Tag Archives: Writing

Books by the Author

#55: Stories Winding Down

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #55, on the subject of Stories Winding Down.

This is about the creation of my book Verse Three, Chapter One:  The First Multiverser Novel, now being posted to the web site in serialized form.  This “behind the writings” look definitely contains spoilers, so you might want to read the referenced chapters before reading this look at them.  That link will take you to the table of contents for the book; links below (the section headings) will take you to the specific individual chapters, and there are (or will soon be) links on those pages to bring you back hopefully to the same point here.  There were also numerous similar previous mark Joseph “young” web log posts:

  1. #18:  A Novel Comic Milestone (which provided this kind of insight into the first six chapters),
  2. #20:  Becoming Novel (covering chapters seven through twelve),
  3. #22:  Getting Into Characters (for chapters thirteen through eighteen),
  4. #25:  Novel Changes (chapters 19 through 24),
  5. #27:  Novel Continuation (chapters 25 through 30),
  6. #30:  Novel Directions (chapters 31 through 36),
  7. #33:  Novel Struggles (chapters 37 through 42),
  8. #35:  Quiet on the Novel Front (chapters 43 through 48), and
  9. #37:  Character Diversity (chapters 49 through 56),
  10. #39:  Character Futures (chapters 57 through 60),
  11. #43:  Novel Worlds (chapters 61 through 66),
  12. #47:  Character Routines (chapters 67 through 72), and
  13. #50:  Stories Progress (chapters 73 through 78), and
  14. #53:  Character Battles (chapters 79 through 84).

This picks up from there.  The battles our three characters were fighting last time have come to an end, or at least a lull, in these chapters.

img0055Spring

There is some essential background to the book as a whole in that first post, which I will not repeat here.

Chapter 85, Hastings 30

Lauren’s story was driving forward at the moment with the arrival of Horta, so I brought her back and delayed Bob for a chapter.  That also had the advantage of leaving Bob floating in space a bit longer, giving the feeling of that seemingly interminable waiting he experienced before he was rescued.

I still had no idea what the acorn did; having Bethany shout to use it was another piece of the puzzle I was going to have to solve when I worked it out.  It seemed appropriate to suggest that it would be useful against Horta.

Lauren is overmatched by Horta, and it shows.  She is losing from the beginning, and can’t get an advantage.

I did not need the gun, as such, to go with her; I only needed the bullets.  To have Horta damage the gun meant Lauren was not going to use it, and the bullets would be in the clip when she reached the next world.

The more potent a spell is in Multiverser, the more it costs to do it.  The cost of the magic Lauren uses to engulf Horta in flame is high in that the range is extremely short creating the serious risk that the user will be caught in the fire—which is what happens to Lauren.  The idea that the spell Lauren used was so powerful that it killed her even as she succeeded was an idea I had seen with explosives, but not with magic.

Chapter 86, Slade 28

The notion that life pods are automatic seems to be presumed in science fiction stories, but it occurred to me that it is presumptuous and there should be some consideration of why they are that way.  The answer was simple enough.

This was a different way to show the battle; it saved me from trying to work out the details of how they did such combat just yet, and captured the necessary parts.

Bob reasonably sees this as a turning point in his life, a moment at which he has begun to be a warrior.  It’s not much, but it gives him his start.

Chapter 87, Kondor 29

The vorgo has had its effect, and by chance it has brought to unlife the dead man next to Joe.  He is now looking for an explanation that does not include the idea that magic has animated a corpse and caused it to attack him.

He also has the experience of being frightened of something which intellectually he does not believe.  The dead are dead, he tells himself, and this is all done as part of a psychological battle—but if so, it is working against him almost as well as against the others, because he believes they are undead even though he knows they cannot be.

Again Kondor comes up with a naturalist explanation for a supernatural event.  That leads him to start seeking a naturalist solution, which the reader knows is a mistake.

Chapter 88, Hastings 31

The image for this world bothers me a bit.  Our artist was from the southwest, and apparently was unfamiliar with the shape of the wigwams made by Native Americans in the eastern forests—he made them look like teepees of straw.  They’re supposed to be round-topped.  But then, I’m not an artist.

Although I knew that this was the last world for the book, and I knew the major plot points that would have to happen here, I actually knew very few of the details of this world at this point.  I knew that it was primitive; that was about all.

The telepathy test was something that I don’t think I’d ever seen anyone try, but it made sense:  if you were still in the same world, you should be able to find the mind of at least one person whose mind you knew.  Lauren did not consider the possibility that they might all, or any, be asleep, though.

I considered that she might have been teleported to the Poconos, not far from the city; I knew she had not been, but it was a possibility she had to consider.

The notion that versers think about patterns in their arrivals is a recurring one.  There are no patterns, but the randomness of the arrivals sometimes seems to create them.

I sleep in sweat suits.  I started decades ago when we had a dog who would wake me wanting to go out, and the pajamas I favored while not indecent were not exactly adequate for being seen by neighbors.  The practice made sense for a verser, particularly when in an outdoor setting, so Lauren adopted it.  I don’t think I ever considered what the others wore for sleep.

Chapter 89, Slade 29

I was actually impressed by Slade’s performance; it seemed to work well.  I thought it would be good to have his shipmates impressed.

QNL is explained later.  It stands for Quantum Non-Locality.  I don’t know whether it would actually work, but is based on the theory that one particle of matter can exist in two places at the same time, which I’m told has been “demonstrated”.

Slade questions his actions, wondering rather human questions about the men he had killed, and chides himself for doing something (the thinking) that does not fit with his warrior self-image.  I’ve seen the monolithic fighter type, and he doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

Slade’s decision to push the questions from his mind seemed an important part of his character development, but I’m not yet certain where it is leading.

Chapter 90, Kondor 30

The priest Talwin is of course healing people by prayer.  Kondor assumes that that is not possible, and so concludes that Talwin simply persuades them that they can keep going.

Kondor keeps coming back to being a doctor.  It seems to be his first response in most situations, and so has become very much core to his character.

Figuring out what day would look like when the sky is so totally overcast it is as night, to a man whose red and blue visual receptors are tuned outside the visible light range into the infrared and ultraviolet respectively, was a feat; but I had already considered the problems of mixing those frequencies into normal eyesight in a web page on vision variants in Dungeons & Dragons™, so I had a head start on it.

Interest in these “behind the writings” continues, so I’m still thinking they’re worth producing.  Feedback is always welcome, of course.  Your Patreon support is also needed to maintain this.

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Books by the Author

#53: Character Battles

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #53, on the subject of Character Battles.

This is about the creation of my book Verse Three, Chapter One:  The First Multiverser Novel, now being posted to the web site in serialized form.  This “behind the writings” look definitely contains spoilers, so you might want to read the referenced chapters before reading this look at them.  That link will take you to the table of contents for the book; links below (the section headings) will take you to the specific individual chapters, and there are (or will soon be) links on those pages to bring you back hopefully to the same point here.  There were also numerous similar previous mark Joseph “young” web log posts:

  1. #18:  A Novel Comic Milestone (which provided this kind of insight into the first six chapters),
  2. #20:  Becoming Novel (covering chapters seven through twelve),
  3. #22:  Getting Into Characters (for chapters thirteen through eighteen),
  4. #25:  Novel Changes (chapters 19 through 24),
  5. #27:  Novel Continuation (chapters 25 through 30),
  6. #30:  Novel Directions (chapters 31 through 36),
  7. #33:  Novel Struggles (chapters 37 through 42),
  8. #35:  Quiet on the Novel Front (chapters 43 through 48), and
  9. #37:  Character Diversity (chapters 49 through 56),
  10. #39:  Character Futures (chapters 57 through 60),
  11. #43:  Novel Worlds (chapters 61 through 66),
  12. #47:  Character Routines (chapters 67 through 72), and
  13. #50:  Stories Progress (chapters 73 through 78).

