This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #113, on the subject of Character Movements.

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),
7. #94:  Novel Meetings (which continued with coverage of chapters 55 through 63),
8. #100:  Novel Settling (which continued with coverage of chapters 64 through 72),
9. #104:  Novel Learning (which continued with coverage of chapters 73 through 81),
10. #110:  Character Redirects (which continued with coverage of chapters 82 through 90).

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 91, Hastings 73

The early obstacles to teaching Bethany may illustrate the principle that the more clearly God indicates His intended direction for you, the more problems you are likely to encounter along the way. Lauren is pretty sure that she is here to teach Bethany—she even told Pack Mother Ferenna as much—and so she realizes that she is ill-equipped for the task, Bethany’s father is resistant, and Bethany knows very little initially.

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Chapter 92, Brown 31

I wanted Derek to leave the compound, but I had no idea where he was going to go.

Meesha was, I think, based on a character of that name (or one very like it) played by Margaret Morano in the Gamma World game from which Starson and Qualick originated. It was with Meesha that we learned the limitations of the game’s version of telepathy—she could not “speak” to us without being “heard” by anyone within range, but if we sent her ahead to scout she could not call to us once out of range.

I got the name Holger from someone who wrote to me about time travel theory in the early days of the temporal anomalies web site. The character was invented. We had had the practice in those early games that humans always had given names and surnames, but mutants, whether human mutants or animal mutants, had single names.

The name “Cavalier” was probably because we played a Gamma World adventure in which we sought, found, and captured a compound known as “Samurai”. It, though, was partly under water, and the name was a pseudo-acronym for something I no longer remember.

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Chapter 93, Kondor 73

I found my next step for Kondor: his raygun got attention, and he was being investigated. It was a hook to move him forward into something else, which still needed some detail.

I think I had some vague notion that “N.I.B.” stood for something like “National Investigations Bureau”. The thing is that FBI agents never identify themselves as “Federal Bureau of Investigation”, so all I really needed was the letters that the agents would use assuming that anyone would know what they meant.

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Chapter 94, Hastings 74

I had a side problem. In the first book, Bethany implies that she and Lauren had fought vampires in the past, and now I was in that past and had to make that a reality—but Bethany at this point is the teen daughter of a widowed father who wants to see her live an ordinary life, and Lauren doesn’t know where the vampires are. I did not see them attacking Wandborough—apart from the fact that I would be repeating a scenario I’d already run, there was no logic to the raid deep into werewolf country, and less with rumors of the famed sorceress in the area. I also had to stage an encounter that Bethany would survive, even if Lauren were killed. So I was exploring options, trying to work out for myself where the vampires were and how to make this happen.

The comment on the verse about the fool is another of those that I included because people get it wrong. The psalmist did not mean that all fools are atheists or that all atheists are fools. Rather, some people are foolish enough to act like there is no God because they don’t really believe that there is a God, or that God matters, or at least that’s what they think. Thus they do things God would condemn, because they don’t really think He knows.

I knew by now what was going to happen with Merlin, in the broadest sense. I did not know when, where, or how it was going to happen, but I knew the major pieces.

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Chapter 95, Brown 32

None of the creatures in the encountered group came from anything I remembered. Gamma World had a multi-legged horse, which is the nearest thing to a source for the six-legged bull. The “porcuperson” was my own idea here.

Again, as I did with the magic coin in the first book, I buried the one item that mattered in a batch of others—this time the porcuperson. The others are all mutants, but I gave them very little thought, using them primarily to fill the group.

I might have ended Derek’s time in this world here, but it would have felt like an abrupt interruption and I wanted to resolve this part of the story, not merely make it feel as if I’d moved him out of the school so I could kill him.

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Chapter 96, Kondor 74

The “blue card” was based on a “green card”, which I assume has a different name but is generally just known by its color. I figured they would have something like it in this world, but that it would defy the odds for it to be the same color.

Federal investigators pursuing a claim by a military surplus store manager that someone showed him a ray gun was a bit of a stretch, perhaps, but I tried to accept that it seemed unlikely and give it some plausibility.

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Chapter 97, Hastings 75

There were a number of things that were in the first novel as things Bethany learned from Lauren, or things Bethany knew that she must have learned from Lauren, and now I had to find a way for Lauren to pass them to Bethany. The anti-aging spell is first.

This is also when Lauren tells Bethany to meet her in Philadelphia. It’s a predestination paradox, but it works.

If memory serves, the part about Lauren blocking memories was back-written. In a later chapter Lauren causes someone to forget she had entered a room, and she does it casually and easily; I needed to lay the groundwork for that, so I found a reason for her to learn and use that ability.

The road trip was created to give me some action in this story, and to move Bethany to the Camelot area for the longer story arc concerning Merlin.

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Chapter 98, Brown 33

I had thrown some new characters into the story, and I needed to characterize them. I decided that Holger, the crack shot with the laser rifle, would be the kind of person who objects to attributing something to luck that was the result of good planning and skill.

Gamma World had sects of various kinds with their own philosophies about the world. I don’t remember the names, and invented this name, “progressivists”, to fit the philosophy of those who think mutation is the path to the future.  I was not writing political articles at the time, and did not see a connection to the “progressives”, the liberal wing of the modern Democratic party; I leave it to the reader as to whether such a connection might be made.

When I gave Derek the darts, I wanted him to have another weapon for the final scenario; I did not realize how significant the darts would become in the third novel.

Derek was also going to need tools, and a compact futuristic toolkit was just the thing.

I think this is the first time I’ve mentioned Derek using the tent and sleeping bag he got from Bill; it suggests that he used it regularly on this trip, though, and this really is the first chance he’s had to do so.

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Chapter 99, Kondor 75

Kondor’s simple explanation for having gotten the gun on a spaceship and then wound up here omitted the part where he was the one who picked up the vorgo all those centuries ago; that was a complication he had not considered when he went for the short and simple version.

It might be stretching the concept, but it seemed not unreasonable for a government agency sending a team to investigate the possibility that someone had a ray gun to include on the team someone who might be able to recognize such a device if he saw it.

I decided to give Einstein’s work in this universe to my artist friend Jim Denaxas (who did the cover of the first novel) because I needed an uncommon name. The names “Sabrins” and “Cordikans” were created to sound like nationalities.

