This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #94, on the subject of Novel Meetings.

With permission of Valdron Inc I am publishing my second novel, Old Verses New, in serialized form on the web (that link will take you to the table of contents).  If you missed the first one, you can find the table of contents for it at Verse Three, Chapter One:  The First Multiverser Novel.  There was also a series of web log posts looking at the writing process, the decisions and choices that delivered the final product; the last of those for the first novel is #71:  Footnotes on Verse Three, Chapter One, which indexes all the others and catches a lot of material from an earlier collection of behind-the-writings reflections that had been misplaced for a decade.  Now as the second is being posted I am again offering a set of “behind the writings” insights.  This “behind the writings” look definitely contains spoilers, and perhaps in a more serious way than those for the previous novel, because it sometimes talks about what I was planning to do later in the book or how this book connects to events yet to come in the third (For Better or Verse)–although it sometimes raises ideas that were never pursued.  You might want to read the referenced chapters before reading this look at them, or even put off reading these insights until the book has finished.  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.

These were the previous mark Joseph “young” web log posts covering this book:

1. #74:  Another Novel (which provided this kind of insight into the first nine chapters along with some background material on the book as a whole),
2. #78:  Novel Fears (which continued with coverage of chapters 10 through 18),
3. #82:  Novel Developments (which continued with coverage of chapters 19 through 27),
4. #86:  Novel Conflicts (which continued with coverage of chapters 28 through 36),
5. #89:  Novel Confrontations (which continued with coverage of chapters 37 through 45),
6. #91:  Novel Mysteries (which continued with coverage of chapters 46 through 54).

This picks up from there, and I expect to continue with additional posts after every ninth chapter in the series.

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

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Chapter 55, Kondor 60

I had not been completely cognizant of the fact that Kondor was armed before he entered the bank.  He wasn’t really aware of it himself–he had been carrying his weapons for so long he didn’t think twice about it.  But as he walked inside, my mind’s eye saw him, armed and dressed in worn fatigues, and I realized it would be taken wrong.

Kondor’s expectation of racism causes him to overlook how others would see the weapons.  He takes offense at it because he automatically assumes it’s because he’s black.

Peter Winslow was something of a response to Kondor’s expectations.  He was a black man and vice president of the bank.  I didn’t imagine that it would be credible to involve the president of the bank, but this would make it clear that there wasn’t any significant racism going on here.

There was a conscious effort throughout here to make this like earth but not earth.  The names were common, and the money is in some unnamed form comparable in value to dollars; but rattling off Cliff Westmont as if it would be as familiar a name as Clint Eastwood or John Wayne was one of the opposite suggestions.

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Chapter 56, Hastings 62

I had long wanted Lauren and Derek to meet at about this point, and subsequently to be separated.  This would give me the opportunity to give Derek Lauren’s thoughts about why he had been in so many horror settings.  Done this way, it would also disrupt that expectation the editor of the first novel had noted, that once two of them are together the reader expects the third to join them.  But now I realized that I needed Derek to know that Lauren was also a verser; and the best way to do that would be for her to be in that world when he arrived, so he would sense her in addition to her equipment.  Thus this section covered the entire battle with Horta and his allies, and brought her to the new world.

Comparing humans to grass that withers and dies is of course drawn from the Psalms.  Lauren is recognizing what she had already read, that human life is truly brief.

Grarg and Chicker (the bear and the raccoon) were characters I had played in a game world very like this; in fact, I’m applying a lot of the game world rules here, although I’m not using the game itself in any detail.  The game is Gamma World, probably its fourth edition.  I’ve modified some of the details of these characters to make them less fantastic.  Grarg, in the game, was able to make himself much larger, reaching architectural proportions.  Although I did not necessarily take that ability away from him, I intentionally avoided any situation in which it would be useful.

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Chapter 57, Brown 19

Derek has been working on his philosophy of the verse.  We didn’t see the process with the other three characters.  Kondor already had his established  atheism and could blame the army experiment for his current situation.  Lauren’s faith would mean that she had to fit the new experience into what she already believed.  Slade was never a deep thinker, and just picked up an idea from a book and went with it.  But Derek was too young to have much of a philosophy of life, and so as he moved from universe to universe he tried to figure out what was happening to him.

I brought Lauren in first specifically so that Derek could sense her now; it would give coherence to his realization that she was also a verser when she arrived.

Again Derek expects a horror story; this time he doesn’t get it, although he gets many of the trappings.