This picks up from there.  All three of our characters are involved in some kind of fight in these chapters.

img0053Phila

There is some essential background to the book as a whole in that first post, which I will not repeat here.

Chapter 79, Slade 26

I have never been a sports enthusiast, but I was forced to play a bit in high school and knew something of the various games.  Football is a particularly good example here, as each player has to do his job but probably does not know what the other players are doing—only that if they all do the little part they need to do, the guy who does understand the whole plan will see to it that they achieve the desired result.  My job might be only to push this incoming lineman to the left, but the result should be that our receiver goes through the hole that helps create and we advance the ball a few yards.

I would feel bad about stealing matter transmission, except I don’t know who created the idea.  They had it in Blake’s 7, and mine is most like theirs, but I saw it in Star Trek before that, and it was on Doctor Who at least as early as the Tom Baker years.

In my explanations of what happens when someone “verses out” I noticed that it was very like what theoretically happens in matter transmission:  the molecular structure of the body is disassembled, moved, and reassembled.  Thus for Slade his first transmat would feel similar to his last verse-out.  He’d never been fully conscious for that, but fortunately I’d already moved him to that semi-conscious state for his arrival here, so it was something that would feel familiar.

Chapter 80, Hastings 28

The idea of blessing water as it filled the tank of a pumper truck was mine.  We used it when we went after the Presemium, a high-brow theater that was the third of the three major vampire strongholds in Ed’s version of Chicago—it had underground caverns, and I wanted them flooded with holy water.  Since at this point I knew Lauren was not going to stay in this world long enough to do all that I had done, I decided to use the pumper truck, and several other bits we used at the Presemium, at the Pit.  (I also did a psionic transmutation, changing the water in the fire sprinkler system to alcohol, but I did not include that in the books.)

The camp food was modeled on Gumper’s Four-man Meal Packs, a staple of long-trek hikes and canoe trips.

I think I inserted this short chapter to give the feeling of delay, of the passage of time before the attack on the Pit, hoping that the reader would feel some anticipation from it.

Chapter 81, Kondor 27

I may have seen something like the ram catcher in a game source book somewhere, but I can’t recall to credit it.  I might have invented it and used it here initially, and then seen something like it elsewhere.

The fact that arrows are not terribly effective against skeletons is a Dungeons & Dragons™ trope, but it makes sense to me.

Eventually, when I designed this world for game play, I had to work out how the wizard did his magic; at this point, he only needed to be able to do it, particularly since Kondor, a disbeliever, would not be interested in how Sowan thought he did it.

Chapter 82, Slade 27

Two things are happening in this chapter, really.  One is that I am trying to give the impression of critical sections of the ship—a liquid or gas cooling system, a computer mainframe, and something like rods to control the reaction in a nuclear reactor—without actually saying what anything really did and so limiting the future technology or causing Slade to appear to know more than he did.

The other is that I’m trying to turn a routine raid into an action story.  The alarm sounding and the appearance of the technician are part of that effort, creating problems that have to be overcome.

The expression about there being no good plan Bs is something of a family enigma.  I’m sure I heard it from my brother Roy, who is equally sure he got it from me.  I joke that since I included it in my novel, I’ll be credited for it, but I suspect there’s someone out there who came up with it first who hasn’t gotten credit for it.

I wanted one-man life pods so that it would make sense for Slade to be alone.  They’re not exactly sensible, but you do see them on some science fiction movies.

Chapter 83, Hastings 29

I had staying power—Ed complained about how difficult it was to get my character out of a world, and he never actually succeeded in getting me out of this one.  Lauren is reflecting that to some degree, winning and surviving against the odds.  She is the only one of the characters at this point still in the original world—although in fairness, Slade stayed in his first world for a couple decades, and Kondor for perhaps a dozen years, and it’s really only been a few months for Lauren.  Still, I was going to have to move her out of this world, and I knew that this event was my best shot—if I did not do it now, I was going to have to expand into a lot of much more difficult adventures (my work eventually involved a paranatural predator, a ghost, an Egyptian curse, and a wizard, all of which were crazy open-ended stories).  So I knew going into this that somehow Lauren was going to come to the end during this fight.

This chapter is laced with Lauren’s scripture verses.  I wanted to establish them, and convey the texts to the reader.

The dimming is of course the wizardry of Horta, battling against her.  We’ve got a contest of skills and power here.

The baptism quote is one of my favorite “people get this wrong all the time” verses, which is why Lauren explains it.

The wizard whom Bethany replaces brought a Barbie doll—he seemed to be fixated on the things—and when he cast his spell it walked into the fray stabbing people in the ankles with something like a hat pin.  He complained that it was supposed to grow to be forty feet tall or something.  I wasn’t doing dolls with Bethany, and thought that military toys were a better choice.

The soldier was not an unreasonable possibility, given the priest’s connections with the hunters, but the real reason for having him here was to give Lauren the bullets that Joe was going to need in the last adventure.  I did not yet know what that was, exactly, but it was taking shape and I knew that he was going to be short on ammo and needing more.

I still did not realize that Lauren would be fighting Horta in the past, or that there would be a more powerful vampire, Tubrok.  Still, this confrontation was going to be adequate for the climax of this world.

Chapter 84, Kondor 28

C. S. Lewis somewhere spoke of the “materialist magician”, the person who tapped supernatural powers but believed they were entirely natural abilities of his own.  Kondor has something of that perspective of the wizard—who is not such a person, who actually is knowingly tapping supernatural energies.  However, he is correct that there is a difference between having mental abilities beyond those of everyone else that give you unexpected powers and using magic—he just fails to recognize that the latter is also possible.

Joe tells the dying man he’s going to be all right, and maybe he thinks so, if he can get back in time to help him; but there is something to the need for medical personnel to encourage positive thinking in patients, who are more likely to recover if they believe they will, and so it may be that this is just something Joe has learned as part of “bedside manner”.

Joe is faced with another evidence that what he thinks is happening is incorrect, as the dying soldier dies and comes back to life as a zombie to attack him.  First he has to deal with the problem; then he has to explain it to himself in a way that fits his view of the universe.

Interest in these “behind the writings” continues, so I’m still thinking they’re worth producing.  Feedback is always welcome, of course.  Your Patreon support is also needed to maintain this.

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Law and Politics

#52: The X-Files Sexism Debate

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #52, on the subject of The X-Files Sexism Debate.

A few days ago I published mark Joseph “young” web log post #49:  Duchovny, Anderson, Sexism, and the Free Market.  It created quite a stir on an IMDB thread where I had announced it, and it seemed that I should provide some kind of response–but the sheer volume of the posts there (which has undoubtedly grown since I wrote this) made it difficult to provide a comprehensive and orderly reply there, so I am writing another post here to address it.

Early in my writing career I learned two important truths that all aspiring writers need to grasp.

First, you are much more likely to hear from those who disagree with you or do not like what you are writing than from those who agree.  As long as you are “preaching to the choir” the choir will nod quietly and let you speak uninterrupted.  Get a few objectors in your audience, and you will hear the objections.  This is good, really.  Those negative responses are valuable.  Some of them are valuable because they give you insight into opposing views; others are valuable because they clearly misunderstood what you were saying, and so may indicate that you need to communicate your points better.  It may be that both of these benefits acrue to me from the comments posted, and for this I am grateful.  Thank you.