If the government really believed someone had been in contact with technologically advanced aliens, that would be a security concern and they would be at least sequestered until some determination could be made of what they knew. Thus I think it reasonable that they would take Joe into custody here.

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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 #110, on the subject of Character Redirects.

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 (coverage of chapters 28 through 36),
5. #89:  Novel Confrontations (coverage of chapters 37 through 45),
6. #91:  Novel Mysteries (chapters 46 through 54),
7. #94:  Novel Meetings (chapters 55 through 63),
8. #100:  Novel Settling (64 through 72),
9. #104:  Novel Learning (73 through 81).

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 82, Hastings 70

I brought Lauren to stage three at this point, although I didn’t get into details.  That is, she realizes that she is awake; she has been awake but didn’t know it.  Also, I’m going to step her backwards in a future world—that can happen, but it’s unusual, but I need to do it for the beginning of the fifth novel.  But the idea of becoming accustomed to dying seemed significant at this point.

Again we have the idea that she has to choose a direction, and even with only two directions she is opening some possibilities and closing others with the choice.  She resolves her concerns by making as rational a decision as she can—keeping the sun out of her eyes for a while—and trusting that God will get her where He wants her to be.

Once she confronts the familiar place name, she needs a way to identify whether it is the right place in the right universe.  Getting to her cave is the easy way; it stands a good chance of being pretty much the same after only a few centuries.

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Chapter 83, Brown 28

It becomes a pattern for Lauren, that she gathers people around her, gets them working together with her toward some goal, and then she gets killed but they keep going.  She thus changes worlds by creating something self-perpetuating before she leaves them.

The word Derek uses for the head of the school is of course “principal” and not “dean” because he went to schools that had principals.

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Chapter 84, Kondor 70

We have reached the reveal:  Joe has solved the mystery.

Kondor starts talking before he knows what he’s going to say, honestly because at this point I wasn’t sure what he was going to say.  I’d written myself into a bit of a box here, following the logic of the conversation, and now I had to find a way out of it.

Both of my adversaries here were good, each trying to outmaneuver the other.  It was difficult to get it to come out with Kondor as the winner, because Krannitz really was a smart illusionist expert in misdirection.

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Chapter 85, Hastings 71

Figuring out what would change and what would be the same in a wood that stood undisturbed for some unknown number of centuries took a bit of thought and some tapping into my experience.

The idea that the woods would be a terrible waste of space if no one lived in them is in one sense a bit silly, but it really is in another sense perceptive.  The woods must be there for a reason; the best reason is to be a place for someone or something to live.  Extrapolating the existence of forest people doesn’t necessarily follow, but a good case can be made for it—and in that universe, it happens to be correct.

I knew, and perhaps the reader knew or should have known, that this was the time when Lauren would meet and begin teaching Bethany.  However, it was important to me that it happen naturally, that is, Lauren is not looking for Bethany and not really expecting to find Bethany; she finds a young girl who impresses her with her insight, her intelligence, and offers to teach her something, and then discovers that this is the girl she met in the future.

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Chapter 86, Brown 29

I wanted time to pass without spending a lot of the book talking about it, and leaping in with the idea that everyone else had aged ten years and Derek looked the same covered that adequately.  It would include however long Lauren was there, which was maybe three or four years, but would give Derek plenty of time to become quite proficient at his interests.

The explanation about Lauren and Derek being versers is not really necessary for the reader, who already understands it, but helps in giving some form to Derek’s own understanding of it.

I eventually would need to move Derek to another world, and barring another classroom incident I was either going to have to have him kill himself on a botch, probably with some kind of high-tech equipment, or get him to move out of the compound into the more dangerous world.  The latter had more interesting story possibilities.

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Chapter 87, Kondor 71

With the arrest, I needed to make it seem like a modern world without making it the same as our world.  I had some advantage in having watched British television, particularly A Touch of Frost, and so had heard the different version of what in America are called “Miranda Rights” (after the defendant in the case in which the Supreme Court affirmed them), but I didn’t want them to be the British version, either.  So I thought about what might be said in my other world, and came up with a plausible statement.

Kondor’s problem was my problem.  I had envisioned a continuation of the game in which he worked as a magician’s apprentice (and later when I ran this part of the game for Graeme Comyn, he did exactly that).  I didn’t have another next step for him, and having Merrick suggest he come by to discuss a possibility was a stall on my part—I had nothing in mind in that direction.

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Chapter 88, Hastings 72

As I came into this scene, I wondered how Lauren proves her identity to people who only know her legend.  The answer presented itself:  she knows the name of the wolf whom she taught to walk the twilight, who is the ancestor of the present pack mother.  Since Garla was not the pack mother at the time, there is no other reason why Lauren should know the name but that she was the teacher.

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Chapter 89, Brown 30

One of the problems with versing is that even people who believe it have trouble understanding it.  Dorelle asks obvious questions that completely misunderstand the problem.

I’m beginning to work on an adventure, but I don’t know how I’m going to do it—which is fine, because it makes the feeling of uncertainty all the more palpable in the character discussions.  They don’t know how to find a place to explore, either.

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Chapter 90, Kondor 72

I had set myself up for the possibility that Merrick would have an idea to help Kondor figure out what to do next, but I didn’t have any such idea.  So I took Merrick away for a few days, figuring I could fill in story details and maybe have something else by the time he returned.

---

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.

[contact-form subject='[mark Joseph %26quot;young%26quot;’][contact-field label=’Name’ type=’name’ required=’1’/][contact-field label=’Email’ type=’email’ required=’1’/][contact-field label=’Website’ type=’url’/][contact-field label=’Comment: Note that this form will contact the author by e-mail; to post comments to the article, see below.’ type=’textarea’ required=’1’/][/contact-form]

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #104, on the subject of Novel Learning.

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),
7. #94:  Novel Meetings (which continued with coverage of chapters 55 through 63),
8. #100:  Novel Settling (which continued with coverage of chapters 64 through 72).

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 73, Kondor 66

I never put a year on Kondor’s visit. Within the past decade or so libraries, or at least the library I have most frequented, have changed their systems drastically. At one time when you picked up a book on the shelf there was a paper pocket glued inside the cover in which was in essence an index card on which were the names of everyone who had borrowed the book, along with the date that they did so. Thus the information Kondor wants would have been available easily. Today you would need to access the library circulation desk computer and run a special routine against the database to obtain the same information, but since at least a few of the books I get from library discards have those pockets in them (cards removed) it is likely that the cards were still in use wherever/whenever Joe is doing this.

