear in a secure building, he could probably catch an out-of-shape mid-level executive.

"Of course not!" Asmodeus replied happily.  "But I've had my eye on you for a while, wondering how you were going to solve this dilemma.  Sleeping with your underlings is great while it's happening, but the endings are always just so messy." The man emphasized that last word, drawing it out almost like a hiss.

"And killing her like this, using her food allergy, well, it's really a stroke of brilliance!" he went on, full of energy, as if we were discussing a pep rally and not a murder.  "I'm just here to shake your hand, as one respectable evil-doer to another!"

And the devil stuck out his hand towards me, still grinning.

I stared back at him, not reaching out for that offered hand.  The man wasn't threatening, but his eyes were staring at me, dark and deep.  In fact, I realized as I stared back at him, his eyes were darker than any human's eyes ought to be.  There was no pupil, just two inky black irises gazing back at me.

After another minute, Asmodeus chuckled again, letting his hand fall back down to his side.  "Well, that's okay," he said.  "Hitler didn't like shaking hands either."

I looked down desperately at the candies that I was mixing in with the other treats in the woman's desk drawer.  "I could take the candies out?" I offered, my voice pleading.

But Asmodeus was shaking a finger at me, a naughty little "no-no" gesture.  "Doesn't work that way!" he said gaily.  "It's all about the intention.  You're already well and deep in it, now - might as well go through with it, so at least you don't have two problems!"

The man looked as if he wanted to say more, but a beeping from his pocket made him start, and he pulled out a sleek black rectangle.  "Oh, well, gotta go," he said, sounding only slightly crestfallen.  "Other sinners to see, you know.  But hey, good luck with the murder!"

There was no gout of flame.  I simply blinked, and he was gone.  I was alone in the office once again.

For a long time, I stood there, no thoughts moving in my head, just staring down at the drawer in front of me.

It had seemed like the perfect answer.  Hell, it still was.  One little candy, and the insufferable woman would be gone from my life.  No more blackmailing me for promotions, because in a moment of weakness I'd let her lead me up to her hotel room!

I could take the candies out, perhaps.  I'd mixed them in, but I could just throw out the whole lot.  It would be obvious that someone had been in her desk, but maybe it was just a janitor.  She wouldn't know the bullet she'd dodged.

Slowly, however, I pushed the drawer shut.

I knew that I was already a bad person.  I'd gone too far to recover, slipped too far down that alluring path.

Maybe I should have shaken his hand after all.

Book 4 of 52: "Three Signs of a Miserable Job" by Patrick Lencioni

It looks like I'm going to be switching back and forth, from fiction to non-fiction books and back again, as I work through this 52 book challenge.

I picked up this book, "Three Signs of a Miserable Job" by Patrick Lencioni, expecting to get to hear tales of jobs where employees are miserable, perhaps learning about how even those "perfect" jobs like actor or rock star don't end up leading to happiness.

I did learn about why those "perfect" jobs aren't so perfect - but it was presented in a totally unexpected way.

This book tells a story in the form of a parable, following a displaced and unhappily retired CEO by the name of Brian.  Brian believes that proper management, rather than just focusing on profits and the bottom line, is what leads to happy employees and a happy company.  As we follow his adventures, from buying a stake in a pizza restaurant to trying to turn around larger companies, we get to see his three core beliefs about management at work.

Those beliefs are founded on the idea that all employees seek three things in order to make their careers feel rewarding and enjoyable:

1. Metrics - most employees have no way of truly telling how well they're performing at their job.  For a hotel clerk who checks in guests, there's no tracking of numbers - and for someone in the middle of an organization, like an office receptionist, there's no real numbers to consider at all for evaluating performance.  A good boss or manager needs to find a way to provide real data so employees can track their unbiased performance.

2. Relevance - employees need to know how their work actually benefits someone.  If you file away papers in an office all day, what does that actually do to help the rest of the outside world?  A good manager needs to make sure employees understand who their job benefits - even if that person is the manager himself.

