Monthly Archives: August 2021

Uncategorized

#411: Quest Concludes

2 Comments

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #411, on the subject of Quest Concludes.

With permission of Valdron Inc I have previously completed publishing my first six novels, Verse Three, Chapter One:  The First Multiverser Novel, Old Verses New, For Better or Verse, Spy Verses, Garden of Versers, and Versers Versus Versers, in serialized form on the web (those links will take you to the table of contents for each book).  Along with each book there was also a series of web log posts looking at the writing process, the decisions and choices that delivered the final product; those posts are indexed with the chapters in the tables of contents pages.  Now as I am posting the seventh, Re Verse All,  I am again offering a set of “behind the writings” insights.  This “behind the writings” look may contain spoilers because it sometimes talks about my expectations for the futures of the characters and stories–although it sometimes raises ideas that were never pursued, as being written partially concurrently with the story it sometimes discusses where I thought it was headed.  You might want to read the referenced chapters before reading this look at them.  Links below (the section headings) will take you to the specific individual chapters being discussed, and there are (or will soon be) links on those pages to bring you back hopefully to the same point here.

There is also a section of the site, Multiverser Novel Support Pages, in which I have begun to place materials related to the novels beginning with character papers for the major characters, giving them at different stages as they move through the books.

This is the twenty-sixth and final mark Joseph “young” web log post covering this book, covering chapters 150 through 156.  It was suggested that more shorter posts were a better choice than fewer longer ones, so there will be posts every six chapters, that is, every other week, for this book.  Previous entries were:

  1. #354:  Versers Reorienting, covering chapters 1 through 6;
  2. #355:  Versers Resettling, for chapters 7 through 12.
  3. #357:  Characters Connect, for chapters 13 through 18.
  4. #359:  Characters Engage, for chapters 19 through 24.
  5. #361:  Characters Explore, for chapters 25 through 30.
  6. #364:  Characters Learn, for chapters 31 through 36.
  7. #365:  Characters Travel, for chapters 37 through 42.
  8. #367:  Versers Encounter, for chapters 43 through 48.
  9. #370:  Characters Confront, for chapters 49 through 54.
  10. #373:  Nervous Characters, for chapters 55 through 60.
  11. #376:  Characters Arrive, for chapters 61 through 66.
  12. #379:  Character Conundrums, for chapters 67 through 72.
  13. #381:  World Complications, for chapters 73 through 78.
  14. #383:  Character Departures, for chapters 79 through 84.
  15. #385:  Characters Ascend, for chapters 85 through 90.
  16. #388:  Versers Climb, for chapters 91 through 96.
  17. #390:  World Facilities, for chapters 97 through 102.
  18. #392:  Characters Resting, for chapters 103 through 108.
  19. #395:  Character Obstacles, for chapters 109 through 114.
  20. #397:  Verser Challenges, for chapters 115 through 120.
  21. #401:  Characters Hiking, for chapters 121 through 126.
  22. #403:  Versers Innovating, for chapters 127 through 132.
  23. #405:  Versers Converge, for chapters 133 through 138.
  24. #407:  Versers Integrate, for chapters 139 through 144.
  25. #409:  Characters Cooperate, for chapters 145 through 150.

History of the series, including the reason it started, the origins of character names and details, and many of the ideas, are in earlier posts, and won’t be repeated here.

Chapter 151, Beam 116

I wanted Beam to be forced into a fight before he reached the surface, and I was running out of time, but this seemed the way to do it.  I realized that just about anything that I could set up Dawn could handle without blinking an eye, but I needed it to be Beam who fought.  Having the Manner charge from across the room made it an easy situation.

I knew that Lauren would pray for the wounded man as soon as she got there, and that the result would be the arrival of the medbot, but by having Beam call for the medbot before she got there no one would be surprised at its arrival.

Chapter 152, Hastings 231

I started with the fact that Lauren wanted to know what happened to the gunshot victim and that Beam wanted all the versers in one apartment but had to squeeze three times the capacity into the space, and followed the thread to the place where Sophia wanted to know about healing magic, which to Lauren meant faith in Jesus.