At this point I was working from the view that Ralph Mitchell stole the vorgo. I had worked out that his motive would be connected to the death of his wife, that he hoped he could use it to restore her to life. The first time I ran the scenario as a game (which was after I wrote this) I went with that solution. This time it was falling into place too easily. However, it was easy to make Krannitz and Merrick seem innocent—I had not at this point considered that they might be guilty.

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Chapter 74, Brown 25

Again we see Derek’s negative reaction to “school” as a concept.

I needed to skip Lauren primarily because I needed to get Derek’s reaction to the school expanded before I returned to her.

It’s obvious that some people know how to read and write, because Chicker writes and someone else is able to read what he writes. However, it’s not a particularly common skill in a world like this, and it is probably needed to go forward.

The giant moth and the snake with eight arms both came from Gamma World games. It took me a very long time to understand that the eight foot tall winged creature that traded information for tasty clothing was a mutant moth, and I’m not at all certain of the origin of the eight-armed snake but I think the books called it a “menoral”, so I got the concept pretty clearly.

It is an interesting point that my schools had rooms that were set up similarly to office meeting rooms, and some offices have presentation rooms set up similarly to lecture halls, so there is enough overlap that you can easily run a small school in a large office.

Derek notices that Lauren seems to be able to keep up on everything she is doing even as she increases her workload. That’s not really true, as we see in the next chapter, but I’ve noticed that it is not at all uncommon for busy people to become busier and realize themselves that they are becoming overburdened long before anyone else notices it.

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Chapter 75, Hastings 68

Lauren has a bit of a crisis of faith. Most believers have them, times during which God seems to be absent. Hers is particularly understandable, because she is in a low-magic world, a world in which spiritual realities are restricted. Yet it lets me talk about such faith crises in a way which addresses them in the real world as well.

Lauren left the world in about 1999. The Internet existed and had opened to ordinary people, but most ordinary people weren’t using it yet. She never had much contact with it; it just wasn’t part of her life as housewife and mother at that time. Even Derek had only some exposure to it, and it was not nearly so massive a thing as it is now—he left a few years later, when Google was still an upstart and Facebook hadn’t displaced MySpace. So they don’t know much about cyberspace yet.

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Chapter 76, Kondor 67

It occurs to me that this is the second mystery in this book—Derek had to solve the slasher summer camp murders. I’ve always wanted to write a murder mystery, but they’re not easy; I suppose I’m practicing for that.

I wrote a web page once about expanding the local phone service to eight-digit numbers by replacing the three-digit “exchanges” with four-digit variants. People said it would be much more trouble than it appeared.

The bit about banks wanting to be located in expensive buildings is, or at least at one time was, true. Insurance companies do the same thing with their main offices. The idea is as Joe suggests, that the real estate investment makes the company look solvent so you trust that they’ll have your money when you want it.

I remember realizing the difference between measuring mass with a balance scale and measuring weight with a spring scale sometime in high school. Electronic scales would undoubtedly also measure weight, and the value of gold, despite being given in dollars per ounce, is really based on its mass.

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Chapter 77, Brown 26

The idea of bringing in the Internet, in some form, seemed essential to Derek’s future: I needed him to learn far more about computers, particularly, than he could learn simply by looking at the ones in the compound. The site would have been connected to information elsewhere, and that was the way to make that possible.

My recollection is that robots were fairly common in Metamorphosis Alpha, and were also found in Gamma World, but I had not included them in my version here to this point partly because I did not want Derek taking one with him.

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Chapter 78, Kondor 68

The “batteries included” line was something of a throwaway, because of all the products in our world that say “batteries not included” on the package. It was actually difficult to package early chemical power cells and have them stay fresh and not leak, which meant that many products would have a shorter shelf life if the batteries were in the package, so “batteries included” is probably the exception, but it didn’t seem inappropriate for that to be another difference between universes.

The comment Krannitz makes about the Vorgo rumored to have real magic is one of the clues. I realized when I created the game version that I needed two different versions of the magician (there named Merlin Mandrake for mnemonic purposes), one of whom holds the view that magic is not real, and the other who believes and hopes to find it in the world somewhere.

Making up names of places that sound real is part of the game, and part of the story. The places given sound like they would be real places in the world, but not in this world.

Seeing is clearly not believing, and Joe illustrates that by his attitude that all the inexplicable things he has seen have explanations, he just doesn’t know what they are. Magic is denied as the starting point, and the fact that he can find scientific explanations for some things that are thought to be magical to his mind proves that the rest of the supposedly magical things have similar scientific explanations that are simply not yet known to him.

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Chapter 79, Hastings 69

I am not certain now that I understood why Grarg was so against the Internet when I put him in that position. Part of it was my feeling for a character I had played a few years before, and part of it was that I needed someone to cause friction, to disagree with the rest of the group, without being or seeming to be a villain. I started with the idea that the science of the ancients had destroyed the world, and I knew that there were factions within that game world that felt that way; but I also saw that that was an insurmountable objection, that Lauren probably could not ever win Grarg over to her side if that was the real problem. I thus went with the idea more as Grarg’s smokescreen for his real problem (perhaps inadvertently illustrating that people often have arguments against what they want to reject that are not the real reasons), and looked for something that could be solved.

I ultimately looked up the quote Lauren cites. It is apparently attributed to George Santayana, and in its original form reads “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Lauren didn’t need to have it right or know where it originated.

Running a school is challenging, but it’s also somewhat boring to watch. I needed to bring some action into the story. That would arise again later for Derek, but I also knew that I had to make Derek an independent character and also start teaching Bethany, so the powerful Lauren had to be moved forward.

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Chapter 80, Brown 27

As mentioned, I needed some action. I figured that the cat had to lose, but Lauren was going to be killed in the process, and that meant that someone had to fight against the cat besides Lauren. Derek was the obvious choice to see the monitors, and I could use his perspective to describe the fight and thus avoid having to cover the moment Lauren is killed. It also gave me the chance to show how powerful Grarg was and how skillful Qualick was—two characters about whom I knew a great deal more than had been included in the story. That’s often the case, but it helps to reveal the characters in action.

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Chapter 81, Kondor 69

I think it was about this point that I decided Mitchell didn’t do it. I needed a more interesting mystery, and he became my misdirect.