Second, there will always be people who will criticize what you wrote without having read it.  They will base their opinion on a title, or a comment from another reader, or their expectations of what you are likely to have said based on such information as they have obtained about you.  My advice is to ignore these people.  Gradually others will realize what their opinions are worth, and arguing with them will not help your position in the least–they do not know and do not care what you are saying, only what they have already concluded regarding what they think you meant.

img0052Actors

The objections began with someone self-identified as alphabase17, who seemed to think that by asserting that the action of the producers was not sexist I was denying the existence of sexism in the world.  Perhaps I was unclear.  My point was actually that the sexism that was reflected in the situation was actually “in the world”, not in the producers.  Assuming arguendo that the facts are as they have been presented (more on that in a moment), the reason male actors are offered more than female actors is not because Hollywood producers are prejudiced, but because viewers are.  Both men and women want more to see male leads in their films and television shows, and so Hollywood produces more shows with male leads.  Over the decades as shows with female leads became more popular, more such shows were produced–but it is ratings that drive television, and the decision concerning what to pay an actor is ultimately a bottom-line decision:  will having this actor sell enough soap to pay that salary and still turn a profit?

Our poster alphabase17 asserts that we know the facts, but when those facts are stated they are the same incomplete facts I included in my article:  We know that at one point Anderson was offered half the salary that Duchovny was being paid.  We do not know what Duchovny was initially offered, and we do know that after negotiations were complete Anderson was being paid the same amount as Duchovny.  The way these negotiations work, of course, is that the producers approach the actor’s agent and say we’d like to have your client in our show and are offering X amount; the agent then says X is not enough, we want Z; the producers then say Z is too much, what about we settle at Y?  Eventually they agree on a number that is usually more than the original offer and less than the original response.  Our problem is that for Duchovny, we don’t know “X”, “Y”, or “Z”; for Anderson, we don’t know “X”, “Y”, or “Z” but we do know that her “X” is half of Duchovny’s “Y”, and her “Y” is the same as his.

Let’s be hypothetical, and extrapolate some thinking.  The numbers I’m using are intentionally unrealistic, for illustrative purposes.

    We’d like to launch a new X-Files.  We want Duchovny.  We can do the series without him, but we’d have to rethink it–whether to make it a reboot with a younger actor playing Mulder (like the 2009 Star Trek), or a next generation with a new lead agent taking Mulder’s job (like Star Trek:  The Next Generation), but we’ll take a hit–the show will be more popular if we have Duchovny as Mulder.  Let’s offer him a thousand an episode and see what his agent says.

    So the agent says no, make it ten thousand, and they dicker, and agree on five thousand.  Now they move to the next step.  If they didn’t have Duchovny, they probably wouldn’t want Anderson at all–if they’re replacing Mulder with a younger version, they’ll want a younger Scully, and if they’re moving to the next generation they won’t want Scully at all.

    Now that we have Duchovny for Mulder, we’ll want Anderson for Scully.  We can’t easily have a new actress play Scully, but we could replace Mulder’s partner with a new, younger, agent.  We’d rather have Anderson, but we have options.  Let’s offer Anderson twenty-five hundred, and see where that puts us.

    The agent thinks that’s a solid offer, but it’s his job to negotiate, so he inquires to find out what they’re paying Duchovny, and when he sees the five thousand figure he says, no, you’re going to pay Anderson as much.  They agree.

    Note that if the producers offered Anderson up front what they were paying Duchovny, her agent would reasonably have thought they were more desperate to get her than they were, and would have asked for more; then they would be in the position that Duchovny’s agent would insist that Anderson can’t be paid more than Duchovny, and the entire negotiation process would be in turmoil.  In a sense, they have to offer Anderson less than they’re paying Duchovny.  However, note in this hypothetical reconstruction, their initial offer to Anderson was greater than that to Duchovny, even though it was only half what they were paying him.  Note, too, that the producers expected to pay more than their initial offer.  Initial offers are almost always low-ball for that reason, and a low offer to Anderson meant Anderson’s agent could earn his commission by getting her more without having to demand that she be paid more than Duchovny.

No, we don’t know that this is an accurate reconstruction of the negotiations; the numbers are certainly not accurate.  However, the point that alphabase17 missed is that this is a plausible reconstruction precisely because we do not know what Duchovny was offered before he negotiated the agreed pay.  Comparing agreed pay to agreed pay, we find they are equal.  Comparing an initial offer to one against a final agreed salary of the other tells us nothing, because we do not have the initial offer to the one.  We can be pretty certain that whatever the number is for which Duchovny’s agent settled, it was more than the initial offer.

alphabase17 makes a valid point with this:

As to audience preferences, you offered no data to support the claim that “more viewers are more willing to spend more money to see male stars.”

I admit that to some degree my argument is circular, but it is not entirely so.  Television producers spend a lot of money trying to determine what viewers will watch.  There are people trying to sell them program ideas of all kinds, starring men, women, children, aliens, animals, and who knows what else.  They do audience reactions, surveys, ratings of what people actually do watch, sponsor interest, and much more, and they attempt to pick shows that will attract viewers–and if those shows fail to attract viewers competitively, they get cancelled.  The facts that more shows have male stars and that male actors get paid more than females are strong indicators that all this analysis points to viewer preference for male leads.  It has never been exclusively true–Lucille Ball was able to hold audiences in the fifties and sixties, Star Trek did a series with the wonderful Kate Mulgrew in the captain’s chair (I did not enjoy the series, but she was good), Cagney and Lacey held viewers to a police drama starring female detectives, and there have been many others–but even now more male-star series succeed than female-star series, and producers put their money where the probabilities favor success.

Maybe it’s wrong, but I think that in law it would be said that I’ve got a rebuttable presumption:  there is enough evidence that the statement is true that to contradict it would require proof.

I want to thank waslah for his contribution.  Mish4 (who specifically chose to criticize without reading the article) had said

Why I always expecting the best from a man when they always erase sexism and dismiss women’s serious complains (sic)?

waslah answered

…this comment is kind of sexist in it’s own right. It seems to suggest that all men are misogynists…and that’s a bunch of man hating, misandrist bullcrap.
(Ellipsis original)

waslah is correct, but he misses a critical point about progressivist philosophy:  for some reason, it is only discrimatory if the target is a “protected class”.  You can make prejudicial comments about straight white men without any fear of retribution, but the assumption is that any negative statement made about a woman, or a black, or a homosexual, is inherently discriminatory.  We see this even with Michelle Obama, who assumes that a short elderly white woman asking her, a tall black woman, to reach something on the top shelf in a Target department store reflects the white woman’s prejudice toward blacks, not a recognition of the advantage of height.  If I say that statistically women have less upper body strength than men (anatomically demonstrable) I’m being mysogynistic, because it doesn’t matter that it’s true, only that it can be taken as a negative statement about women (or a positive statement about men, which comes to the same thing); but if a woman says that all men are misogynists, even though that is demonstrably false (whether or not it applies to me specifically), that is not considered sexist because it is not a negative statement about women (or gays).  No, it does not make any sense, but it is the way the progressivists regard the matter.  It has something to do with the fact that our ancestors mistreated these groups, and so we, their descendants, must bear similar mistreatment.

Returning to alphabase17:

…I commented upon it [the Duchovny/Anderson pay discrepancy] on three websites and got a lot of ironic, belittling, condescending comments from men, and those champions of intellect claimed that of course the male deserves to be paid more than the female and that I know nothing about show business and that I must be a vile feminist and that people like me should be ashamed for finding sexism where there is none.

I certainly apologize if I came across that way.  There is nothing in what I said that I intended as a matter of what anyone “deserves”.  That’s a bit like saying that apples “deserve” to cost more than oranges because apples taste better, or are healthier for you, or something like that.  If apples cost more than oranges, it’s because the demand exceeds the supply.  If actors are paid more than actresses, it is because audiences want actors more than they want actresses.  I did not say that there was no sexism involved; I said that the sexism was in the audience, the culture generally, not in the bean counters trying to get as much as they can for the smallest possible expenditure.  They tried to lowball Anderson.  They probably tried to lowball Duchovny first, and they’ve undoubtedly had to negotiate with a lot of people, such as writers and directors, concerning how much everyone will be paid for this project.  Actors are not paid based on how hard they work; they’re paid based on how much audience they draw.