Chapter 153, Takano 58

When I started this chapter I thought it would be Tommy’s reflections as she walked; then I remembered that I wanted to include a speech by Beam inviting the people who lived there to come with them.  Thus I didn’t get as far as I anticipated.

I have no idea whether none, some, or all of the other group is going to join them, but at this point I don’t have to decide.  Beam will have to know when he tries to do lunch.

I feel like this is dragging.  When I brought Lauren and Tommy together I thought the book was almost finished and that it was going to be short, in terms of chapters.  It is now one of the longer ones, chapter-wise.  That’s good in the sense that it might give me time to write the next one, but I’m hoping these chapters are worth reading.

Chapter 154, Beam 117

I knew that Beam was going to reach the outside, but then get killed; I even knew roughly how he would get killed, but not exactly where or when.  At this point I was putting the final pieces on that, and setting up the fact that Lauren was going to have to take over the part about creating a world outside.

Chapter 155, Hastings 232

I knew for a long time that the top of the ramp would be inside a building.  I had considered a warehouse, but it seemed to me that warehousing would not make sense here–there might be warehouses for some goods on the surface, and there might be warehousing for some goods on the lower levels, but the entrance would have to be a traffic hub, and therefore a huge garage and repair facility.

The idea that it was night and raining was a solution to an unanticipated problem.  Beam had bought dinner and it made sense for him to envision a picnic on the lawn on a sunny day; he was never going to get outside, because he was about to be versed out trying to hotwire a door.  If that happened while the food was still in his carts, they would go with him, and Lauren would be faced with feeding the multitude.  Thus I had to have a reason for Beam to feed the people before they stepped out of the hangar, and a dark rainy night was an effective deterrent.  I’m not sure what day will be like, but I think I don’t need to answer that in this book.

Chapter 156, Takano 59

This was strange, because I felt as if the ending had dragged on for a long time, and then quite abruptly in two chapters it was over.

I already know how Lauren opens the door, and what she begins doing from here, but I’m going to have to write some book nine chapters since I think Lauren and Tommy will skip book eight–but I’m not certain of that, as I’m not sure whether I want book eight to be Kondor, Slade, and Brown.  I’ll have to read over the opening chapters I have for each of them and make a decision, but then, they are all at cliffhangers from book six, and dropping any one of them out of the scene until book nine might be unfair to the readers.

It was always the case that Beam was going to electrocute himself trying to do something with one of the high-voltage boxes on the surface of the planet.  The player on whom he was based was trying to tap power to recharge some kind of robot by breaking into a box intended for something else along an electrified fence.  I couldn’t think of a way to make that work, but electric doors on the garage provided me with a solution.

As I was finishing this final behind-the-writings post, I settled on the name In Verse Proportion for the next.  I had already decided that it would include Bob Slade in an industrial revolution era of the parakeet world, Joe Kondor still in the Twin Rivers Caliphate, and Derek Brown aboard the lost colony spaceship.  I’ve also worked out the gather, which will use The Farmland Beta from Multiverser:  The Second Book of Worlds, probably in Slade’s world, which is a bit higher tech level than the book but should work admirably.

I was just over a week from publishing the last chapter of this book when it struck me that in book nine I expected Lauren to settle the people in a primitive camping community in a meadow by a lake, and that Con Verse Lea would be a good name for it, so I marked some of the preliminary papers with that.  At this point I had not more than some very basic ideas framing the opening of those stories.

This has been the twenty-sixth and final behind the writings look at Re Verse All.  If there is interest and continued support from readers we will endeavor to continue with another novel and more behind the writings posts for it.

Bible and Theology

#410: When to Pray

Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #410, on the subject of When to Pray.

I often mention that I’ve been studying the Bible since I had The Golden Book of Bible Stories as a preschooler, and I was saying grace before meals and prayers before bed back then as well.  However, the issue of when a believer should say prayers and spend time in scripture sometimes arises, and although I addressed this some in What Does God Expect? it is worth revisiting here.  We are instructed to “pray without ceasing”, but few of us manage even to approach that, and even with the notion of a constant attitude of prayer, specific times of prayer and study still seem necessary.