3. Recognition - employees want to have a manager who knows them as more than just a cog in a machine.  Here, we risk straying into some touchy-feely stuff, and there probably are some employees who don't want their manager to really be a friend.  But Lencioni emphasizes that some level of connection, knowing some facts about employees, whether it be that they live with their parents, just had a baby, or are coming down with a cold, is useful in helping those employees feel like they are truly valued.

Of course, in the parable in the book, application of these techniques works out amazingly for our case studies.  Whether this truly translates into the real world is less certain, but the book definitely resonates with me, and its lessons seem useful and applicable.

Now, I just wish I had some employees to manage...

Time to read: About 2 hours.  As a narrative, this went quite fast.

A Werewolf in Time

This time, I'm not going to be unprepared.

In between glances up at the sky, I take another look at all of my equipment, laid out neatly on a tarp.  I've been over the list of equipment ten, a hundred, a thousand times already, but I'm still checking it once again.  I can feel nervousness curling up in my belly, a stirring, restless viper.

It's hot outside, the air almost oppressively still.  August fifteenth, two thousand and eleven.  Even the bugs that normally buzz through the dusk seem to be exhausted by the heat; I can only barely hear them chirping in the tall grass outside my barn.

I glance down at my watch.  Moonrise is different from sunrise, and the full moon is going to hit its apex in under an hour.

Welcome to Hell, here's your chain.

When I finally reached the front of the long line, I stepped up to the absurdly tall podium, tilting my head back to gaze up at the shadowy figure standing behind it and staring down at me.

The creature leaned forward, its head sliding down on a long neck to stare down at me.  I felt like a guilty schoolboy, pinned in place by a forbidding mistress.

Most schoolmarms, however, don't have eyes filled with flames, giant venom-dripping spikes sticking out in a ruff around their heads, or scaly grasping fingers that end in terrifyingly long and sticky claws...

Book 3 of 52: "The Southern Reach Trilogy" by Jeff Vandermeer

Author's note: Yes, this is a trilogy of three books; however, if I hope to space out this 52-book challenge over anything close to 52 weeks, it's going to take some creativity to not advance too quickly.

I can't recall the last series of books that had me throwing my hands up in the air this many times in frustration... while still wanting to read the next book!  Talk about frustration.  Annoyed, bothered, but with no choice but to continue in hopes of finding answers.

The plot is difficult to even summarize without giving away spoilers, but here's my best shot:

About thirty years ago, an area of the United States (designated "Area X") was consumed by an event that barricaded it off from the rest of the world, with only a single doorway, or point of access inside.  Strange things are happening inside, and it has fallen to the government division known as the Southern Reach to figure out what is happening.  The Southern Reach attempts to accomplish this by sending in expeditions, each group trained and conditioned for the best odds of success.

Despite all of this, the agency hasn't been making much progress.

Although there's a common core of characters that persist through the whole series, each book takes a different approach, focusing on different characters and a different area.  The downside to this, of course, is that some characters are much more interesting than others.  I was much more interested in what is actually happening inside Area X, as documented in books 1 and 3, than I cared about the dysfunction of the Southern Reach chronicled in book 2.

In addition, my biggest frustration with this series is that, much like in a horror movie, Vandermeer has the ability to paint very descriptive scenes, using beautiful language, without actually telling the audience much about what we want to know.  We learn in great detail about the scenes of nature and the birds and plants that are spotted, but the strange and unnatural buildings that are encountered, and the creatures within, barely get more than a couple very broad strokes of the literary brush.

Instead, as a reader, I found myself wading through pages of flowery and beautiful descriptions in order to find the tiny little nugget of story.  There are many beguiling, interesting threads opened up, but many of them remain frustratingly loose, not tied down or answered.

In the end, I'm still left with far more questions than answers, feeling as if I missed another book's worth of explanation somewhere, and I need to find that before it all makes sense.

Time to read: Approximately 2.5 hours for the first book and 3.5 hours for the next two; call it 10 hours for the complete series.

Our New Alien Overlords

When I stepped out of Starbucks, latte in hand, and spotted the alien in the street, my first thought was Oh, please god no.