I also decided who did it, because now I had a viable suspect the reader would not have guessed, but who fit the pieces well.

---

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.

[contact-form subject='[mark Joseph %26quot;young%26quot;’][contact-field label=’Name’ type=’name’ required=’1’/][contact-field label=’Email’ type=’email’ required=’1’/][contact-field label=’Website’ type=’url’/][contact-field label=’Comment: Note that this form will contact the author by e-mail; to post comments to the article, see below.’ type=’textarea’ required=’1’/][/contact-form]

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #100, on the subject of Novel Settling.

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),
7. #94:  Novel Meetings (which continued with coverage of chapters 55 through 63).

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 64, Kondor 63

I have no idea why I went with Krannitz the Stupefying.  I think I wanted to suggest something about this world being different, such that a name that sounds pretty silly to most people might be a successful performer in this other world.

Kondor’s problem really is that something supernatural did happen, and he is well practiced in explaining away the supernatural, but when Krannitz does it this time he creates an explanation that does not fit the facts known to Kondor.

The idea of having the story embellished seemed to fit with everything, and particularly with Kondor’s annoyance at the difference between the truth as he knew it and the history that was recorded about him.

---

Chapter 65, Hastings 65

The idea of Derek moving between horror movie settings had more sprung from my desire to stretch into the genre and try to do something frightening; the logic behind it, the connection to who he was, came after that, although to a degree it sprang from those events.  I had already characterized Derek as someone who knew all the horror movies, so I started to think about why he had watched them (something I’ve never wanted to do).

---

Chapter 66, Brown 22

Right at the beginning of their relationship, Derek, still really a boy, struggles with what to call Lauren, even in his thoughts.  She is probably about as old as his parents, in appearance, and of course much older in years according to her stories.  So he thinks of her as “Mrs. Hastings” and then corrects himself because she insists he call her “Lauren”.

Derek is eventually to be the great computer hacker; to get him there, I needed to give him opportunities to practice and let it appear that he was doing so.  Thus the continued efforts here.

I was trying to create a rather alien mindset for Spire.  It was not the most alien mind I’d ever done, perhaps, but it had to be conveyed easily.  The poor linguistic skills, the seeming lack of awareness of time, were juxtaposed against her intuitive grasp of forgotten technologies.

The food packets were inspired by trail foods, particularly the Gorp at Philmont and Gumper’s four-man meal packs, from my Boy Scout days.

The idea of putting the system on maintenance status was the only thing I could think to do that would make sense to the reader.  I know some electronics, but nothing about security systems, really, so I was making it up as I went along.

Starson calls Lauren “the lady”.  I remember playing in a Gamma World game once and saying that even though our characters were all teenagers, it was really unthinkable that we had reached that age at all in so dangerous a world, let alone without having learned what was safe to eat.  I would not expect very many people in this world to reach thirty, and those who manage it would probably be recognized and treated with a certain amount of respect.

I realized that whatever this compound once was, Derek would eventually know, so I had to decide.  The satellite tracking facility idea was mostly devised as something that would have all that sophisticated gear but be in the main inoperable for anything significant.

---

Chapter 67, Kondor 64

At this point, I had decided that the man who left early was my culprit; it wasn’t until it was all falling into place too easily that I decided to shift that.

That shifting would in turn inspire a game version of this part of the story.  The first part, the quest to recover the Vorgo told in the first book, had already been released for game play, but only in electronic form.  The events to this point sounded like they’d be a lot of fun to play, and a mystery would be fun to write.  The problem I faced was making it such that those who read the book wouldn’t know the solution.  The answer to that problem was to provide multiple suspects and tweak the facts slightly for each, so that any of them could be suspect but only one could have actually done it in any particular instance.  As I say, that idea that more than one person might have been guilty was inspired by the switch I made when writing this version.

I was also going to follow the thread of Kondor studying to be a magician under Krannitz’ tutelage; shifting the villain derailed that entire direction, and instead forced me to look elsewhere, and get him involved in advanced physics, which seems a better choice for him anyway.

The events in the hotel room were to give the feel of time passing as well as provide Kondor with an alibi; I also wanted to have his thoughts come to the fore, particularly about the magic lessons, which he might yet pursue in a future world.

I thought quite a bit about whether the police would knock on the door or the concierge call upstairs to let him know they were there; I decided that the police would insist that no call be placed.

This was the first time I had to think about what Joe wore to bed, and since he sleeps alone I thought boxer shorts would probably work, at least in the privacy of his hotel room.

---

Chapter 68, Hastings 66

This chapter started precisely because I didn’t know what Lauren was going to do here.  I knew that Derek was going to come to understand the verse from what she taught him, and that he was going to pick up his computer skills and get in shape and learn to fight; I didn’t really have anything planned for her except to support him, make it seem like her presence here mattered, and move her on to meet Bethany.  Thus this chapter was in part my own effort to determine what she should do, as she sought such guidance for herself.

There is a bit here on the uncertainty of guidance from circumstance.  Lauren recognizes that she could have followed either of two paths, both of which would have led to her being here with Starson’s group and Derek.  Her purpose for being here might be connected to any one of those things.  In my mind, it was connected to Derek; but it didn’t have to be, and there was nothing to say Lauren had to reach that same conclusion.

When I first wrote that she could teach, I of course meant Derek, and maybe Starson’s group; but it was the beginning of the idea of the school.  I didn’t have that idea yet, but I was headed that direction.

The evangelistic angle was problematic.  I realized that I couldn’t duck it–Lauren would have to think of that.  At the same time, I didn’t want her chapters or Derek’s to become so blatantly Christian that it would turn off those who disagreed with her.  At this point I didn’t know how I would handle that, but I would have to move that direction.

---

Chapter 69, Brown 23

I had modeled parts of this on several role playing games; in one of them, people had cards (and in another, bracelets) which were color coded for what kind of access they provided.  That had bothered me; there was too much access.  I wanted to keep the flavor of the electronic access, but not have the universal access suggested by those approaches.  Thus I devised the identity card notion from crossing what I knew of modern cash/credit cards and information systems.

The skill plus attribute system Multiverser uses for skill success is enhanced in regard to combat with an extra attribute bonus, a “strike value” that averages more basic scores to increase the chance of hitting a target.  (There is also a “target value” that is subtracted from the chance to hit, representing the target’s ability to deflect and dodge.)  As a result, it is possible for someone to have a natural ability with ranged weapons that increases their chance to hit a target even with an unfamiliar one.  Derek has been developing his hand/eye coordination through video game play, and that’s one of the attributes that contribute to strike value.

