This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #494, on the subject of Warring Worlds.
With permission of Valdron Inc I have previously completed publishing my first nine Multiverser novels,
- Verse Three, Chapter One: The First Multiverser Novel,
- Old Verses New,
- For Better or Verse,
- Spy Verses,
- Garden of Versers,
- Versers Versus Versers,
- Re Verse All,
- In Verse Proportion, and
- Con Verse Lea,
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 tenth, In Version, written in collaboration with Eric R. Ashley, 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.
This is the tenth post for this novel, covering chapters 109 through 120. Previous posts were:
- #476: Versers Deduce, covering chapters 1 through 12;
- #478: Character Conflicts, covering 13 through 24;
- #480: Versers Think, 25 through 36;
- #482: Versers Engage, 37 through 48.
- #484: Characters Maneuver, 49 through 60.
- #487: A World in Space, 61 through 72.
- #489: Battle Worlds, 73 through 84;
- #491: Verser Ventures, 85 through 96 ; and
- #493: Verser Engagements, 97 through 108.
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.
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.
Quick links to discussions in this page:
Chapter 109, Kondor 247
Chapter 110, Slade 241
Chapter 111, Beam 188
Chapter 112, Brown 273
Chapter 113, Kondor 248
Chapter 114, Slade 242
Chapter 115, Beam 189
Chapter 116, Brown 274
Chapter 117, Slade 243
Chapter 118, Kondor 249
Chapter 119, Beam 190
Chapter 120, Brown 275
Our discussions suggested that this city had more survivors and thus more work, and that they had captured an alien and a ship, but both had been caught by the tsunami, with the ship visible in the shallows off shore.
I live within an hour of the southern New Jersey Atlantic shoreline, and my wife and I often walk along the Ocean City boardwalk in the evenings. The houses edging the landward side of the boardwalk are generally rather large and cost millions of dollars. The opening of this chapter calls these to my imagination.
While I was somewhat socially isolated the acronym “POC” arose to refer to non-whites as “Persons of Color”. Bothered by unnecessary acronyms generally, I decided to give the designation a different meaning in Zeke’s universe, and use here it in a universe where the meaning in our world would be effectively meaningless.
Eric invented the Tso and gave me a rough description; I set about creating the fight. The combination of avian features and the alien name made me think of General Tso’s Chicken, and so there were several jokes along that line in Slade’s thoughts.
The difficult part about writing a lot of combats is making them different enough to be interesting. It was obvious that this creature could pounce, but Slade’s first opponent had leapt at him and I didn’t want to repeat that.
Eric raised the stakes in the propaganda battle when he created this chapter. It was an interesting move which kept the conflict alive.
Eric drafted this chapter, bringing in criminal efforts to throw a fight and the detail that the verser’s apartments were rentals paid for by the Kelp.
This chapter includes a cameo appearance of a race called Vrai.
I drafted this, pulling the ship out the seabed. Having Zeke do it keeps the sidekick useful, something that sort of matters to the reader. The decision to leave it behind was made for all the reasons given in the text and no others.
I wrote this. Part of it was that we had agreed we were going to have to skip fights (top contenders probably have to fight near a hundred times before being eliminated), and I was suggesting a way to accomplish this.
The notion that alien restaurants would be as varied as human ones is an extension of my frequent suggestion that alien cultures can’t be monolithic, they just have to have elements that distinguish them from human consistently.
The idea of an alien race using something like arsenic as a spice comes from the Volturnus series of modules for Star Frontiers® from TSR. The Ul-mor referred to a flavoring they used in their food and much of their water as “spice”, but it was actually poison.
I composed this, an attempt to overcome the obstacles Eric had created in relation to the combat robots. The information about robots being all the same was established in Derek’s stay on The Wanderer.
The number 32,768 is eight to the fifth, and thus written 100,000 in base eight; it is thus a round number in their math and language.
This was mostly Eric’s work. However, there was an extended section in which he had the versers order outrageous clothing from the vid screen, including custom-tailored tuxedos and ridiculous nineteenth century hoop dresses, and I objected first that it would be impossible to get those without special tailoring in this universe, there being no human clothing at all, and second that none of the characters would be at all willing to or interested in obtaining such clothing, so it was cut.
For the record, a tuxedo is a high-fashion dress suit with a vertical stripe of a silk-like material down the outseam of each leg.
A Tniap is introduced in this chapter, and they have a minor role in a few future chapters at the party.
Eric had written that there were 640 columns in the center, and explained it by saying that Chlorophytes built it, a reference I didn’t grasp until the final edit–it was intended to connect to the fact that they work in base eight. I changed it to 512, the base eight value of the digits 1000.
Eric wrote nearly all of this, but left it with the mention of two green-scaled aliens doing something and a note that he wasn’t sure how to handle the middles of parties, and I finished out the chapter with the Slades exiting and the note that I didn’t do parties terribly well, either.
I drafted this, originally intending only to cover that they were headed for another town and possibly the arrival, but getting sidetracked into Kondor’s realization that the charitable effort was failing because the parakeets didn’t have the kind of religion that humans had.
I drafted this chapter, which would simplify the battle by taking the combat robots out of the equation entirely.
I drafted this chapter, following up on the notion that the alien mafia was looking for Slade.
This has been the tenth behind-the-writings look at In Version. If there is interest and continued support from readers we will endeavor to continue with more behind-the-writings posts and another novel.