My second thought was Great, now I'll have to explain to my boss why I'm late.  Why do I have to live so close to the ground zero?

I knew why, of course.  My bank account was distressingly low, and rents were cheap around the alien's landing sites and established bases on Earth.  No one really wanted to live next to our overlords, be constantly reminded of how our people had been conquered.

Besides, I thought as I watched the alien shamble up the street, bellowing out tinny commands through a small metal box clamped in amid the green tentacles, our alien overlords turned out to be real jerks.

I started to turn away, hoping to maybe duck up a side alley so I could still make it to my office on time, but the alien caught the movement and gestured to me with a tentacle.  "You, Human!" it rasped at me from that tinny little box.  "You Will Bow!"

"Can I not?" I asked, knowing that it was no use but giving it a try anyway.  "This coffee is really full, and I don't want to spill on my new pants-"

With a bellow, the alien reached into its nest of tentacles and produced a large laser cannon, which it hefted with considerable difficulty.  "Puny Insect, Do Not Test The Might Of The Kalaxaranian Empire!" it bellowed, its eyes waving with agitation at the end of their stalks.  It leveled the weapon and squeezed off a shot.

Unfortunately, stalked eyes are not good for sighting down the barrel of a weapon, and the shot went wide.  Ten feet away from me, a parking meter exploded in a shower of quarters.  "Dammit!" the alien growled, trying to adjust its wildly fluctuating aim.

I knew that this would just take longer, add to my delay.  "Okay, okay, I'm bowing," I called out hastily, setting down my cup of coffee on the ground beside me.  I got down on my knees and waved my arms forward towards the alien, the weird gesture that these idiots insisted was a sign of honor.

The alien put away the laser cannon quickly.  I couldn't read tentacle gestures, but I would have bet that it was signaling relief that it didn't actually have to shoot any more.  Really, the whole thing was embarrassing.

The aliens had arrived a few years previously in a giant horde, all set to invade us, their ships blistering with weapons.  Unfortunately, although the monsters had cracked the cold fusion barrier and carried technological marvels, they had simply no sense of tactics or skill in battle.  They simply landed and started blasting away at trees and squirrels, succeeding only in causing a few scattered forest fires.

The Powers That Be, however, decided that, to best explore the tech of these new invaders, it would be easier to just surrender, rather than crushing them in a fight.  We give the aliens some lip service and a few trinkets, our esteemed leaders figured, and in return we get a new leap forward in technology.

Well, that part worked out all right.  My cold fusion powered Jetta was testament enough to that.  Scientists were already predicting that energy issues would be fully solved by the end of the decade.

But no one had figured on the aliens leaving behind a force to "Ensure Peace And Order In Our Loyal Conquered Subjects."

So now, whenever one of these big blobs ambled out of their compound into our world, we all had to scrape and bow, pretend that we were subservient.  It was, I thought to myself as I watched my coffee cup tremble on the ground, a royal pain in the ass.

But after a few minutes, the alien was satisfied.  "Carry On With Your Tedious Lives, Humble Servants," it rumbled, turning and meandering off down another street.

I waited until it was out of sight before leaping back up to my feet, grabbing at my coffee cup.  A small wave sloshed over the edge and caught my hand, making me curse, but I didn't slow down as I hurried up the street.

I was definitely late, now.  Great.  Just great.

The Priest in the Coffee Shop, Part II

Continued from here.

It took a good, strongly brewed fresh cup of coffee being waved under his nose, but eventually the priest came around, his eyelids flickering as he regained consciousness.  I had the pretense to keep my hand ready to clamp over his mouth if he started screaming.

The man didn't scream, but his eyes shot wide open as his memory booted back up, and he shot upright in the booth and twisted his head around.  I watched, feeling a little guilty, as he stared at the various angels, devils, and other celestial beings in the shop, his eyes looking as though they were about to explode out of his head.

After all, I had been the one who shattered his veil of self-imposed ignorance.

Book 2 of 52: “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History” by Elizabeth Kolbert

Click above to see the book on Amazon.

Well, now I’m depressed.  