Locking him in the room gave him reason to examine the consoles in detail, and to start trying to hack into them.  Derek’s part in the end scenario was always envisioned as hacking the computers and control systems, and it was time for him to establish that as an ability.  But he had no particular reason to stay here at this moment, but that he could not get out, and that became the motivation to learn the skills.

Derek is working against a couple hundred years of computer advances; I did what I could to make his success seem credible, by thinking in terms of reverse compatibility particularly in protocols and connectors.

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Chapter 58, Kondor 61

The ID problem was a natural.  Everyone presents ID when they cash a check; Kondor wouldn’t really have anything useful in that regard, but would have a lot that wasn’t really meaningful here.  I suppose it springs from the amount of junk I carry in my pockets–in the game, I realized that most of it wasn’t much good for anything but starting fires.

The same is true of paper currency.  Even modern coins aren’t worth much in other universes, because they aren’t made of very valuable metal.  Paper money is a novelty whose only real use is burning, and I gather most of it does not burn that well.

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Chapter 59, Hastings 63

The “telepathy” of that game world was short range broadcast thought sending; Lauren uses long range narrowcasting two-way.  Thus when Grarg sends everyone nearby receives, but when Lauren sends to Grarg only Grarg receives.

I don’t recall whether the original Chicker could send telepathically (I think it was a default ability of mutant animal player characters), but I thought it would be interesting if he understood speech and could write.  It was an intriguing limitation.

Starson Cumbrick was also a Gamma World character, but from a game almost two decades before, run by Bob Schretzman.  He was the leader of a party in another set of adventures, but neither party seemed exactly what I needed to create this Gamma World-like group, so I did some picking and choosing.  I changed the name Cumbrick to Coombrick because, well, I’m a sea turtle and someone had to tell me that the original name might be considered lewd.

The idea of the group sending a couple of people ahead to find out about the rumor is not terribly credible in that game world, but it made for a better story.  It also gave me more time to think about who was part of this group.

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Chapter 60, Brown 20

Derek teaches himself to hack the computer so he can get outside; then when he reaches the threshold of outside, he recognizes that it is not where he really would want to be.

The mention of controlling fire suppression equipment was a natural extension of the concept of controlling the security, but it accidentally prefigured a later situation, where he discovers he can access pest protocols.

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Chapter 61, Kondor 62

I wasn’t certain what might actually be in a hotel of this quality, but the hot tub was nice, and something with which I had some familiarity–a friend who was staying with us once pulled a hot tub out of someone’s trash, made some minor repairs, and installed it in our yard for a while.

Kondor’s reliance on technology makes him most subject to depletion of resources.  This world was an opportunity to reload him.  In fact, that was a key point.  I knew Kondor was running out of ammo, and that in the end scenario (which I knew in some detail before I ever started writing this one) he would need plenty.  So I needed a modern world setting where he could get it.  But a modern world setting needs something to make it different; and I didn’t have many that I’d used.  The idea of bringing him into the Vorgo world in its modern age had a lot of appeal, and if it seemed to work I could use it as a game world as well.

Enjoying the comforts of more developed worlds is, I think, a good subtext for Multiverser stories.

The steakhouse is modeled on several places, oddly the first of them the high-end fast food places that once were popular (Bonanza, York), a cafeteria style line with flame grilled steaks and a limited menu, plus more recent mid-level restaurants such as Texas Roadhouse, Lonestar, and the like.  I miss the old ones, and the new ones are a bit pricey for me.

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Chapter 62, Hastings 64

Qualick had been a character my wife ran in the game in which Starson was the leader.  Dorelle Timbata I invented of whole cloth, as I needed someone with technical skill and I didn’t want the party to be too heavily male–already I had four.  Spire is based on a character my son Evan played in the game in which Grarg and Chicker were my characters, but the basis is extremely loose.  She radiates a sort of psionic field that causes discomfort in those around her, as a flaw.

Spire’s choppy mode of speech was invented on the spot; characterization through voice was on my mind at the time, I think, and trying to convert some of that to a couple of game characters seemed worthwhile.

On the cards, I departed from what I knew of Gamma World.  That setting allowed that certain card types would have access to certain facility types.  That was too unrealistic to my mind, particularly when dealing with a secure building.  I determined that the cards would all be individual identification cards, with colors and such that connected to professions perhaps, but ultimately with their own magnetic coding which would or would not be recognized by the systems.  That also meant that they were unlikely to have a card for this door; but this in itself made it more likely that it had never been entered before, and since I already had Derek inside, I didn’t need to worry about getting them in.