It was apparent that I was more immersed in the Bible than most of my peers when in eighth grade the local Presbyterian church we had only recently begun attending selected me as one of their two representatives on the NBC radio Bible quiz, and we advanced to the finals.  I inherently recognized the importance of reading and understanding scripture, and immersed myself in it frequently.  I recall one occasion on which I was applying a highlighter to a copy of the Revised Standard Version while riding in a school bus to a marching band competition.  Yet it wasn’t until I was in college that I recognized the importance of regular prayer and study.  By “regular” at that time I meant “daily”, with some kind of prayer list, a minimum amount of time, a specified reading plan, and a scheduled timeslot.  I have learned much about each of those aspects, and adjusted them many times over the decades, but it is that last that I thought to address here.  I received advice on it from many quarters, although not much of it was all that helpful.

Many who have been dynamic figures in the faith have pressed the notion that every day should begin not merely with, “Good morning, Lord, I’m awake now, thank you,” but with an extended time in prayer and study.  Someone has said that if he is anticipating a particularly long and busy day, he gets up three hours earlier to spend the extra time in prayer.  I admire people who do that, and if you can, knock yourself out.  I am not a morning person, and when I have tried to do devotions early I have generally found myself falling asleep on top of the Bible.  I had to accept that morning devotions did not work for me.

The second option was obvious:  always make sure you get your devotions in before bed.  This suffered a similar fate, and although it was usually easier for me to push myself to stay up later than to get up earlier, there were still many times when I was struggling to stay awake while reading and praying.  The additional complication was that as long as I was single I could try to stay up later and pay the penalty in morning weariness, but once I was married my wife was always calling me to come to bed, and I realized that this was complicating my married life.

Malcolm Smith had some excellent advice on this.  It doesn’t matter when you pray and study, as long as you do, and a regular schedule will help ensure that you do.  For some people with rigorous schedules, securing a private room during the scheduled lunch break is a viable option.  Alas, never having had that kind of structure, I had to carve the time from my home life for most of my life.

That made it a bit hit-or-miss, that there would be days when I did not get to pray more than–well, over the years I’ve learned to pray when I hear sirens, when I’m driving long stretches alone, and at other odd moments.  Establishing prayer triggers is helpful in this regard, and if you see the flashing lights of an emergency vehicle that’s a good reason to pray even if they are not coming for you.  This is the value of “grace” before meals and prayers before bed and other “ritual” prayers, that they remind us we should always be praying and call us to do so at this moment.  But that’s not the same as putting aside time to spend with God, and the latter is important.

As life is now, it’s rare that I have two consecutive days with schedules at all similar.  As a consequence, I have developed an attitude that whenever I have a reasonable opportunity to get alone for an hour, I open my prayer list, start a timer, and start praying.  If I get interrupted, I usually try to pause the timer and return to it at my earliest opportunity.

I don’t always get the full hour into the day, but that’s fine.  This isn’t a law; it’s a privilege.  I don’t always eat breakfast, or lunch, or indeed a decent scheduled meal to which I can attach a name.  Life is like that.  Spending some of it with God is a priority, but it’s not a requirement.  I make the time when I can, and go from there.

I also try to include in my day other activities that have me focused on my faith–such as writing this article.  Exactly what you do with your quiet time doesn’t have to be much more consistent than exactly what you eat at your mealtimes.  What matters is focusing your life on Christ.  Doing so through specifically focused times helps that, but if it doesn’t always work out God is not upset.

Books by the Author

#409: Characters Cooperate

Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #409, on the subject of Characters Cooperate.