Elizabeth Kolbert, a journalist for the New Yorker, has chosen a handful of creatures, settings, and species - some of them extinct, some of them still barely hanging on - to show how, right now, humans are in the midst of causing the sixth mass extinction event.

The book starts by briefly discussing the history of extinctions, starting with the very idea that animals could go extinct, and that every animal alive today might have come from a different ancestor.  We learn how there were five different events that signaled the “end of an era” - that is, a mass extinction that wiped out the majority of life on Earth.  The most recent of these, of course, was the asteroid strike that took out the dinosaurs.

However, interspersed with this history are accounts of some of the many species that are currently vanishing from our planet, or have gone extinct within the last thousand years or less.  Some of these species include the American bat, frogs and amphibians around the globe, rhinos and elephants, the auk (an extinct relative of the penguin), and corals, linked to vanishing barrier reefs.

Kolbert is definitely a gifted writer, and she expertly weaves together stories of history, accounts of her own personal travels and experiences as she sought out those who worked to protect these species (or at least chronicle their passing), and sobering facts about the changing world around us and the reality that is a result of humankind’s rapid spread and alteration of the environment.

However, while many books on topics such as this end with an uplifting note, that is largely absent from this book.  The conclusion, we are told, is that this is happening, and it is likely too late to stop the sixth mass extinction event.  This won’t be undone by recycling, by donating an extra $10 to Greenpeace or eating dolphin free tuna.

We are losing more and more of our biodiversity each day, Kolbert tells us, and there’s nothing we can do - except wait to see what the fallout will be.

Time to read: 3 hours 15 minutes.  I’m a bit slower on non-fiction.

Summer Love at the Dusk

We spent most of our first date staring up at the night sky, I remember.

Of course, that wasn't the intention.  No, I had plans.  This girl was everything I'd been looking for - sweet, caring, and with that weird little sense of otherworldliness about her.  Somehow, when I talked with her, our conversations drifted from the mundane deep into the realms of philosophy.  I loved spending hours with her, just running circles through the meaning of life.

I'd intended to take her out to dinner, followed by a play that had been getting tons of great attention in the papers recently.  But the restaurant was so crowded that we couldn't get a table, and it turned out that one of the play's actors had just torn a ligament, and he didn't have an understudy.

All of a sudden, my big night, the big planned date, was dissolving into nothing.

But we didn't let that stop us.

Instead, we simply headed for the big hill in the park, Carrie shyly letting me hold her hand.  I can remember how my big, clumsy fingers seemed to dwarf her slim, graceful digits.  I was so worried that I'd accidentally hurt her.

There, on top of that hill, in the grass and the fading residual warmth of the summer, we gazed up at the night sky, at the stars.

"The ones that are left are still pretty," Carrie commented to me.  Our heads were next to each other, and she barely had to speak above a whisper.  I could feel the vibration of her words as her body pressed against me.

She was right.  I tried to think back, to remember how the sky had looked before.  Already, the images were fuzzy, faded, inside my head.  How could I forget something as important as that?  But I'd never thought of the stars as especially important to remember.

If I'd had to guess, I would have said that there were a quarter of them left.  The scientists on the news claimed that we'd lost far more than seventy-five percent, because of all the ones too dim to see, but what did those matter?  If no one could see them, there was no one to care that they were gone.

"Where do you think they're going?" Carrie asked me.  Her words didn't break the silence as much as they shaped it, slipping in easily between the soft chirps of crickets in the tall grass.

I started to shrug, but then realized that this would push her head off of my shoulder.  "I don't know," I said, my voice sounding rough and unpolished compared to her light tones.  "They say on the news that it's the dark matter collapsing, that maybe it's a wave of gravity sweeping through and putting them out."

"They say, they say," Carrie parroted my words back to me.  "They don't know anything!  Maybe someone poured a bucket of water on our universe to put out the cinders.  They don't know."

For a minute, we fell back into silence, listening to the crickets.  Carrie's leg pressed against mine, and I could feel her heat through my jeans.