Qualick in the game was not much for talk; again, I created the idea that he would provide a list of many reasons as a point of characterization to distinguish him.  I didn’t make much use of it.

I had a lot of reasons to bring Derek and Lauren together.

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Chapter 63, Brown 21

The interaction here was pretty much invented on the spot to give the feeling of Derek and the others coming together.

The description of Lauren was intentionally humorous in the sense that this is how Derek sees her, which is not at all the effect she intends by the robe.

Derek had been focused on getting out of the complex and then changed his mind, but had not really thought since about what to do about finding food.  People coming suggested they might have food, and when they suggested there might be food here, that caused him to realize that as obvious as that was, he hadn’t looked.

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I hope these “behind the writings” posts continue to be of interest, and perhaps some value, to those of you who have been reading the novel.  If there is any positive feedback, they will continue.

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #91, on the subject of Novel Mysteries.

With permission of Valdron Inc I am publishing my second novel, Old Verses New, in serialized form on the web (that link will take you to the table of contents).  If you missed the first one, you can find the table of contents for it at Verse Three, Chapter One:  The First Multiverser Novel.  There was also a series of web log posts looking at the writing process, the decisions and choices that delivered the final product; the last of those for the first novel is #71:  Footnotes on Verse Three, Chapter One, which indexes all the others and catches a lot of material from an earlier collection of behind-the-writings reflections that had been misplaced for a decade.  Now as the second is being posted I am again offering a set of “behind the writings” insights.  This “behind the writings” look definitely contains spoilers, and perhaps in a more serious way than the previous ones, because it sometimes talks about what I was planning to do later in the book or how this book connects to events yet to come in the third (For Better or Verse)–although it sometimes raises ideas that were never pursued.  You might want to read the referenced chapters before reading this look at them, or even put off reading these insights until the book has finished.  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.

These were the previous mark Joseph “young” web log posts covering this book:

1. #74:  Another Novel (which provided this kind of insight into the first nine chapters along with some background material on the book as a whole),
2. #78:  Novel Fears (which continued with coverage of chapters 10 through 18),
3. #82:  Novel Developments (which continued with coverage of chapters 19 through 27),
4. #86:  Novel Conflicts (which continued with coverage of chapters 28 through 36),
5. #89:  Novel Confrontations (which continued with coverage of chapters 37 through 45).

This picks up from there, and I expect to continue with additional posts after every ninth chapter in the series.

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

---

Chapter 46, Kondor 57

I conceived this idea of bringing Kondor back to a future version of the world he had saved, perhaps in part from Lauren’s adventures, perhaps in part from the idea in Sherwood Forest that I had ignored, of creating a future world based on past actions of the character.  I started with the idea that the Vorgo would be stolen, and he would again recover it, but the details would have to be devised on the fly.

Eventually I found a way to turn this into a playable world—I created a mystery in which there were six possible solutions, each with a unique clue set that excluded all suspects but one.  I’ve run it once, but of course to run it you have to have a player who at some point in his past recovered the vorgo.

I repeat the comment about why Joe is nervous around cemeteries because not every reader will have read the first book, and it might be important to understanding him in this world.

The idea of a statue that recognizably resembles Joe is perhaps a bit of a leap, but it is not unlikely that such a statue might have been made in his honor shortly after his departure from the previous vorgo world.  This one was probably based on that one, to serve as a display stand for the vorgo itself.

---

Chapter 47, Brown 16

Derek takes Bill’s backpack at this point.  He incidentally acquires the tent and sleeping bag in the process.

Derek has decided that once more he is in a horror movie, and he wants to get out of it because even though he has recovered from death several times already, he does not want to die again.

The misdirection pointing to Ralph was part of the process.  I’d left this possible solution open for the reader, and for Derek, and wanted them to close on it at this moment.  It was not at all certain that Ralph was not the killer, and would not be for some time.

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Chapter 48, Hastings 59

How to walk the “between” (given many names in the stories so as to avoid giving it any particular name) was described in the first book.  It needed to be explained in the second book so a new reader would have some clue about it–although I did not yet know the ways I would use its function in the chapters ahead–but it could not be overdone.

When Lauren comments about Sagrimore being housed and fed for free, I originally wrote a short rant about the innkeeper overcharging others to cover the cost.  After I wrote it, it seemed unlike her, inappropriate to the situation, and completely undirected; and it never came up again.  So I cut it.