With permission of Valdron Inc I have previously completed publishing my first six novels, Verse Three, Chapter One:  The First Multiverser Novel, Old Verses New, For Better or Verse, Spy Verses, Garden of Versers, and Versers Versus Versers, in serialized form on the web (those links will take you to the table of contents for each book).  Along with each book there was also a series of web log posts looking at the writing process, the decisions and choices that delivered the final product; those posts are indexed with the chapters in the tables of contents pages.  Now as I am posting the seventh, Re Verse All,  I am again offering a set of “behind the writings” insights.  This “behind the writings” look may contain spoilers because it sometimes talks about my expectations for the futures of the characters and stories–although it sometimes raises ideas that were never pursued, as being written partially concurrently with the story it sometimes discusses where I thought it was headed.  You might want to read the referenced chapters before reading this look at them.  Links below (the section headings) will take you to the specific individual chapters being discussed, and there are (or will soon be) links on those pages to bring you back hopefully to the same point here.

There is also a section of the site, Multiverser Novel Support Pages, in which I have begun to place materials related to the novels beginning with character papers for the major characters, giving them at different stages as they move through the books.

This is the twenty-fifth mark Joseph “young” web log post covering this book, covering chapters 145 through 150.  It was suggested that more shorter posts were a better choice than fewer longer ones, so there will be posts every six chapters, that is, every other week, for this book.  Previous entries were:

  1. #354:  Versers Reorienting, covering chapters 1 through 6;
  2. #355:  Versers Resettling, for chapters 7 through 12.
  3. #357:  Characters Connect, for chapters 13 through 18.
  4. #359:  Characters Engage, for chapters 19 through 24.
  5. #361:  Characters Explore, for chapters 25 through 30.
  6. #364:  Characters Learn, for chapters 31 through 36.
  7. #365:  Characters Travel, for chapters 37 through 42.
  8. #367:  Versers Encounter, for chapters 43 through 48.
  9. #370:  Characters Confront, for chapters 49 through 54.
  10. #373:  Nervous Characters, for chapters 55 through 60.
  11. #376:  Characters Arrive, for chapters 61 through 66.
  12. #379:  Character Conundrums, for chapters 67 through 72.
  13. #381:  World Complications, for chapters 73 through 78.
  14. #383:  Character Departures, for chapters 79 through 84.
  15. #385:  Characters Ascend, for chapters 85 through 90.
  16. #388:  Versers Climb, for chapters 91 through 96.
  17. #390:  World Facilities, for chapters 97 through 102.
  18. #392:  Characters Resting, for chapters 103 through 108.
  19. #395:  Character Obstacles, for chapters 109 through 114.
  20. #397:  Verser Challenges, for chapters 115 through 120.
  21. #401:  Characters Hiking, for chapters 121 through 126.
  22. #403:  Versers Innovating, for chapters 127 through 132.
  23. #405:  Versers Converge, for chapters 133 through 138.
  24. #407:  Versers Integrate, for chapters 139 through 144.

History of the series, including the reason it started, the origins of character names and details, and many of the ideas, are in earlier posts, and won’t be repeated here.

Chapter 145, Beam 114

I didn’t really have much to write on this but to keep the group moving.  The book Lauren is reading is of course her Bible.

Chapter 146, Hastings 229

I knew Beam was going to have more confrontations, but that these would not be terribly interesting story-wise if they were always from his perspective.  The notion that some other tribe was occupying the buffet made for a good conflict which Lauren could both observe and resolve without being at the front of things.

Chapter 147, Takano 56

I knew that the space would become more crowded as they approached the surface, and decided that level six was a good spot for the real complications to begin.  The maintenance control room seemed a logical spot, as it would be spacious enough.

Chapter 148, Beam 115

I needed Tommy to practice, and Beam to recognize that she was not secretly a powerful ninja, and also to recognize some other things about them.

Having Beam discuss the problems ahead with Bron seemed the best option.

Chapter 149, Hastings 230

Since Tommy would be needed to lead the people back to the ramp, I figured I could put Bron in back and have some exchange of information between him and Lauren.  I also set myself up for her to teach him some magic, but of course we have that issue that the god of this world honors magic but tries to push people toward technology, so magic is wonky.