Pizza restaurants buy their ingredients and sell their pizzas.  As one chain likes to remind us, better ingredients make better pizza–but also more expensive pizza.  There are chains that never tell us they make good pizza, they tell us that they make it cheap.  A decision is being made by each restaurant, is it worth the extra money to buy the better cheese, the fresher spices, the more expensive tomatoes?  Will we be able to sell the pizza for enough more to cover the extra cost of making it, or will we make more money by making the cheaper pizza?  From the perspective of the television producers, actors aren’t employees paid for their work, they’re ingredients in a product, commodities bought and sold.  The question is, how cheaply can I buy this actor, and what’s the return on my investment?  Any sexism that goes into that is the sexism of, “What will the audience pay to see this man in the project, as opposed to that woman?”  It is an assessment of the attitudes of the consumers, finding those often to be sexist.

Many of the things I have said here have been said by others in the thread at IMDB; I have been working on this response for several days, and decided not to remove such points.  I will finish with a quote from nrkist2424, from what was the last post on the thread when I finished this.  It was a point I was considering making, but I had no numbers to support it.

[Gillian Anderson]’s pay outweighs the combined pay for all the returning character actors.  Are you concerned about that?

Indeed, if it really were about “equal pay for equal work”, there is a tremendous amount of disparity there.  I read a quote from an actor who said they paid him a lot of money to stand in the rain and drink coffee; the acting he did for free.  The lead actors do not work much harder than all the others on the set; they aren’t getting paid based on their work.  Their performances are being purchased according to an agreed price based on the resale value of those performances.

And in the end, Gillian Anderson was paid exactly the same thing as David Duchnovny, because the studio agreed that she was worth it when she asked.  That’s how negotiation works.

Again, I extend my thanks to all who read the previous article and provided feedback.  Your input has not gone unnoticed.

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Bible and Theology, Law and Politics, Logic and Reasoning

#51: In Memoriam on Groundhog Day

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #51, on the subject of In Memoriam on Groundhog Day.

My father died a few days ago, at noon on January 27th, 2016.  There will be memorial visitation on Saturday, February 13th, from one to four in the afternoon at the Van Emburgh-Sneider-Pernice Funeral Home on Darlington Ave in Ramsey (New Jersey) near the home he has shared with my mother since I was twelve.  Before that we lived in Scotch Plains, and in Freeport, Long Island.  He came from Sardis, Mississippi, by way of an Electrical Engineering degree from Georgia Tech.  I will always remember him working decades for Western Union, but it had been decades since he was there and he had held a number of other jobs since.  He did not speak much of his education or his work, but I gather he had completed a masters at Stevens Institute of Technology, and worked sporadically toward a doctorate.  He held patents in focusing microwaves, and headed engineering in Western Union’s Data Services offshoot in the late 60’s.  He was the only person I knew who had worked in assembly language.

He was Cornelius Bryant Young, Jr.  Technically, he was the third, but his grandfather had died while his father was still young, and his father married old, so my granddad took “senior” and made him “junior” (although they never, as far as I know, called him that).  Since his grandfather was “Cornelius” his father was always “Bryant”, and he wound up with “C.B.”, although it was often reduced to “Seeb”, which is what my mother generally called him.  He hated nicknames–I never understood why, and as “Mark” always wished that there was a more familiar form distinguished as “my friends call me”.  (I might then have felt that I had friends.)  My mother wanted to name one of us Cornelius Bryant Young IV and call him Neil, and my father always said, “If you want to call him Neil, name him Neil.”  My little brother is Neil Bryant Young.  My wife also wanted to name a child Cornelius Bryant Young IV and call him Cory, but my father said–well, you know what he said.  My second son is Kyler Cornelius Bryant Young, and my third has Cory as a middle name.

I will remember many of the wonderful things he said over the years.  They come to mind particularly because he often quipped about today–Groundhog Day–saying “If the groundhog sees his shadow, we will have six more weeks of winter, but if he doesn’t, it will be a month and a half.”

Cornelius B. Young, Jr., in 2015 at his brother-in-law's birthday party.
Cornelius B. Young, Jr., in 2015 at his brother-in-law’s birthday party.

He gave the name Young’s Theorem to a quip he created and put on signs in a working lab he headed before I was born.  People working on various projects would find that they did not have the particular piece of equipment they needed, so would substitute something similar–“not the same, but not really different”–and then be surprised at the results.  My father’s sign read, “Things that are not the same are different.”

It was from him that I first heard Murphy’s Law, and he delighted in collecting such witicisms.  He gave me (appropriately, given the recent reaction to my article a few days ago on the X-Files sexism flap), “I know that you believe that you understand what you think I said, but I am not certain you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.”  I was still in Cub Scouts, having trouble working on a Pinewood Derby model car, when he said, with a wonderfully instructive facetiousness, “If you cut it too short you can always stretch it, but what can you do if you cut it too long?”

He was the most patient man I ever knew (although once when I said that to my mother, she told me to remember that he lost his temper at me more than once).  I only heard him swear once in my life, in a famous story of our effort to navigate Skinner’s Falls on the Delaware River when it was several feet above flood stage.  He remained constantly calmly rational–my model of unemotive rationality long before Spock appeared.  It has impacted me significantly, as I, too, am generally not effusive in my expressions of emotion, regard foul language as an indication of a poor intellect, and choose rational response over impatient reaction.  Yet it had its negative side.  He would often praise my efforts after a success in my school days, such as a band or choral concert, but because he knew that his cool rationalism would not sound sincere he forced an enthusiasm that always sounded less sincere in my ears, and so I never received praise well from him–and in turn I made a point with my own sons not to attempt to sound enthusiastic in my praise.  I can only hope they understood that I was sincere.

He was always there for us when we were in trouble.  I think perhaps we relied too much on him.  I wonder, often, whether his available support caused me to rely less on God in times of trouble, or whether it taught me that a father is always there for you.  I probably called him for help about a tenth as many times as my wife suggested.  I knew I was a disappointment to him in that area, and that that was important to him.  I shall need more help from others in the years ahead, I expect, as he is no longer there.

He was, and in a sense continues to be, the reason for much that is in this web log.  Because of my law school degree (for which he paid a significant portion, and for which he never received an adequate return on his investment) he regaled me with articles, clippings in envelopes and links online, claiming that President Obama was not legitimately elected because he was not a “natural born Citizen” as required by the Constitution.  That led to the composition of my series on The Birther Issue and the addenda on The Birth Certificate, and my title as Newark Political Buzz Examiner.  The law and politics section of my website has been expanded to many times its previous size by those articles, and I still keep an eye on the political news and write about it here sporadically.  One of the last clippings he sent me before he died was an insightful piece on whether Ted Cruz was a “natural born Citizen”, although I had already addressed that.  I have not checked my e-mail since before his final hospitalization, but expect that I will find something there from him that might require me to respond here.

I miss him.  We rarely talked, and always when we did I felt that I had failed in the ways he had most hoped I would succeed, but I knew he loved me despite his cool exterior, and I know that my life will be a lot harder and a little lonelier without him.

He was a Southern Baptist in Mississippi, but had settled into the (calmer and less conservative) American Baptist Convention churches by the time I was born.  He often expressed doubts and raised questions about Christian faith, and I wanted him to read the draft of my hopefully forthcoming book Why I Believe (tentative title).  I don’t know whether he expressed those to me because of my degrees in Biblical Studies, and I never could be certain exactly about his faith in Christ, but I have good reason to hope that he has had those doubts resolved and is in the presence of our Lord even now.