Lauren’s improved shooting ability is from using her other weapons.  Shooting branches off trees outside the compound fence showed both the accuracy of the weapon and her own skill.

Neither of the games on which this scenario is based (Metamorphosis Alpha and Gamma World, the latter probably based significantly on the former) had power cell chargers, at least that I ever encountered, but it was evident that something like that must exist or the weapons made no sense.  The portable one was in some sense less likely, but only because in a compound like this wall units would be the obvious choice, and travel supplies would not have been in demand.  Yet there might be one lying around, and that was what Lauren hoped.

It was necessary for them to practice extensively with the new weapons so that their level of skill with these in the future would be credible.

These weapons are more potent than those used by Bob and Joe (and these are photonic, while those are kinetic/gravitic).  They hit harder.  Bob’s weapon gets more shots, but not as deadly; Joe’s weapon gets as many shots on its high power setting, which is not as potent as this.

One of the lessons Lauren learned in the parakeet world was that it might be valuable to teach what she knows to other versers.  She is very much in teaching mode in this world, and Derek is her primary pupil; but she lets him decide what he wants to learn, while making what she offers to teach sound somewhat attractive.  Thus having shown him how to use the rifle and coached him a bit to improve his ability, she now offers to teach him how to fight in close combat.

---

Chapter 70, Kondor 65

Knowing that there were going to be police questions, I had written the previous section of Kondor’s story to include several contacts with the hotel staff, so that there would be little if any question of him having left the room.  I knew he would be a suspect, and I wanted to reduce that credibly as soon as possible so he could get on with solving it.

The library was a sudden inspiration; I was trying to think of a way that Kondor could get the clues he needed to track down the culprit, and that seemed the best way at that moment.

---

Chapter 71, Hastings 67

This was particularly difficult for me, because I am specifically not a specimen of physical fitness and have never been particularly interested in becoming one.  I studied some tumbling at the Y as a boy, but most of what I know about gymnastics and martial arts comes from observation.  Working out how Lauren would train Derek in these skills was a bit of a challenge.

Lauren finds her purpose in this world in teaching pretty much everything to people who have lost all knowledge of their own world.  She focuses on coming to it from a Christian base, but she covers quite a bit ultimately.

---

Chapter 72, Brown 24

Limiting Derek’s ability to identify his own location freed me from having to be too specific about it.

Derek has the kid’s immediate negative reaction to the idea of school.  Because it is mandatory, we see it as undesirable; because everyone goes, we don’t see any individual advantage.  It isn’t until we’re older that we realize the benefits of school.

---

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 #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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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).

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

[contact-form subject='[mark Joseph %26quot;young%26quot;’][contact-field label=’Name’ type=’name’ required=’1’/][contact-field label=’Email’ type=’email’ required=’1’/][contact-field label=’Website’ type=’url’/][contact-field label=’Comment: Note that this form will contact the author by e-mail; to post comments to the article, see below.’ type=’textarea’ required=’1’/][/contact-form]

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #82, on the subject of Novel Developments.

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).  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).

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 19, Hastings 50

The discussion of magic raises interesting theological issues.  God forbids the kind of magic that calls on spirits other than Himself to work miracles.  The “other kind” of magic, the type in which rituals control supernatural energy directly, simply does not exist.  Yet if it did, there is no argument against its use that does not also apply to technology.  Either God permits us to impact events in the world, or we are wrong to do so; means are a separate issue.  (I address these issues in several of the articles in the Faith and Gaming series at the Christian Gamers Guild website, also available in print.)

I hadn’t really thought about how Lauren would be involved in bringing Arthur to power; these things sort of developed through asking myself what I would do.

Sometime before I began writing the second novel, I knew that Horta and Jackson were both going to kill Lauren at different times–Horta in her Merlin visit, Jackson in the Bethany visit.  I’m not certain when it came to me, but it seemed the route to take.  It also gave meaning to their reluctance to trust her in 2005.

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Chapter 20, Kondor 48

I don’t think I’d realized when Evan was shot that Kondor would become the doctor; but the idea worked.

It may seem odd that Joe argues against his own promotion, but ultimately he is really out of place in this world and there are still a lot of things he does not know about how to do medicine on the ship.  I wanted to have to persuade him, because he’s aware of his own shortcomings in that regard, but he really is the best man for the job.

I think that the mention of the lack of a watch that kept time on a ship reminded me, first, that Joe had that travel clock that should run adequately well on the ship, and, second, that such a clock, set to the standard time in Sardic, would be an incredible navigational aid.  I did not at this point know I was headed that direction, but the clock was going to get me there.

---

Chapter 21, Brown 7

The floor plan in this house owes something to that of my parents’ house in Ramsey; but it has a very different feel in several places.  It’s a bit distorted, too, but I didn’t expect the reader would sense that–or if he did, it would add to the eeriness of it all.  Derek starts upstairs in a left rear bedroom; but there are only windows in the back, so there’s probably another room beyond that.  In addition, the hall continues past that room, again suggesting at least one more.  He makes a left, putting the rear of the house on his left, and walks straight down the hall.  There is another door before he reaches the stairs, and I envision at least one on his right.  But, rather incongruously, the stairs seem to continue straight in front of him.  Yet when he falls down them, he rolls straight toward the front of the house–somewhere he’s made a right turn, yet the hall was always straight.  He lands on what I envision as a flagstone front hall, he notices a lightswitch but not a door.  He now makes effectively a right, headed back parallel to the hall but closer to the front of the house, which is now on his left.  This carries him through the living room, which is open to the hall, and then through the arch into the dining room, which is in the left rear corner of the building–but again, has no windows to the side.  My parents’ house is so designed downstairs, but that the front hall is enclosed and the door quite obvious.  Derek seems to have traveled farther upstairs than down, but he is clearly at the end of the house downstairs, when he seemingly was not when upstairs.  Again, it is the layout of the kitchen and dining room from their house:  the table is beneath the hanging light fixture, a picture window on the rear of the dining room, and a door to the kitchen more toward the living room.  Beyond that door, the kitchen area is largely to the left, much as described, with the refrigerator to the right, and a counter extending into the center of the room to separate the dinette.  At this point the model diverges, as we have reached the line of the stairs and seemingly the edge of the house.  I imagine a basement stair behind a door to the right at the far end, and perhaps another door straight ahead to something else, but in the model there’s a door in the far corner across the dinette which leads to a screen porch.  Derek never sees that far, but is driven back into the kitchen.