In Dungeons & Dragons™ games, a lot of people complain that they don’t see any reason why their fighter can’t learn magic, or their wizard can’t be a better fighter, or similar cross-class ideas.  I’ve never had a problem with that, as it always seemed rather evident to me:  in the mindset of the age, you could not be two things.  Sagrimore objects to learning magic because it is not knightly.  He doesn’t think there something evil about it, or too difficult for him.  He just thinks that it is inappropriate for a knight to use magic.  Lauren is different; she’s a twentieth century girl, and as such she doesn’t see any reason why she shouldn’t learn a bit of everything.

It’s my impression that most people who worry about getting on a slippery slope to something they view as wrong are not in any danger of doing so; but that’s a bit of a Catch-22, since if you think you’re not in danger because you’re worried so you stop worrying, the evidence that you’re not in danger has just vanished.

At some point in writing this book, I decided to use italics for telepathic thought; it was not done here until I came back and changed it.

I realized I might be creating a difficulty at this point.  Eventually Camelot would fall, and Sagrimore would have to be there to defend it; but he now had the ability to contact Lauren and she the ability to travel to him.  I couldn’t bring Lauren into that battle, because it would interfere with the telling of a known and popular tale.  But I was going to have to let that go for the moment.  I didn’t know how I would handle it, but at this point it was entirely possible that Lauren would not survive so long.

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Chapter 49, Kondor 58

The fainting security guard was in part a way to motivate Kondor out of the room.  The expression “his own graven image” comes of course from the Ten Commandments, putting forward the idea that statues are in a sense a way of worshipping people.

Pernicans was a shift of the word Pernicious.  Aurons was borrowed from Star Trek.  Verdi was the name of the composer, although it only means Green.

Again, bits of the story of the first novel had to be sketched so that a reader who had not read that would be able to handle this.

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Chapter 50, Brown 17

I think it was around this point that I began to recognize that this book would be longer than the first.

I was guessing that the “other set of connections” would be the ones the reader had noticed as well.

The blood on Michael’s hand isn’t really a giveaway; he had to pass John’s body on the way up the steps, and could have touched it then.  Yet it does shake the scenario and shift the attention away from Ralph.

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Chapter 51, Hastings 60

Lauren is ambivalent about the use of magic even now; she cooks because she hesitates to use magic, but then she does other things by magic because she wants to be good enough to be able to use them in a pinch.

Lauren’s suggestion about finding unique landmarks to target when traveling the between was something I’d only just considered, but it made good sense overall and fit well with a lot of other things.  It also gave me a way for the skill to “botch” by delivering the traveler to the wrong destination.

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Chapter 52, Kondor 59

I’m not sure at what point I’d decided to create a theft of the vorgo mystery, but by this point I knew that I was headed that direction.  At first the idea was to bring the character back into the future of a world in which he had been a significant figure in the past, and see how he handled that.  Now I had a plot; I just had to figure out how to make it work.

The notion that Joseph Wade Kondor is named for his grandfather yet is not a “junior” is not that difficult.  “Joseph”, as mentioned, is my middle name; it was my grandfather’s first name.  It is entirely likely that Kondor’s grandfather was Joseph something Kondor, or Joseph Wade Smith, or Wade Joseph something, and that he got his name or names from him.

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Chapter 53, Brown 18

I’m not sure why it made a difference whether Bob was hit with an oar or a paddle, but they are really very different objects, and Derek would not know that.  It does demonstrate that Michael was aware of the object on the dock, though.

When I was a schoolboy, I was one of those constantly targeted by those who thought they could prove themselves by attacking the weak kid.  I probably relate most to Ralph here, but also to Derek, to the unathletic bunch.  People would tell me they wanted to fight me after school, and I would tell them I did not want to fight.  Then they would ambush me, and I would kick and scratch and bite, and they would beat me anyway and then complain that I fought like a girl, as if they had the right to make the rules for a fight I did not want.  Anyway, I figure both Ralph and Michael are that kind of kid, and so neither of them has any notion that they should obey the rules in this fight—particularly as it is probably life and death for both of them.

I had to think of an “appropriate” weapon for killing the Dungeon Master, that would also be available somewhere at the camp.  A chain was a stretch on the latter point, but I thought I could make it work.  It also had the advantage of being so entirely out of place in the cabin that it would shock Derek’s sense of order and give him what he needed to know.