I had been so certain that she'd say no, that she'd just laugh at me, that I almost didn't ask at all.  It was only with the egging on from my friends, not letting me shamefully back down, that I dared approach her as she sat and sipped at her cup of tea, perched so gracefully on the edge of her chair as she held her little book.  I remembered a beam of afternoon sun, cutting through the windows to illuminate her face.  Like an angel, I remember thinking.

She had smiled up at me, read to me a line of poetry that I forgot the minute it left her lips.  I said something stupid, embarrassing - and she had burst into peals of laughter, her whole body quivering.  She was a songbird, amused by the inarticulate bullfrog as it tried to match her beauty of song.

"They say that it will reach us in about a year," I offered, tilting my head slightly until I could see a single brilliantly blue eye gazing back at me.  "All sorts of doomsday cults are starting up."

That single eye looked back at me.  Suddenly it was serious, no laughter hiding there.  "What do you think?" Carrie asked me.  "Is the end coming?"

I felt as though this was a test.  What would it say about us, about any chance at a relationship?  I worried about that, sometimes.  Would I die alone, swallowed up when the blackness reached the planet?  Had the universe put an expiration date on us?  "Do not consume after 8/23 of next year"?

I cleared my suddenly dry throat.  "I don't think the end is here yet," I said, not letting myself even think about my words.  "I think this is a beginning."

For a moment, Carrie just stared at me.  The songbird was thinking, deciding whether to take wing and leave the poor bullfrog behind.

And then she decided.  "A beginning," she repeated softly, snuggling in closer to my arm.  "I like that."

The crickets continued chirping as we lay and watched the lights above us slowly wink out of existence.

A Man Walks Into a Coffee Shop...

When I glanced up from the iPad mounted in front of my counter as an ersatz cash register, I was surprised to notice two things about the man standing in front of me, in the following order:

First, he was not wearing a flowing white robe.  There was nothing hovering in the air above his head - especially nothing producing any sort of a glow or luminescence.  He wore a belt around his hips, but there were no bladed weapons slid into it, and he wore very practical black shoes instead of golden sandals.  Instead of a gold coin, he was holding a credit card loosely between two fingers.

Second, the man wore the clerical collar of a priest around his neck...

Book 1 of 52: “Takedown Twenty” by Janet Evanovich

To anyone who missed my 2015 resolutions, one of those is to read a book a week for the whole year, the 52-book challenge!  And to hold myself accountable, Monday's post each week will be a brief review/my thoughts on said book.

Click above to get to the book on Amazon.

I really could have started off my “52 books in 2015” goal with a solid story, with something that has true literary merit.  I could have picked an informative and engaging book that would teach me new things, or an award-winning new author who presents a fresh take on a genre.

But I’m still on vacation, so I didn’t.

Instead, I picked up “Takedown Twenty,” a Stephanie Plum mystery by Janet Evanovich.  As you might be able to guess from the title, this is the twentieth book in Evanovich’s mystery series, and by this point, the plot is almost nostalgically cookie-cutter.

Every Plum mystery includes the following:

• A high-profile “skip” comes in for Plum to capture (she works as a bounty hunter).
• Plum and her partner, Lula, go off to capture this skip.  They find him, and then fail and he gets away.
• Consumption of unhealthy foods (donuts, cake, chicken, pizza).
• Plum’s car is destroyed.
• Plum gets a loaner car.  This is also destroyed.
• Plum has a run-in with sexy man of mystery Ranger, who flirts with her but gets nowhere.
• Lula is called fat by someone and takes offense.
• Lula’s wild neon outfit is described in detail.
• Plum captures a low-value skip, generally by luck.
• Plum’s boyfriend Morelli gives her some familial bliss.
• Plum feeds her pet hamster.
• Plum’s grandma says shocking things about how she wants to get laid.
• We hear how Plum’s grandma wears inappropriately skin-tight clothes.
• Plum + grandma go to a viewing at the funeral home.
• Somebody gets tazed.
• Plum captures the high-profile skip, generally by luck.

In this regard, Takedown Twenty did not disappoint.  Janet Evanovich has clearly found the winning formula, and she doesn’t leave it behind.  She puts out 3-5 of these books a year, and they probably all make a lot of money for her.  Still, the reason for picking one up is not because I’m expecting something new, something interesting.  