Breaking up the journey into pieces let me decide things as they happened and avoid bogging down with planning part of the journey that would never occur.  It also allowed for more tension, as I could consider everything that could go wrong with each bit and then make the move, and then consider again, thus giving the feeling of creeping across the set.

It was then time to do something with all that tension.  Up to now it’s possible that it’s all in Derek’s mind, and as long as it is there, it is a mood built on uncertainty.  The revelation that the ghost is real is a fright, in some ways breaking the mood by confirming our fears.

---

Chapter 22, Hastings 51

Tubrok came into existence entirely because I needed a reason why Merlin had not killed Horta.  A more powerful enemy seemed the best idea.  Once I had thought of him, I began to get the idea for the grand conclusion of the third book.  That is, I had already determined that Lauren, Bethany, Slade, Shella, and Derek were going to be together fighting something in the vampire world in the future, but now I knew what.

Lauren overlooks the fact that the Horta she sees here will be more than a millennium older when she fights him in the future; she is estimating his power based on her memory of a greatly strengthened future version of him.  Thus Merlin is not so worried as she is.

Tubrok’s strategy came largely from extrapolation from Gavin’s, figuring out what a vampire might try to do to further his own ends in that milieu.  I later saw something similar in the television series Being Human, but that was years after I wrote this and it wasn’t quite the same.

There is a sense in which Lauren has created a predestination paradox by mentioning the sword in the stone:  she has brought from the future an idea that she got from history.  However, we know that she is not from this universe, so it’s not really a problem—we just need to figure out how such a story came into existence in her world, and since we know the story exists we know it can come into existence without the suggestion from the future.

What Merlin teaches Lauren here is something we learned to call SEP invisibility.  It stands for “Somebody Else’s Problem”, and is a sort of psionic trick that doesn’t make you invisible but puts you beneath the level of notice—the way you walk around people on the sidewalk without really seeing them.  Lauren and Merlin do not vanish, but they pass unnoticed because they’ve persuaded the minds around them that they’re not important, not worth noticing.

I back-wrote that teaching moment after the book was finished, because I needed Lauren to have that skill when she arrived in the final world of the book.  I added her using it several times in earlier chapters to get it there, this being the first.

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Chapter 23, Kondor 49

The problem about leaving Doctor Evan in Durnmist had two levels.  One was that I needed to figure out what job Kondor would do on the next route, and I didn’t really see continuing the Kondor as Doctor bit too much longer; the other was I needed a plausible reason to keep Evan on the ship if Kondor wasn’t going to be the doctor.

I hadn’t considered what would happen when Kondor got to New Haven; but I thought I’d get things pointed in the right direction for that.

Joe knows the route from having worked the other Mary Piper.  Captain John would assume he just found out from being aboard the ship.

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Chapter 24, Brown 8

I had no idea how Derek was going to die in this world; but once the battle got fierce, it was just a matter of playing both sides and seeing what I could cause to happen.

The bit with the glass shards is I think a wonderful poltergeist effect.  They should be falling with him, landing around him.  Instead, they pause in the air high above him, and then target him in rapid flight as projectiles.  I don’t know whether it comes across, but I didn’t want to be too technical about it.

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Chapter 25, Hastings 52

The argument about vampires led logically to one of those most difficult questions:  how can you prove that something does not exist?  I particularly like the notion that these magical creatures could exist unknown to her.  I think most people take too much on faith, and don’t realize they’re doing it.

The issue of whether Lauren can use magic to do what she thinks God wants done is a difficult one altogether, and worth bringing up again.  Merlin’s answers are useful; they make it easier to build a diversified sorceress who is yet something of a prophetess, because there’s no conflict between the magics she uses and the mission she pursues.  The answer to the problem seemed to lie in whether there was a difference in kind between doing what you think God wants done and doing it by magic, or whether that was only a difference in style.  I think this conversation, although it didn’t fully convince Lauren, fully convinced most readers.

The idea that criminal accusations had to be made in the king’s courtyard at noon was something that easily sounded right and made it impossible for vampires to make use of the legal system.  I liked it.

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Chapter 26, Kondor 50

Oddly, I turned the loop around in my mind when I wrote this.  I somehow envision the ship going east through the northern latitudes at the beginning of the route and then returning west closer to the equator.  The fact is that the major currents do exactly the opposite, going west near the poles and east near the equator, and they do so precisely because of the direction of rotation of the planet.  The only way I could maintain my circle and have it fit with known laws would be to put the major settlements in the southern hemisphere–one too many things to try to explain to the reader.  Thus this passage is always jarring to me, because I expect Kondor to be going east and he claims to be going west.

I might have included the clock bit because my wife is related to the Harrison clockmakers of England, and that might include the John Harrison who solved the longitude problem by building a clock that kept time at sea.  I saw the special on A&E, but now can’t remember whether I’d come up with the idea before that (based probably on some of James Burke’s shows) or because of it.

The GSPS thing was a throwaway.  Not having Bob Slade in this book, I didn’t have the usual anachronistic comments he makes, but Joe sometimes made them as well, so I let him make one here.

I think I was using the game mechanics from the Mary Piper world again to generate events; sea monster is such an event, and dropping a sea serpent into the story here was a fun idea.

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Chapter 27, Brown 9

E. R. Jones had run a world for my eldest when he was first playing in which there was a castle in the midst of a swamp, the castle inhabited by what was not so obviously a vampire and his mildly deformed idiot servant.  This world was inspired by that, but all the detail was invented.

I did a lot of camping in my teens, but by the time I was in my twenties I’d had enough of “roughing it” and have not done any tenting since, although I once went to a festival in a pop-up camper.

The mosquito was, I think, prefiguring the real villain of the world.

I mentioned the need for a larger pack, but had not yet solved it.  When I introduced the characters in the next world, I created Bill specifically to be the source of the backpack.

The block was originally a wall; but the wall bothered me.  It couldn’t really look big enough to be mistaken for a cliff and be far enough to take that long to reach.  I changed it on my read through from wall to block, hoping that would work better.