Dad, if you get this message, my long-remembered college friend Steve Freed established the rendezvous location for us and I promised to meet him there, along with everyone else:  East Side, Center Gate.  I hope to see you there in a few short years.

With tears on my face,

    I love you, Dad.

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Books by the Author

#50: Stories Progress

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #50, on the subject of Stories Progress.

This is about the creation of my book Verse Three, Chapter One:  The First Multiverser Novel, now being posted to the web site in serialized form.  This “behind the writings” look definitely contains spoilers, so you might want to read the referenced chapters before reading this look at them.  That link will take you to the table of contents for the book; links below (the section headings) will take you to the specific individual chapters, and there are (or will soon be) links on those pages to bring you back hopefully to the same point here.  There were also numerous similar previous mark Joseph “young” web log posts:

  1. #18:  A Novel Comic Milestone (which provided this kind of insight into the first six chapters),
  2. #20:  Becoming Novel (covering chapters seven through twelve),
  3. #22:  Getting Into Characters (for chapters thirteen through eighteen),
  4. #25:  Novel Changes (chapters 19 through 24),
  5. #27:  Novel Continuation (chapters 25 through 30),
  6. #30:  Novel Directions (chapters 31 through 36),
  7. #33:  Novel Struggles (chapters 37 through 42),
  8. #35:  Quiet on the Novel Front (chapters 43 through 48), and
  9. #37:  Character Diversity (chapters 49 through 56),
  10. #39:  Character Futures (chapters 57 through 60),
  11. #43:  Novel Worlds (chapters 61 through 66), and
  12. #47:  Character Routines (chapters 67 through 72).

This picks up from there.  Our characters are advancing in their efforts.

img0050Cemetery

There is some essential background to the book as a whole in that first post, which I will not repeat here.

Chapter 73, Slade 24

I took Slade’s cryptic comments in another direction with his statement that he’s died before and will do it again.

The concept of an “auto-mechanic” is very much a twentieth century concept, and while it’s not dead yet it probably will be if we keep going a few more centuries.  Thus I realized that the crew of the spaceship would be just as clueless regarding what an “auto-mechanic” was as the medieval adventurers.

The captain’s comment that the assassin Ishara has “problems with intimacy” is, as far as I recall, the only line of which my editor specifically said it was funny.

I also thought it likely that people in the future would have no understanding of smoking, and that faced with that Slade would realize that it can’t be explained.

The stuff in the small treasure chest was invented on the spot, as things I thought might have use as well as value.

Chapter 74, Hastings 26

I had imagined—not as much as envisioned—that in future books when Lauren trained Bethany in the past some of these magics would come into that.  They never did, although the trick with the die came to have plot significance in making something work when I painted myself into a corner with Merlin.

I still had no clue about the acorn.  I often wonder when I read books by others whether the author knew when he put the “shotgun over the mantel” how he was going to use that particular shotgun, or whether it was an “I can do something with that” moment, or simply a bit of serendipity.  This was a highly serendipitous “I can do something with that” object, and I stunned myself when I realized what I had given myself.

Chapter 75, Kondor 25

Kondor’s dream is dealing with the idea that the fact that you disbelieve something does not mean it could not be a reality.  It is easy to laugh at supernatural horrors when you know them to be fictional; it is much more difficult when they might be a reality.  Army of Darkness can fill the screen with horrors, but they are never real horrors for us, and we can laugh.

When he was in Sherwood, I spent very little time on the notion that he would learn their skills; but it seemed reasonable that having been there for years he would take a bit of time here and there to learn a few things outside his medical specialization.  He was, after all, also a soldier.  Thus the bow was a reasonable choice; at one time all English peasants were expected to learn the bow, and it was the weapon that defeated the French.

Joe had a resource problem:  his bullets were limited.  I knew by this point that I was going to have to find a way to re-supply him, but also that he was going to have to be careful about how quickly he used what he had.

Because of Kondor’s skepticism, the explanation of the vorgo is a superstition, and he thus thinks that what is being done in that vein is wasted resources.  He tries to justify this based on the morale of the fighters, but at every turn he sees more problems—such as the fact that manpower is going to be used to move corpses to the pyre when it should be on the walls.

Chapter 76, Slade 25

In technology skills, Multiverser recognizes that the level of skill necessary for various tasks differs in kind.  The ability to design a machine is the highest level, but there are people who are very good at building a machine from a design, even better at building than the designers, who could not create a design.  There are those who can modify a machine by looking at how it works and improving it, those who can repair a machine if it breaks, those who can (intelligently) sabotage a machine so that it won’t work properly, and those who can operate a machine with only a basic knowledge of how it works.  Slade is looking at star drives and gravity generators and particle weapons, and he cannot begin to fathom how these work—but he’s also looking at electrical systems and fluid and gas conduits and support structures, all of which are simple enough that he could fix a problem without knowing how that particular part of it makes the rest of it work.  Thus he has repair skills that can be used here.

The listening post raid is inspired by a Blake’s 7 episode in which they attack a Federation Outpost to get the latest code cipher machine.  It was an obvious type of mission for this kind of scenario, and I run it frequently in live games (although, as I think I mentioned, this world was created in this novel and only subsequently detailed for game play).  I had to remove the code cipher machine, as that was too obvious a connection, and I expanded the outpost significantly both to give me more room for my adventure and to make it different.

The line about Slade trying to decide “what medieval gear he should have for a raid on a space station” was another that my editor mentioned positively.  The image of an armored knight with a sword attacking a space station does have something of a lark to it.

Chapter 77, Hastings 27

The game system imposes limits on how much people can carry, both in terms of what can be lifted or carried while walking and in terms of how much will move with the person from universe to universe.  This latter limit increases over time, but particularly in the early worlds people who are pack rats have to consider what they really need to take with them.

It is also often the case that players wish they had gotten one thing or another in a previous world where it was relatively easily obtained, and Lauren is considering that aspect now.  She has sort of left it to the last minute, and while I might be accused of the convenience that she managed to think to do this shopping very shortly before she left this world (and I had at this point realized that I was going to have to move her before I’d used all the cool stories I’d developed in play), it is certainly the case that facing the fight she has planned she would be aware of the possibility of moving to another world in it.

Chapter 78, Kondor 26

The darkness was needed because without it there would be no explanation for how the undead were able to fight in daylight.  I don’t think I ever explained how it was done, but I attributed it to magic used by the specters, the most powerful of the enemy.

The eyesight adjustment was one of the key reasons for giving him that eye before.  I wasn’t certain where or when I would use it, but seeing in the dark was the point.

It is interesting that Joe thinks of the natural eye as the “good” one, and the cybernetic one as a substitute, not a real eye and therefore inferior, even though it does more and responds faster.

That the castellan regards Joe’s vision magical fits into Joe’s preconceptions about magic, that it is simply a word to describe what we do not understand.

Interest in these “behind the writings” continues, so I’m still thinking they’re worth producing.  Feedback is always welcome, of course.  Your Patreon support is also needed to maintain this.

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Books by the Author

#47: Character Routines

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #47, on the subject of Character Routines.