Rather, Plum’s books are comforting, like that sitcom you’ve seen a million times.  Jerry breaks up with a girl for no reason, George is a schlub, Elaine puts her foot in her mouth, and Kramer is krazy.  There’s nothing new, no innovation; it’s the same old formula.  Order a Big Mac, get a Big Mac.

But sometimes, when all we want is a Big Mac, it can be comforting.

Time to read: 1 hour, 30 minutes.  A new record, even for these Evanovich fluff novels.

Angels planning post (behind the scenes, novel 1)

One of my goals for 2015: Write 3 novels.

One of these novels will be in November for NaNoWriMo.

Given as how I will be totally burned out by December, however, the other two will have to come out earlier.  Fortunately, since November is the eleventh month, this still gives me five months per novel,, as long as I also spend a bit of time fleshing out the outline for NNWM.

Novel 1?  I've always wanted to publish all of my stories about angels; selfishly, I believe that these stories include some of my better writing, as well as a few rare moments when my humor actually seems to work.

I even have a cover in mind (not that I'm sharing that yet!).

The issue, however, is that most of these stories are quite disconnected.  Here are the stories that I have so far, in reverse order:

1. Tough Love - a man on a blind date instead meets his guardian angel, who turns out to be a bit of an asshole.
2. Do Computers Speak to Angels? - an angel tries to bring a computer into a coffee shop.  It doesn't work.
3. D'oops'day - the Apocalypse was supposed to be yesterday.  Fortunately, no one remembered.
4. Hell's IT (2 posts) - turns out devils aren't so good with technology either.
5. Lucifer's Gift (3 posts) - a dream in which the devil appears to hand out the apple of sin.  It doesn't end up going quite as planned.
6. Welcome to Heaven!  Now What (unfinished) - Heaven turns out to be rather dull.
7. Blake Meets Ophiel (Ophiel series) - short excerpt of a human meeting an angel.
8. Blake and Lucifer Have Dinner - segment where human (from #7, above) has dinner with Lucifer.
9. Guarding the Borders of Heaven - Angels are vigilant border guards.
10. The Vault Theft - chapter 1 of an earlier attempt at this novel that I abandoned.
11. Ambition (2 posts) - a devil steals a man's ambition, and dares an angel to figure out what's missing.
12. Azrael & Mephistopheles (2 posts) - the yearly meeting of an archangel and devil.
13. In A Perfect World... - a guardian angel explains why the "perfect world" didn't work.
14. Cold Blooded Humans? - a guardian angel (#13) points out that cold-blooded humans were an early experiment.
15. The Angel On the Train (2 posts) - everyone has bad days - even angels.
16. Barista To The Angels (2 posts) - a coffee shop begins getting unexpected visitors.
17. Heavenly Grounds - initial write, narrator interjecting with history, of #16.
18. The Angel at the Press Conference - Fear not!  God exists, he's just off somewhere on vacation!  Probably.
19. Mis-Filing Has Serious Consequences... (2 posts, unconcluded) - an angel and a devil chase after a stolen tablet.
20. Calcifer on Karma (2 posts) - Calcifer explains how karma works.
21. The Roman Army Upgrade - Calcifer tries to teach the Romans to ride a bike.
22. Calcifer's Intrusion (2 posts) - Calcifer's favorite coffee shop is invaded by an angel!  This is his space!
23. Calcifer's Haunt (2 posts) - Calcifer proves that he's a devil to coffee shop girl.
24. Soul Harvesting Difficulties - a reaper demon pops up in a supermarket, determined to gather souls.  The visitors are determined to mow him down with carts to get to their deals.
25. Lucern's Little Whoopsie (2 posts) - Lucern misses one teeny, tiny little asteroid.  No big deal.
26. The Coffee Shop of Vice and Iniquity - the post that started it all!  Is a soul worth a grande latte?

26 posts, with lots of raw material.  Now, to organize it into some semblance of a story.  That's the challenge...