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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 #78, on the subject of Novel Fears.

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).  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.

There was at this point one similar previous mark Joseph “young” web log post 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).

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 10, Hastings 47

When writing the Multiverser rules, I had described “stage two” as “attempting to achieve that higher level of consciousness known to the ancient monks of Tibet as ‘awake’”.  I didn’t use the whole line here, but I still liked the description.  Lauren supposes herself surrounded because her dream-state is overlaying the mossy trees of the new world with the imagery of giant birds from the previous one.

Those who have read the previous book know that there is some connection between Lauren and Merlin.  This is where it starts.

I knew from the beginning of the first book–even before it was going to be a book–that eventually Lauren was going to become Merlin’s pupil.  It was, I suppose, one of those ideas Ed Jones had that he never fully executed; but he credited me for it in a round-about way.  I had been running his character in Multiverser games, and had a crazy idea for a Narnia series.  It would begin with an adventure connected to The Silver Chair, a rather easy one to build an adventure around, but people in the world would recognize him from an earlier visit in the time of Prince Caspian which he had not yet made.  Thus I was going to run him through a series of adventures in this world in reverse chronological order, and tease him in the present with things he was going to do in the past.  He liked the idea so much he had a character named Henry show up and tell me that I was Merlin.  I’ve probably already covered this (I’m writing this history of the ideas entirely out of sequence, so I have not yet written the history of the ideas in the first book that far).  I worked out that I was eventually going to meet Merlin and then later be mistaken for him.  I figured out how to get around the fact that Lauren was a woman (and so could not be mistaken for Merlin), but she was still going to be his student.  It was time to do that.  I knew I needed in this book to train Lauren, give her her other name of Laurelyn, connect her to Wandborough, introduce Bethany as her student, and not make it seem like this was the entire point of the book.  That meant I needed ample time to do other things, and I had to create story lines that led her to these events smoothly.

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Chapter 11, Kondor 45

CPR—Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation—was not taught to lifeguards when I took my training, nor part of Boy Scout first aid.  It was not developed until I was starting college, I think, and then it became very popular very quickly.  More recently it has been revised to eliminate the interruption for breaths when working alone, but Joe would have learned the version that was taught at the turn of the century, which is the one I represent here.

My father once commented on that aspect of the history of medicine.  We were taught a couple ways to pump air into the lungs of someone who was not breathing, with Mouth-to-Mouth Resuscitation the most modern of them.  It wasn’t until the 1960s that someone thought to blow air into the lungs of someone not breathing.  I’m guessing that before that they thought that exhaled breath wouldn’t have enough oxygen in it, but there must have been a time before that when they wouldn’t have thought to consider that.

The reaction seemed apparent.

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Chapter 12, Brown 4

Derek is working through the process of proving to himself that this nightmare of his present experience is not a dream.  It’s not really that easy to do.

The line “But a wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser” is taken directly from Poe’s story.  I was very impressed with it, and brought it over into my dialogue.

When I ran this game for my son, Montresor’s gun was a muzzle-loaded cap-and-ball.  After reading Poe, I moved it up to the early nineteenth century and gave him a revolver, which made more sense as a weapon in Multiverser terms.  It also meant that even if Montresor responded faster than Derek, Derek would have a chance to kill him before dying.

I needed the talking killer; but I needed to make it seem reasonable.  Thus I came upon the idea of moving Derek to a spot where he would not be seen, and letting Montresor spill his guts about the murder as a way of trying to flush him out.  I also wanted Derek to kill the killer, but die in the process, which is a difficult stunt to arrange, but I think I did it.

This is terribly athletic for Derek, but it is an act of desperation in a desperate situation.

It is also improbable in Multiverser that a knife wound would be rapidly fatal; I’m assuming that Derek is teaching himself a kill technique, which he refines in future encounters.

Derek takes the knife with him; it is now his, and becomes his first real weapon even though it’s only a butcher knife.

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Chapter 13, Hastings 48

I never explained how Merlin knew anything he knew; at this point, he was just Merlin, Lauren’s teacher for this part of her adventures and part of the mythology of Camelot.  He expects her because by some magic he knew she was coming, but I don’t know how he knew.

When Lauren was working with the parakeet language, my editor became impatient that I was trying to explain why names did not translate, but that was actually a problem—ordinarily names do translate, because they have meanings.  It seems that the parakeet names did not have meanings, but were musical strings identifying individual birds.  Having established then that the names did not translate, I now had to explain why in this case they did.  It was essential to my story of Lauren that she somehow was going to become Laurelyn of Wandborough, and part of that was that I was making the name “Lauren” a shortened form of “Laurelyn”.  The trick was not quite sudden, and took some thought; but it had occurred to me that I could get to Laurelyn from Lauren if I suggested it was the earlier form of the same name, and that the creation of the name Elsbeth (a popular name in fantasy at least) could give me Spellsbreath, which would be a fun name to give her.

As to that, I never checked.  I don’t know that the names are etymologically related at all, but it sounds good.

I also have no idea about the spell that creates the road, and don’t think I ever used it again.

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Chapter 14, Kondor 46

Medicine is one of those things that seems almost magical if you don’t know what’s happening, but in this case the doctor is intelligent and experienced enough to figure out what it is that Joe did, and try to learn it.

One of the challenges in front of Joe that I did not want to overlook is that he knows how to do things with much more advanced medicine and equipment, and of course he knows what he learned in Sherwood, but it was pretty likely that there would be medicines and procedures here that “everyone knows” that he had never seen.  He had to be able to learn them without suggesting that he doesn’t know any real medicine—but the CPR incident has moved him forward significantly in that regard, an incidental benefit of an event that was intended primarily as a moment of excitement in what is otherwise a routine storyline.

I briefly contemplated whether Kondor should do the medical advances thing here, so I brought it up thinking my readers would probably also wonder about that.  I found reasons why it would not work, and so was able to avoid telling the same story over again.

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Chapter 15, Brown 5

The ghost story I made up out of whole cloth.  It probably has some connection to a lot of haunted house movies that I never saw.

The haunted house was an experiment.  I’d never run it, never really thought much about it, but I wondered whether I could do it.  I later wrote it up for game play, and have used it in convention demos.

The bicycle now came in handy as a reference point for him to track; that part was fortuitous.