This is about the creation of my book Verse Three, Chapter One:  The First Multiverser Novel, now being posted to the web site in serialized form.  This “behind the writings” look definitely contains spoilers, so you might want to read the referenced chapters before reading this look at them.  That link will take you to the table of contents for the book; links below (the section headings) will take you to the specific individual chapters, and there are (or will soon be) links on those pages to bring you back hopefully to the same point here.  There were also numerous similar previous mark Joseph “young” web log posts:

  1. #18:  A Novel Comic Milestone (which provided this kind of insight into the first six chapters),
  2. #20:  Becoming Novel (covering chapters seven through twelve),
  3. #22:  Getting Into Characters (for chapters thirteen through eighteen),
  4. #25:  Novel Changes (chapters 19 through 24),
  5. #27:  Novel Continuation (chapters 25 through 30),
  6. #30:  Novel Directions (chapters 31 through 36),
  7. #33:  Novel Struggles (chapters 37 through 42),
  8. #35:  Quiet on the Novel Front (chapters 43 through 48), and
  9. #37:  Character Diversity (chapters 49 through 56),
  10. #39:  Character Futures (chapters 57 through 60), and
  11. #43:  Novel Worlds (chapters 61 through 66).

This picks up from there.  Our characters are settling into new plans.

img0047Earth

There is some essential background to the book as a whole in that first post, which I will not repeat here.

Chapter 67, Slade 22

People who quit addictions remain addicted.  My father quit smoking in essence by saying that he did not need to have a cigarette right now whenever he wanted one, and managed not to have one for half a century.  Bob Slade had quit smoking before he was a verser, which is why he always had those matches, later toothpicks, in his mouth, but the tense situation of finding himself trapped and hunted on someone’s starship made him nervous enough that he wished he had one.

Slade realizes that he’s having something of an alien encounter, but the crew looks human, so he’s dealing with that in his own offbeat way by discussing little green men.

The spell is gibberish.  I needed him to cast a “darkness” spell, and the particular concepts of magic he was learning from Omigger involved incantations in lost languages combined with specific movements (and sometimes materials) to tap supernatural energies.  Darkness is a relatively easy spell, in Multiverser terms, as far as what works in different worlds, and it’s defensive without being aggressive.

Although this is a Blake’s 7 inspired world, my captain is more like Kirk than Blake (although I think he’s more like a choral conductor I had in New Jersey All-State in 1971), and my computer/science guy has more Spock than Avon in him.  Slade’s claim that he called some darkness makes no sense scientifically, but as I wrote decades ago, in magic cold and darkness are energies opposed to heat and light, not mere absence of energy.

My predictions concerning the demise of TV and console games seem to be on track a bit faster than I anticipated, but it certainly made sense to assume that they would be unknown this far in the future.  I had seen PBS specials covering wearable computers, and was expecting them to move into use more quickly than they have, but they do seem to be coming via the smartphone and possibly Google Glass®.

The name game is something that happens with versers, because no one knows who you are until you tell them.  I’ve often had players invent names to identify themselves, or use the names of fictional characters.  Bob at this point just gives them the names people have used for him in the past, and the reference to his girlfriend is a throwaway—I never detailed the girlfriend.

Chapter 68, Hastings 24

In game, I was working with Chris Jones’ character Shadow, who had the ability to become invisible, was incredibly strong and very hard to hurt, and could fly.  He grabbed the ghoul and flew with him, and let me pretend I was doing it somehow.  We got the guns after we reached the airport.  Most of the rest of it was very similar to the game, although I think the game character chose Atlanta.  I liked the idea that Arnie’s now long dead parents retired to Miami so he could visit their graves there.

I was not sure what should happen to the bullet that hit the wall.  It could have deflected, but that would have created a serious danger that it would hit Arnie, and I didn’t want that.  I thought it made sense for a telekinetic force wall, as opposed to a psionically generated force shield, to hold things that hit it, and prevented the dangerous bouncing.

I know that cursing is common in modern books, but it’s not part of my speech patterns and I saw no reason for including it in the books.  It was simple enough to say that Arnie cursed.  I have often wondered how I would cover this if it ever went to film or video, because of course he would have to say something.

The guns will become part of Lauren’s gear.  They are just like a set my character has.  John Cross has since raised issues with whether the design is possible, but has concluded that it could be, given certain assumptions that are not contrary to the book.

I liked the gag about dropping him at the airport where people land safely all the time, instead of just dropping him from wherever they were over Philadelphia.  She doesn’t actually say that she could smash him into the ground below or put him down gently, but she conveys it in the metaphor of landing at the airport.

Chapter 69, Kondor 23

That iridescent indigo sky is among my favorite colors, and I included it largely because of that.

Kondor’s wariness probably reflects the way I run game characters when I’m playing the party leader:  always cautious, moving slowly and keeping eyes open at all times.  I don’t like to lose party members, and I don’t often lose them.

I notice two points now, in retrospect.  One is that I never mention horses in the telling in the book.  Often in play characters will ask for horses to make the trek more quickly.  The other is that when I created the world I made the distance twelve miles, which no one can walk in an hour.  The “less than an hour” is not from the castle, but from the sunrise at the second crossroad.

I like the phrase, “monumental reminder of his own mortality” as a description of a graveyard.  I should shorten it, removing the possessive, and put it on a Facebook image card or something.

People are often uncomfortable among dead bodies, and for many that extends to cemeteries.  I thought it was a good counterpoint for Kondor’s atheism and general skepticism of all things supernatural that he could not account for his own discomfort with tombs, and that his explanation that it was a reminder of his mortality was both a plausible excuse and an answer that had been invalidated by his experience.  It also sets up his own internal inconsistency, that he does not want to admit he is afraid of something in a graveyard but he is compelled to express the fear through his actions.

Standard marching band steps are usually a short eight steps to five yards or a long six steps to five yards.  Both of those are slightly unnatural practiced steps.  A standard pace—a double stride—is about five feet, varying from one person to another.  Ten yards is thirty feet, six paces or twelve strides, so his steps are a bit short.  He is struggling to do this.

People think that football fields are a hundred yards long; they are actually a hundred twenty yards long, due to the end zones of ten yards each.  Kondor makes, and then corrects, that mistake, although he is estimating, and he is trying to encourage himself.

I wanted my characters to be credible adults who did not swear.  It was easy with Lauren, and with Slade his oaths are all references to Pagan deities.  With Kondor, the solution was that he was raised to avoid such words, and had his mouth washed out with soap more than once for using them, so he tended to avoid saying them.

When I originally designed the vorgo, I described it as exactly the size and shape of a bowling ball, roughly the same weight.  Someone suggested that it ought to be bright green, which would add to the comedy for the player character who made a trek to retrieve what proves to be a bright green bowling ball.  When I got to this point in the story, though, I ignored the color suggestion—I was trying to maintain a dark mood and did not want the levity.  It is still humorous enough that he identifies it as a bowling ball and sees nothing of value to it.

The “gravest” importance was a deliberate word choice.

The shock value of the bodies rising to seated positions works in the game; I hope it works in the book.  I put the break here, again returning to the notion that I wanted readers to want to know what happens next and so keep reading.

Chapter 70, Slade 23

I have a very clear image of Ann Parker in my brain, but have no idea where I got it.  She’s got long blonde hair, and is petit.  The implant is there because of the character Gan on Blake’s 7, who had an implanted violence limiter, and there was an episode in which there was a defect with it which forced them to find medical help; I did not know what adventures we were likely to have at this point, so I wanted options.  Her implant is my own idea, although it owes something to some book I read where pilots interfaced directly with their ships by a plug.

Kozakowski was the name of the smartest kid in my high school class (or at least, that’s what everyone thought), but I just used it for a name.  The character is somewhat modeled on Tarrant, pilot who joined the Blake’s 7 crew in a later season, but I made him black to push myself away from the feeling that I was copying the show too closely.

Tom Titus is again very much Vila Reston.  I always loved Vila’s line, “There isn’t a door I can’t get through if I’m scared enough.”

Bert “Burly” Bently is more of a copy of Gan, a big gentle guy, but I made him the engineer.