As it turns out, Derek saves Ralph, dying in the process, but gets to tell the world that Michael did it.  We of course don’t see what happens after that, but we have good reason to think that Michael will be punished for his crimes.

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Chapter 54, Hastings 61

The idea that Lauren has these abilities because she needs them for her battles was fairly obvious; the related argument that those who do not have the same abilities can be thankful because they will not face similar battles is an interesting corollary to it.

The “brief shining moment” is of course drawn from the lyrics of the musical Camelot.

I think it was at about this point that I determined Tubrok would return in the third book, and that Merlin would be there.  It gave me an overarching theme to carry the three books into one grand story.

I had wondered and worried at this point about how to bring Derek and Lauren together.  I had decided in my preliminary notes that they would meet after Derek had been through several horror stories, and now seemed the time for that for Derek.  But Lauren had much to do.  She still had to find and train Bethany; she had to be killed by Horta and by Jackson.  It made sense at this point that I should find a way to remove her from Wandborough and send her to meet Derek; but for the moment all I could think to do was get her lost so she would not be in the battle at Camelot (a battle in which vampires would have no part) and let her help while it fell.

---

I hope these “behind the writings” posts continue to be of interest, and perhaps some value, to those of you who have been reading the novel.  If there is any positive feedback, they will continue.

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #89, on the subject of Novel Confrontations.

With permission of Valdron Inc I am publishing my second novel, Old Verses New, in serialized form on the web (that link will take you to the table of contents).  If you missed the first one, you can find the table of contents for it at Verse Three, Chapter One:  The First Multiverser Novel.  There was also a series of web log posts looking at the writing process, the decisions and choices that delivered the final product; the last of those for the first novel is #71:  Footnotes on Verse Three, Chapter One, which indexes all the others and catches a lot of material from an earlier collection of behind-the-writings reflections that had been misplaced for a decade.  Now as the second is being posted I am again offering a set of “behind the writings” insights.  This “behind the writings” look definitely contains spoilers, and perhaps in a more serious way than the previous ones, because it sometimes talks about what I was planning to do later in the book or how this book connects to events yet to come in the third (For Better or Verse)–although it sometimes raises ideas that were never pursued.  You might want to read the referenced chapters before reading this look at them, or even put off reading these insights until the book has finished.  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.

These were the previous mark Joseph “young” web log posts covering this book:

1. #74:  Another Novel (which provided this kind of insight into the first nine chapters along with some background material on the book as a whole),
2. #78:  Novel Fears (which continued with coverage of chapters 10 through 18),
3. #82:  Novel Developments (which continued with coverage of chapters 19 through 27),
4. #86:  Novel Conflicts (which continued with coverage of chapters 28 through 36).

This picks up from there, and I expect to continue with additional posts after every ninth chapter in the series.

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

---

Chapter 37, Hastings 56

I needed to bring back the clue about the acorn.  It was going to be important in the third book, and so it needed to be remembered.  Using it in passing to get to the marble made sure it was mentioned without being emphasized.

The eyesight trick had a lot of uncertainty to it.  For one thing, it hadn’t occurred to me that the first thing she was likely to do was create light, and so all this preparation for fighting in darkness was unimportant.  Also, I thought I might use it in the end scenario, but I didn’t really have any idea how (and in fact I didn’t).  The whole black and white versus color thing was interesting to me, but not terribly useful but as a way of making it seem like something was happening while they waited.

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Chapter 38, Kondor 54

The luck of the dice gave me a string of potentially disastrous situations, and the opportunity to have Kondor worry about whether he was ever going to reach civilization with his crate.

The idea that Kondor can tell himself he is not superstitious simply because in thinking about whether or not his emeralds were the cause of recent events he does not use the words “luck” or “curse” shows the shallowness of his antisupernaturalist views.

The customs problem was an afterthought, something to keep the story going.

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Chapter 39, Brown 13

The camp routine was built from my own camp memories.

Bob is a conglomerate person, but somehow I think that John Walker is a significant part at least of his temperament.  But John is not terribly religious.

Bill always calls to mind Bill Friant, so he’s big, powerful, slow-moving, kind-hearted; I don’t know if Bill goes camping.  The pack was there so Derek could take it with him (remember, Derek needs a pack).

Pete isn’t anyone.  Neither is Ralph, although I knew a Robert Schwartz back in elementary school (in Scotch Plains, through the ’60’s) who may have contributed a bit to this one.

My mom always liked the copper enamel jewelry; I often wish I could make it at home.

