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A very long time ago I began posting stories here, drawn from the Multiverser games in which I had played and sometimes those which I ran. Gradually I stopped. For one thing, my story was not advancing--I was running games constantly, but never playing them. For another, most of the games I was running were new player games, demos at conventions and game stores, and most of them started in one of a very few similar places which made for good games but very similar stories. The exception to this was the games being run on the Gaming Outpost forums, and they were there on the forums for anyone to follow who was interested.
And then I wrote the first novel, Verse Three, Chapter One.
Anyone who reads the old stories and the novels will see that parts of the novel were drawn from play, the games I ran and played, although I changed them significantly. I stopped posting stories because they were part of the inspiration for the books, and also the games I ran were often test games for the worlds I intended to publish. So the novel went to press, and sold not as well as the game but better than some things Valdron published. I received no royalties, and got "paid in prestige". It opened the door to much in the gaming world, and I am the better for having written all of that--but the books are now all out of print.
There is, somewhere, a hope that Valdron will find a way to pull itself out of its death spiral and put books back in print, or release electronic copies. I am not certain I believe it. The second novel, Old Verses New, was finished and edited years ago, lacking artwork; the third, For Better or Verse, was also completed, although mine is the only hand that edited it at this point. I was working on a fourth, but when it bogged down there didn't seem much impetus to resolve the problems because it was growing more apparent that the others were not going to be published. A few fans have seen the manuscripts, and praised them, but I was becoming persuaded that they were not going to go further than that.
Several times I asked the Board at Valdron whether perhaps I could, or should, publish the novels in serialized form through the website. They kept saying no, that they still intended to find a way to make some money on them, if not as books then as e-books. Now it has reached the point that there does not seem to be anyone to ask, so I've decided to begin publishing, chapter by chapter, week by week, the first novel. If Valdron manages to resolve its issues and move something forward, I will stop and refer you to the printed copies--but I wouldn't recommend holding your breath on that.
So Welcome to a new section in Stories from the Verse, in which I begin publishing the novels. This link will take you to the contents of Verse Three, Chapter One: The First Multiverser Novel; the directors of Valdron Inc, or technically a majority of them, did approve the publication. They have similarly approved continuing the perhaps moderately successful run of the first novel with the release of the second, so I again similarly invite you to read Old Verses New, For Better or Verse, and, as the chapters are released one at a time serially, Spy Verses.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