Ishara Takamura is another whose image is very clear in my mind but whose origin I cannot identify.  He has typical features for a slender Japanese male, with a bit of a sinister look to him.

I always picture Toni Bently as tall, thin, and black, a sweet smile and gentle disposition, and an air of culture.

George White is a composite of a number of people I’ve met over the years none of whose names I recall, a guy who can do all different kinds of things because he’s done all different kinds of things; he’s older than most on the crew, probably in his late fifties or early sixties.  A “Jack of All Trades” skill set was used in the game Traveler, which I never played but for which I created characters once, and I liked the idea.

When I put Marilyn Wells on the crew, I had in mind a character something like Troi on Star Trek:  The Next Generation, but a slightly different look with lighter hair.

The notion of finding a ship adrift was a bit of an improbability, but I needed an explanation for how they had a ship, and to avoid being too much like Blake’s 7.  This barely qualified, but I couldn’t think of another option.

Torbin is based on the computer of the original show, including the idea that it won’t talk about what happened previously or where it originated.

When I run this world in games, I often give this chapter to the player to read when he finds a way to get historic background on the world.  I pretty much invented the Federation backstory, looking for a credible way that a totalitarian regime could arise in something as vast as interstellar space.

The progression from ‘chairman of the meetings hosted at my home’ to ‘chairman the most powerful ruler in known history’ is modeled after one theory of how the Bishop of Rome became the Pope.

As Slade defines himself as landing on the rebel side of a civil war, it is the first step in his view of who they are and what they do.  It takes another step in a later chapter.

Chapter 71, Hastings 25

My recollection is that Lauren forgot her workout in part because I forgot it.  I considered going back and trying to work it into the earlier chapters, but decided that there was enough happening in her life that it was perfectly logical that she would forget an appointment.

The thing about throwing off your sleep cycle with a nap is a rather personal experience of my own—I often find that a nap at the wrong time means I’m awake too late and can’t get up the next day.

John “A1Nut” Cross gave me a lot of trouble about those bullets after the book was published.  I might have handled it differently had he given me feedback on the draft (he helped me immensely with the rifle/pistol arrangement for the world Dark Honor Empire I created for Multiverser:  The Third Book of Worlds), but I was working pretty much from what Ed did in-game.  The issue is whether you can have a pistol that fires the same bullets as a fifty-caliber machine gun; fifty caliber revolvers (they are made) use a shorter bullet with less kick.  However, in the end he agreed that one could custom-make such a gun, and the fact that it would have a lot of kick was covered in the description.

I used the trick with the coin to destroy the Coffee Shoppe.  By this point I had decided that Lauren was not going to survive the attack on The Pit, and the coin would become both a meaningless scrap and a problem for future worlds if I didn’t use it—besides, I thought it a clever idea and wanted to use it.  In game, I used an epoxy, because PC7 was the best glue I knew when I was still keeping track of such things (I read about Superglue and have some grasp of how it works, but don’t ever use it for anything), and Ed had me use something called PC12 when I looked.  But here I thought that the more modern superglue type adhesive was the better choice.

I had worked out what the three objects did for which the clues were given, and was working out how she would test them as I did it.  With the die, though, I thought I could get a good cliffhanger from having her black out—particularly as both Slade and Kondor had already died and gone to other worlds, so I figured the reader was expecting it to happen to Lauren, and I wanted to use that expectation.

Chapter 72, Kondor 24

Part of the fun of this chapter lies in the tension between Kondor’s certainty that there is no such thing as undead monsters and his recognition that something which looks entirely like that is now pursuing him.  He tries to invent explanations for what he sees, but he is still terrified and running for his life.

It was part of the conceit of the world that the undead could, at need, walk about within their cemetery but could only cross into the world in darkness.  The notion of the importance of darkness gave me some other problems, but the solutions were at least workable.

Interest in these “behind the writings” continues, so I’m still thinking they’re worth producing.  Feedback is always welcome, of course.  Your Patreon support is also needed to maintain this.

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Books by the Author

#43: Novel Worlds

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #43, on the subject of Novel Worlds.

This is about the creation of my book Verse Three, Chapter One:  The First Multiverser Novel, now being posted to the web site in serialized form.  This “behind the writings” look definitely contains spoilers, so you might want to read the referenced chapters before reading this look at them.  That link will take you to the table of contents for the book; links below (the section headings) will take you to the specific individual chapters, and there are (or will soon be) links on those pages to bring you back hopefully to the same point here.  There were also numerous similar previous mark Joseph “young” web log posts:

  1. #18:  A Novel Comic Milestone (which provided this kind of insight into the first six chapters),
  2. #20:  Becoming Novel (covering chapters seven through twelve),
  3. #22:  Getting Into Characters (for chapters thirteen through eighteen),
  4. #25:  Novel Changes (chapters 19 through 24),
  5. #27:  Novel Continuation (chapters 25 through 30),
  6. #30:  Novel Directions (chapters 31 through 36),
  7. #33:  Novel Struggles (chapters 37 through 42),
  8. #35:  Quiet on the Novel Front (chapters 43 through 48), and
  9. #37:  Character Diversity (chapters 49 through 56), and
  10. #39:  Character Futures (chapters 57 through 60).

This picks up from there.  Two of our three characters find themselves starting in new worlds in these chapters.

img0043Castle

There is some essential background to the book as a whole in that first post, which I will not repeat here.

Chapter 61, Slade 20

I was building Shella into a sorceress for no real reason other than that it gave me story and character development for Slade.  It turned out for the better in the long run, but at this point I did not see where it was going.  I recently read the quote (and I confess to being terrible at sources) that writing a novel is like driving home at night in the fog:  you can only see a hundred feet ahead, but you can make it all the way home.  That makes sense to me.

The “not bad, for an auto mechanic” line was important.  It was enough that Slade regarded himself a fighter, and was becoming one; I did not see him embracing a career in magic, and doing so would have made him too much like Lauren.  I needed him to think of magic as something he didn’t really do well and wouldn’t pursue seriously.

Having Shella there also gave me a side door through which to arrange Torrence’s marriage.  I wanted it to be something with which the modern Slade would be comfortable, but knew it had to fit within the concept of arrangements of the time.  Using the sister to introduce girls to her brother seemed the way to do it.

I found my way to get Slade out, and had tied up most of the loose ends to this point.  I did not know that any of these people would ever come back into the story, so the parting from Shella was a bit melancholy for me.

At the time I gave very little thought to what it was Slade was trying to do, that is, what spell he was trying to learn.  I don’t think I’ve returned to that, but it’s possible that I mentioned it again somewhere and have since forgotten.  Anyway, I’ll probably recall it in some future book.

I think the fact that Joe and Bob versed out in successive chapters was strictly coincidence here—I’d brought them both to the point that they were ready to go, and I had worked out where they were going, and found ways to move them, so it happened.

Chapter 62, Hastings 22

I wanted Lauren to learn the sort of “hyperspace” travel the werewolves used, as I was certain it would be useful to her in the future.  I had no idea just how much she would use it eventually, but here and now she needed to learn it.

In copying this chapter, I noticed that I’d missed a close quotation in the book.  It’s fixed in the online version.

I’m fond of grilled ham and cheese, and of cream of mushroom soup.  Tomato soup goes well with grilled cheese, too, but is a bit cliché, so I went with my preference.

I had eaten at Bookbinder’s in Philadelphia exactly once—treat of the executives of a company for which I had worked security, when I had to testify at a National Labor Relations Board hearing concerning the termination of an employee I had caught stealing from the company.  All I remembered, really, was that they had really good lobster bisque.  It’s also the only fancy restaurant in the city I know, but at least I knew it was there.