I had briefly considered the possibility of the dungeon master killing the players, but it was so lame and unrealistic an idea I didn’t stay with it more than a few seconds.  However, it led to the idea of the anti-gaming kid doing it.  Also, I created the player interests to match the murders at this point–except for David, whom I had already created as a lifeguard so he could patch the tire.  The story characters were then matched to the game characters in a way that captured a bit of each personality (I thought) and also fit with the murders.  And I introduced Michael as the anti-gaming character.

The game is clearly Dungeons & Dragons, although it never says so.  Roll your own fate is more something we say in Multiverser games, but it applies here as well.

Mary Healy was the name of the old lady who lived next door to us in the ’80’s.  I think I took the name Marybeth from one of my wife’s high school friends I had met briefly but who was often in her stories.  She was just a name.

Having Derek learn to use a bow was supposed to open into the use of the weapon in the future, but the situation didn’t arise until the third book (and it only occurs to me now that it will).

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Chapter 40, Hastings 57

The extended scripture from Romans 8 was thought too long to use in combat by the editor of the first novel; yet it was so strongly defensive I wanted to continue using it.  The solution seemed to be to run it against unrelated physical actions which would enable her to pronounce the words while fighting.

I had not decided whether another vampire should appear that night or not; but on reflection it seemed once they had prepared for it such an appearance would not add to the story.

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Chapter 41, Kondor 55

The customs interruption was a sudden inspiration; it would help to have something go wrong, and this seemed ideal.

The difference between studying for credentials and studying for knowledge was something I learned in college.

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Chapter 42, Brown 14

It seems to me that I went on a treasure hunt during an overnighter at a Y.M.C.A. day camp.  I remember the counselors went with us, and that there was a problem about the clues being in the wrong places.  I didn’t actually create counselors for this story, but these were older kids and it didn’t seem a problem to let them go on their own.

It was important that the boys were always separating when they ran from place to place, because it meant no one knew where any of them were at any moment.

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Chapter 43, Kondor 56

I suppose that my ship-to-ship combat ideas are a combination of playing Pirates (a computer game) and watching a few swashbucklers like Captain Blood.

I don’t think I’d considered this as an opportunity to remove Kondor from this world right away.  It was more an afterthought once the combat began, that I could find a colorful way to remove him, and ultimately I’d gotten all I could from this scenario and needed to move forward.

In the early ’80’s during a D&D game, Bob Schretzman lent me a book about ships of this period.  I don’t remember much about them, but tried to put what I recalled to good use.

My father-in-law had a ring with a star sapphire which she remembered being silver; it was supposed to go to my wife after his death and she had wanted to give it to me on our twenty-fifth anniversary, but it was too small for my smallest finger and got put away to await a day when we could afford to size it (it turned out to be gold).

Joe is of course going through the stage two dream state as he comes into his next world; the imagery of the dead comes from his surroundings.

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Chapter 44, Brown 15

Derek’s story was heating up, and Lauren’s was slowing down, so I jumped him ahead of her here.

Michael bringing the nurse is actually the first real clue to this mystery.  He was supposed to find the camp director, and let Bill get the nurse.  He brings the nurse because he knows that Bill is dead.

The mention of the defibrillator was difficult.  Derek’s story has to reflect Derek’s thoughts and observations, as it is from his perspective; the use of the proper name for the device in the direct narrative seemed to break that.  I tried to capture his perception by calling it a “portable electric shock thing” and then parenthetically stating that he didn’t know the name for defibrillator.

The mention of Pete playing the archer is another clue, pointing to the game as the motive.

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Chapter 45, Hastings 58

Lauren’s story had a couple of serious problems at this point.  I couldn’t let her kill Horta, because she had already faced him in the future; I couldn’t let her kill Tubrok, because he was now my villain for the future scenario.  However, somehow I had to establish her as Laurelyn of Wandborough, Mystic of the Western Woods, so I couldn’t allow them to kill her, at least, not yet.  Thus I have them escape.

Lauren here invents a new psionic skill from consideration of two other psionic skills.  It is part of the process that makes her mind skills a bit more credible to the reader:  she doesn’t simply decide she wants to do something, she thinks through a way to do it.

When I created Garla at this moment I did not know what I would do with her in the future; I just needed a werewolf, and I needed a reason to put Lauren in a cave in the woods, and this did the job.