Chapter 150, Takano 57

I was filling Kyler in on some of what was happening in the story, and he commented that based on the personality of the person on whom the character was based he was pretty sure that Beam would have been flirting with Tommy.  That’s a problem for me, because I have no talent for flirting with younger girls, but apparently he does, so I was going to have to figure out how to work in that he was flirting somewhat effectively without pretending I know how to do that by writing it.  I’m still not sure how that’s going to work, but it starts with Tommy wondering about it.

I wrote part of it, then decided I was out of my depth, printed it for Kyler who was perhaps equally stymied, and then sent a message to friend Cassandra, who had helped with the question of how to get Tommy involved with her peers in the suburban world.

Ultimately I used a lateral break to get out of the flirting question; the discussion of physical training was really there as an escape.  I was still waiting to hear from my friend.  I had not heard from her before I finished the book.

This has been the twenty-fifth behind the writings look at Re Verse All.  If there is interest and continued support from readers we will endeavor to continue with another novel and more behind the writings posts for it.

Music

#408: The Song “Given You My Name”

2 Comments

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #408, on the subject of The Song “Given You My Name”.

For years my wife complained that I had never written a song for her.

She was, technically, right.  Although we had Sue Kirkegard (nee Adams) and Jackie Lund perform it at our wedding, I had written Joined Together for Dave and Jes Oldham.  Jan’s favorite wedding song, God Said It Is Good, was written for Rick and Debbie Van Norstrand.  I’d written several other wedding songs for various people, including one for my sister (which I thought particularly good, but unless I can get a copy of her wedding video it’s probably lost forever).  I’m sure she inspired every one of those songs, but they weren’t actually written for her.

This song remedied that.  I’m not sure when I wrote it, exactly; we had been married a long time.  Yet its simple message is exactly right.  This one is for Janet.

This recording is one made actually in my kitchen, if memory serves, so I would have a recording of it.  Since it really was just for me and her, I didn’t do any retakes; but it’s good enough and gets the point across.

Given You My Name.

So here are the lyrics.

Life is full of many blessings that we often fail to see.
You have been the greatest blessing that could ever come to me.
You are lots of fun to be with, but it isn’t just a game:
You’re my wife, the one I love, I’ve given you my name.

There are times when something little seems to get us in a fight,
And it’s clear before it’s over neither one of us is right.
Let’s give in and get together, and forget about the blame:
You’re my wife, the one I love, I’ve given you my name.

When I say that you’re pretty, believe that it’s so:
Your beauty is in my eye.
I’ll stay here forever if you never go,
Together until we die.

Yes I know we’re getting older as the years go flitting past;
Things we thought would be forever have already failed to last.
All the world and we are changing, yet still this much stays the same:
You’re my wife, the one I love, I’ve given you my name.

I can only hope you benefit from the song in some way.  I will continue with additional songs in the future.

*****

Previous web log song posts:

#301:  The Song “Holocaust” | #307:  The Song “Time Bomb” | #311:  The Song “Passing Through the Portal” | #314:  The Song “Walkin’ In the Woods” | #317:  The Song “That’s When I’ll Believe” | #320:  The Song “Free” | #322:  The Song “Voices” | #326:  The Song “Mountain, Mountain” | #328:  The Song “Still Small Voice” | #334:  The Song “Convinced” | #337:  The Song “Selfish Love” | #340:  The Song “A Man Like Paul” | #341:  The Song “Joined Together” | #346:  The Song “If We Don’t Tell Them” | #349: The Song “I Can’t Resist You’re Love” | #353:  The Song “I Use to Think” | #356:  The Song “God Said It Is Good” | #362:  My Life to You | #366:  The Song “Sometimes” | #372:  The Song “Heavenly Kingdom” | #378:  The Song “A Song of Joy” | #382:  The Song “Not Going to Notice” | #387:  The Song “Our God Is Good” | #393:  The Song “Why” | #399:  The Song “Look Around You” | #404:  The Song “Love’s the Only Command”

Next Song:  When I Think