I think it was an episode of Seaquest DSV in which the characters were exploring a ghost ship, a haunted sunken passenger liner, and one of them touched a doorknob that was blazing hot but immediately thereafter cool.  I liked the idea, but reversed it to cold, partly because I didn’t want to steal it outright and partly because I think of ghosts as connected more to cold than to heat.

I got the idea at this point of having him pick up souvenirs of each world.  He had the knife from the last world, and I was going to add the blanket from this one.

Part of the trick to this world is that the ghost can do things like slam a door or freeze a doorknob or cause noises, but initially these are all done in a way that admits to being otherwise explained.  Derek has to recognize that there is a ghost here, and until then he will continue to provide rational explanations for everything that happens, or at least attempt to do so.  Providing his rational explanations and maintaining the mood of something eerily supernatural was the challenge through this world.

The house has a shape in my mind that is drawn really from several houses, and ultimately it does not fit into a coherent floor plan.  I attempted to fix this when I made it into a playable world, but it wasn’t too important here.

Versers generally have to find an explanation for themselves.  Lauren chose to believe that God was sending her into worlds to do good, Bob that he was training for Ragnorak, Joe that there was a scientifically explainable accident that infected him with scriff resulting in random travels.  Derek is still exploring possibilities, and the notion that “this is the afterlife, and you’re a ghost” certainly is one.

When I was twelve we moved into a new development, and over the course of the next dozen years there were always houses being erected within a block or two of where we lived.  Being kids, we always explored the building sites on weekends and summer evenings, often collecting scrap wood with which to build tree houses.  I spent a fair amount of that time looking at the way the buildings were constructed, and that nervousness Derek has about the open space where the stairs had not been installed was my own—if I fell into the basement, not only was I likely to be seriously injured, there would be no way for me to climb out again.

There were times when my mother would put clothes on the stairs for us to take to our rooms.  She didn’t do it often, partly because she tended to do the laundry before anyone else was awake, and partly because we weren’t very good about putting the clothes in closets and drawers, but there was a time when I had to check to see if anything piled on the stairs was supposed to go up with me to my room.  I figured Derek had the same experience.

It occurs to me that in my mind’s eye I have a pattern, a floor plan, of Derek’s home.  We never see him there but in his own recollection of the moment his friend broke the game controller and he versed out the first time.  However, I see that as the living room of a house in which we lived briefly on Del-a-vue Avenue in Carney’s Point.  It had a couple of small rooms upstairs, and my mind made one of those Derek’s bedroom.  I don’t see that it ever mattered, but it was part of the character background.

The wait has made Derek the more nervous, and so he rushes as he decides the stairs are safe.  Thus his fall is abrupt.

The wooden floor was an accommodation to the fact that I did not want him seriously injured in the fall.  When I see this stairway, it is the one in my mother’s house in Ramsey, carpeted stairs with a flagstone hall at the bottom.  (The floorplan here is very like that house, but that at the bottom of the stairs there is no door to the left leading into the family room, and there is no front door leading outside, and the archway to the living room is open—my mother’s has folding doors concealing that room.)

I worried about the electronics he was carrying—laptop, video game.  I decided that between the backpack and the blanket these things were probably adequately wrapped such that they could survive the tumble, even though they might have broken, and so since I needed them to survive they did.

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Chapter 16, Hastings 49

The uncertainty in regard to the date helps me avoid the problems associated with dating the Camelot stories; all extant accounts are considerably later and highly fanciful, but exactly when any of these people might have lived is debated.

My vision of Merlin’s home probably owes something to Disney’s The Sword in the Stone.

I had by this point worked out what the acorn was.  It was one of those abrupt flashes of realization, but now I had to figure out how to keep it from becoming known before the reveal.

Some of this was rewritten, particularly in reference to Bob Slade, after I had finished the third novel, because I surprised myself there and needed to anticipate that here.

I picked up from C. S. Lewis the notion that it was possible that the myths of Paganism were preparing the world for the coming of the gospel, and perhaps expanded it a bit to suggest that the gods of Paganism were real spirits charged with the care of various peoples in the world until such time as the gospel reached them.  That allowed me to suggest that the gods of the druids were lawfully deities in Britain as servants of God—spiritual mid-level managers running their part of the world to the best of their abilities—and so I didn’t have to make Merlin a Christian for him to work with Lauren.  The idea had been cooking in my mind for many years.  God chose to have the gospel carried by people, not by angels.  There seems a plausibility to the notion that some, at least, of the pagan gods were appointed to care for the nations to whom that message would not yet come.  Lauren’s supernatural presence here might or might not change that.

In a sense, Lauren’s magic is less interesting to Merlin than her technology.  He predates the invention of buttons, and so almost everything she carries is futuristic for him, and thus interesting.

It occurs to me that Merlin uses the Socratic Method; they use it in law schools.  The idea is that you don’t tell the student what you want him to know, you ask him questions that will force him to reach the information himself.  That way you’ve taught him how to think.

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Chapter 17, Kondor 47

The idea of a major operation had the appeal that it would be exciting without being more combat (which can only be interesting so many times).  Having it be the doctor who was injured meant first that there would be no question of whether someone else would care for the patient and second that new avenues would open for Kondor, as he would then have more to do in medical.

I read about using microwave scalpels to cauterize spleen injuries in Omni Magazine in the 1980’s; it still sounds futuristic to me, though.  Spleens are so rich with blood that they don’t normally clot and seal.  I included it in Kondor’s bag as a tool from the future.

The blood typing thing, and the notions that the humans aboard the Mary Piper might not be quite as “human” as they appear, is a consideration in a lot of games.  I remember Eric Ashley dropped me in one world where all the proteins were linked opposite to ours, with the result that there was no nutrition in anything I ate.  Here the concern is about matching blood types, and the recognition that there’s not much Joe can do without a lot of research he can’t do.

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Chapter 18, Brown 6

Derek connects the sight of an electric light switch with proof of “civilization”, having just come from a nineteenth century home where lanterns and candles were the illumination of choice.

Derek’s internal struggle is part of the tension here.  He can enjoy horror movies because they are not real (he ultimately recognizes this), but he would be terrified if for one moment he thought this was real.

As the ghost begins throwing objects, it starts surreptitiously, trying not to reveal its own existence at this point.  It seems more as if things are falling than that they are aimed.

It occurs to me that I always envisioned Derek as finding his own as a computer whiz.  That’s why he started with the laptop.

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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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