The cave was a sudden inspiration.  I was thinking at that moment in terms of a place for Lauren to wait; but I was also going to need a place for her to live for an extended time, to create the legend of Laurelyn of Wandborough I needed, and the cave suited that.

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I hope these “behind the writings” posts continue to be of interest, and perhaps some value, to those of you who have been reading the novel.  If there is any positive feedback, they will continue.

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #86, on the subject of Novel Conflicts.

With permission of Valdron Inc I am publishing my second novel, Old Verses New, in serialized form on the web (that link will take you to the table of contents).  If you missed the first one, you can find the table of contents for it at Verse Three, Chapter One:  The First Multiverser Novel.  There was also a series of web log posts looking at the writing process, the decisions and choices that delivered the final product; the last of those for the first novel is #71:  Footnotes on Verse Three, Chapter One, which indexes all the others and catches a lot of material from an earlier collection of behind-the-writings reflections that had been misplaced for a decade.  Now as the second is being posted I am again offering a set of “behind the writings” insights.  This “behind the writings” look definitely contains spoilers, and perhaps in a more serious way than the previous ones, because it sometimes talks about what I was planning to do later in the book or how this book connects to events yet to come in the third (For Better or Verse)–although it sometimes raises ideas that were never pursued.  You might want to read the referenced chapters before reading this look at them, or even put off reading these insights until the book has finished.  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.

These were the previous mark Joseph “young” web log posts covering this book:

1. #74:  Another Novel (which provided this kind of insight into the first nine chapters along with some background material on the book as a whole).
2. #78:  Novel Fears (which continued with coverage of chapters 10 through 18),
3. #82:  Novel Developments (which continued with coverage of chapters 19 through 27).

This picks up from there, and I expect to continue with additional posts after every ninth chapter in the series.

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

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Chapter 28, Kondor 51

I skipped Lauren in part because she was ahead of Kondor in stories and I’d already determined that he would be out of the next book; and in part because I’d created a cliffhanger for him and had a story idea pressing on me at the moment which I wanted to pursue.

One of the problems I had with the first draft of the first book was that Kondor’s atheism seemed to start when he encountered Lauren’s Christianity; I did a lot of rewriting to strengthen it earlier.  In this book I did not expect to repeat any of those arguments (been there, done that), but needed to keep his identity as an atheist solid as part of his character.  The debate about whether mythical beasts like sea monsters were a challenge to that belief helped in that regard.

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Chapter 29, Hastings 53

Saying that Lauren learned many magics and became a powerful sorceress gave me options to use spells and psionic abilities in the future that had not been established specifically.

I needed to keep her distant from the core of the Arthurian legend as a way of explaining why she doesn’t appear in any of the tales.  She did not need to be entirely gone, just distant enough that no one would wonder that she wasn’t mentioned.

When I mentioned Morgana, I did not realize that she would reappear later in an unanticipated role.

By the time I mentioned the oak forest, I knew what the acorn was.

The healing magic was something she had not done previously, and thus an example of what she was learning.

The idea of having Horta accuse Lauren was a step toward establishing the confrontation I needed to have him kill her; having him flee would give me a viable reason to move Lauren from Camelot to Wandborough.

I chose Sir Sagrimore because he is a known knight for whom there are no familiar stories.  I guessed that in doing this I reduced the possibility that anyone would say I was not representing the knight’s character correctly, as they might with Gawaine, Galahad, Lancelot, Tristram, and other famous knights for whom stories are extant.

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Chapter 30, Brown 10

It was during the readthrough of this section that I made a stone block out of the stone wall; it seemed to work better.

John Walker often says, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”  I’m not sure whether I ever heard it from anyone else, but it seemed to fit Derek’s situation.

I needed to make the trip take a long time through the swamp even though it could not be so far to the castle, because I needed Derek to be tired enough to fall asleep again.  I didn’t see a fight with a vampire as maintaining the mood of this story, although I wasn’t certain exactly how it would end next.

There was a stupid servant in the version of this played in the game, but he was not so deformed nor so stupid as this one I created.

“Morbius” is a nod to a Doctor Who episode in which some dying scientist has created a body in which he intends to put his brain.  It was the name of the madman, but from that also that of the animated body.

The conversation with the servant gives a lot of clues about the situation, although to some degree the world does not completely make sense.  I used his pauses as if to remember to suggest a number of ideas.  I have since run this world for players and had to expand on a number of aspects, but at this point this was the entirety of the world.

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Chapter 31, Hastings 54

Lauren isn’t certain how to track Horta, and neither am I; but I’m also not certain what to do when they find him, so I’m exploring the situation while I look for answers.

It was established in the first book at some point that Lauren had always wanted to move to a more rural location and keep a horse.  It suggests that she is like the many girls who spend time with horses when young.

Lauren’s estimates of how long in the future various events will occur is very inexact; she does not really know what year it is now, only that it is anno domini.

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Chapter 32, Kondor 52

There was a part of me that wished I had thought of this idea of trading food for emeralds sooner; but I resisted the urge to back-write it into the story because it didn’t seem realistic in my mind for Kondor to have thought of it sooner.  I thus committed myself to bringing him around the circuit again, and to creating interesting adventures to fill that time.

In-game, travel times are determined by die rolls and by travel (and port) events determined by die rolls.  I was deciding these things based on averages and ranges, and making them a bit shorter due to the fact that Kondor’s travel clock was a significant aid to navigation.

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Chapter 33, Brown 11

Oddly, although I had decided that the mysterious host was a vampire, I had not determined how Derek was going to die–that is, the actual death moment escaped me.  Even when he fell asleep, I expected he would awaken and actually face the monster.  But having him not awaken was believable, and saved me the disadvantages of another fight scene.

The introduction of the summer camp world was from the outset intended to be a slasher movie story; but none of the details had yet been determined.

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Chapter 34, Hastings 55

I created the comfort bubble with a view to using it in the climactic scenes.  Always there were things I did to prepare for the climax and things that I did to make the current scene work which I later found a way to use.  The comfort bubble was to save their lives and allow the denouement of the story.

When I wrote about Raal’s uncanny ability to spot the undead, I didn’t realize myself that it would lead to his ability to smell them.  But it made perfect sense for a werewolf to be able to smell decay in an undead body from quite a distance, and I needed a way for Lauren to do the same, so this developed from it.

Creating fight sequences is in some ways the most difficult aspect of the writing.  Each has to be distinct, using maneuvers and techniques in ways that don’t sound like she did this again; yet they must also sound consistent with all that has been done before.  It must seem like the same person involved in the battle doing the sort of things he or she usually does, but it must not seem like the same battle over again.  Thus I find myself mixing established bits with variations, and looking for reasons why that which was done successfully last time doesn’t get done exactly the same way this time.

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Chapter 35, Kondor 53

The sextant is one of those things that I expect will eventually be useful; I just don’t know when.

I immediately recognized the tension involved in having a crate of uncut gems and a distant place at which to have them done.  It would become a nagging weight on Kondor, for a little while.

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Chapter 36, Brown 12

I’ve actually never seen a slasher film.  I was not at all certain as I started how it should play through.  I needed characters and a relaxed atmosphere, and so I set about to create it.

A lot of my camp notes recall my days at Lebanon, a Baptist campground in New Jersey; but very little is even similar.  The bell was near the mess hall, there were separate boating and swimming lakes (but no docks on the boating lake that I recall), plenty of woods and trails, a barn where the craft department was, and two-way radios used to keep people in touch with each other.  Oh, and there was a chapel, and to a degree the major landmarks in my mind are roughly in the same relationship on the map as they were there–except that the cabins are in exactly the opposite direction, beyond the barn rather than beyond the mess hall.

Getting the tire fixed was a good excuse to keep Derek here.  I don’t know that I ever used the bicycle as a means of transportation in this book, and although I thought I might I had no specific case in mind.

Everyone in the game develops something we call a “philosophy of the verse”; eventually they start putting together an idea of what is happening and why.  Derek’s, so far, is that he’s comatose and dreaming.  This notion that he is using his expectations to turn the dreams to nightmares is a good step in that development, and it gives him reason to try to put the horror thoughts to one side for now.

Apart from the biblical reference, Shiloh happens to be the name of the next town over, and of a church there which runs a summer camp not far from here, although the camp is not called “Shiloh”.

David isn’t anyone I remember; he’s more a type of person who seems right at summer camp, a conglomerate of those modest leader types.  My cousin Ron probably contributed significantly here.

Mahwah is the town next to where my parents live.  I don’t know whether I’d mentioned it as his home before, but it seemed a good place for his origin.  Newark also is a city in New Jersey, but it happens to be one in Delaware as well, and I recall there being such cities elsewhere.

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I hope these “behind the writings” posts continue to be of interest, and perhaps some value, to those of you who have been reading the novel.  If there is any positive feedback, they will continue.

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