Chapter 63, Kondor 21

I created The Quest for the Vorgo as a world for a stripped demo game that ran very rough, but I found the world to be fascinating and reworked it for full game play; it was slated for release in The Third Book of Worlds, which is a work in progress.  It owes a lot to the wonderfully comedic Army of Darkness, and its idea of dropping a modern person into a medieval undead horror story.  I’ve used it for a lot of demos since I wrote this.

I was particularly interested in running Joe Kondor in it, because he was an atheist, and he would have to find naturalist explanations for the magic that permeates so much of this world.  I figured it would be fun, and there would be a sort of message in the very fact that in the face of all this magic he could maintain his persistent unbelief.

The opening of the world was also fun, because we have a group of magic-using locals who have just performed a ceremony which is supposed to call a “supernatural” deliverer to aid them, and the character appears in their midst.  I will never say whether he appears there because the spell worked, or they think the spell worked because he appears there, but generally people who land in this world take the bait and go on the quest whether or not they think the magic worked.

The names of these characters were invented quite off the cuff; the only one that has any real source is Dimtri, which I got by shortening Dimitrios, cover artist Jim Denaxas’ given name.  When I pulled the world together for game play, I did not carry the names into it, because they are not all that easy to remember.

The castle is on a motte and bailey design, but Kondor would not know that (and the reader probably would not connect the description to anything specific even if told that it is the design of the Tower of London) so I simply had him describe it.  The photo selected for this web log entry is a motte and bailey castle, but rather a smaller and more simple one than the one in the story.

The name mistake, Jo-suede Candor, was at the time intended as a way of intensifying the sense that these people did not think of him as human.  They did not understand the structure of his name.

The comment on the bed was on the thought that medieval life was not comfortable, that they had nothing like the comforts we take for granted.  Even when Joe was in Sherwood sleeping on a mattress he made from local materials, his bed was more comfortable than this one in the main tower.

Chapter 64, Slade 21

In-game, players roll each time they enter a new universe to see whether they have moved to the next “stage”.  In the first stage they enter unconscious and awaken.  In the second stage, though, they arrive in a dream state, and the referee mixes bits of reality with bits of the past and whatever fantastic elements he wishes, much as the sort of dream you have when you are awakening but still dreaming and things in the room mix with the dream.  I wanted this to happen in the book, and Slade’s second world gave me an opportunity to experiment with it.

I created this world specifically for the book, although I later distilled the essential elements from it for demo games and was hoping to release it in a planned project of short world books called “Triple Play”, sets of three worlds that were of similar substance, this one one of three space settings.  That has not materialized.  I based a lot of this on the concepts of Blake’s 7; as I previously mentioned that my thief Filp was based significantly on Vila Reston, I also based characters here somewhat loosely on those characters.  I had run a Blake’s 7 world at least twice in playtest (after all, Ed always encouraged plagiarization for game play) but knew I couldn’t use it as it was, particularly as I think someone had been working on a role playing game for it about that time.

Kondor was surprised to find himself on a spaceship; Slade is similarly surprised, but his situation is different.

Chapter 65, Hastings 23

I gave the impression through Bethany’s dialogue that she and Lauren had fought vampires together before.  I already knew that Lauren was going to train Bethany when she returned in the past, but had not worked out any of the details of that.  When I got to that part in the second novel, it was something of a challenge to figure out how to make that happen.

The use of her psionic powers is becoming automatic for Lauren, which is going to matter eventually.

The hints are riddles.  I had by this point worked out what the paperclip, die, and marble each did, and found a way to create seemingly related riddles for them.  I still did not know what the acorn did, and had to make it seem as if Bethany knew but was keeping it secret.

I remember that when Ed ran this scenario he had his Bob the Ghoul (whom I have renamed Arnie) attack someone I knew—but I do not remember who it was.  I had Chris Jones’ character (known by the not very original name Shadow, I renamed the character Whisp in the rulebook) working with me, but I can’t now recall the details of how we found out about the attack, or who was attacked.

Chapter 66, Kondor 22

The particular fun at this point is that the summoners believe Kondor is a supernatural immortal—which in a sense he is—and therefore that he does not understand anything about being mortal—which of course is not true, he just doesn’t understand the details of their time and place and the nature of their enemy.  So it is difficult for him to make sense of the information, because they assume on the one hand that as the summoned deliverer he must know the problem and the solution, and on the other that as an immortal being he knows nothing about graveyards and corpses and the undead.  His situation is actually the reverse of that.

It would have made more sense for Kondor to send the emissaries sooner so that troops would be arriving the same day he returned with the vorgo, but he did not think of that.  This gave me more drama during the fight, though, because there would be reinforcements if the troops could hold long enough.

The wall was not envisioned as thick enough for an entry passage with arrow slits and murder holes; Kondor’s corral achieves something of the same effect, although less effectively.

Interest in these “behind the writings” continues, so I’m still thinking they’re worth producing.  Feedback is always welcome, of course.  Your Patreon support is also needed to maintain this.

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Books by the Author

#39: Character Futures

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #39, on the subject of Character Futures.

This is about the creation of my book Verse Three, Chapter One:  The First Multiverser Novel, now being posted to the web site in serialized form.  This “behind the writings” look definitely contains spoilers, so you might want to read the referenced chapters before reading this look at them.  That link will take you to the table of contents for the book; links below (the section headings) will take you to the specific individual chapters, and there are (or will soon be) links on those pages to bring you back hopefully to the same point here.  There were also numerous similar previous mark Joseph “young” web log posts:

  1. #18:  A Novel Comic Milestone (which provided this kind of insight into the first six chapters),
  2. #20:  Becoming Novel (covering chapters seven through twelve),
  3. #22:  Getting Into Characters (for chapters thirteen through eighteen),
  4. #25:  Novel Changes (chapters 19 through 24),
  5. #27:  Novel Continuation (chapters 25 through 30),
  6. #30:  Novel Directions (chapters 31 through 36),
  7. #33:  Novel Struggles (chapters 37 through 42),
  8. #35:  Quiet on the Novel Front (chapters 43 through 48)., and
  9. #37:  Character Diversity (chapters 49 through 56).

This picks up from there.  Our three characters are each in various ways preparing for something in the future in these chapters.

img0039Sherwood

There is some essential background to the book as a whole in that first post, which I will not repeat here.

Chapter 55, Slade 18

I had begun seriously toying with the idea that Slade might marry Shella, but at this point I was also seriously planning the end of my book, and Shella did not fit where I was headed.  Still, it seemed natural to draw them closer together.

The notion of Torrence becoming Lord of Slade Manor had developed gradually, and was well-formed when I had the letter sent at the end of the previous chapter.  Shella’s place was still nebulous.

I wanted to bring across the idea that having control over your own destiny is a very modern concept, that even for the sons of noblemen in the past everyone fell into his assigned place in the world and did what his parents left him to do.  Torelle can’t see it any other way.

As Slade begins talking to Torrence, he wants to say that Torelle ought to have mentioned this earlier but is too stubborn in his conception of life to have done so, but he doesn’t want to offend Torelle in the process, so he looks for a reason why it falls to him, now, to do so.

Chapter 56, Hastings 20

I needed a lunar eclipse, because the concepts of the werewolf I was using included that they were nearly invulnerable under that condition.  In play, if I recall correctly, Ed simply rolled the dice and announced that there was such an eclipse coming up on a particular date.  I could have done something similar, but I wanted a bit more of a connection to reality—besides, I had played this in about 1993 and was writing in 1997, so just as he had put me a few years in my future I put Lauren a few years in hers, and had her already past the date of the eclipse from the game.  So I checked an almanac.  There was an eclipse coming on October 17th, which in story terms was very short, as I had been tracking dates and trying to keep consistent with the seasons in the climate and could not easily shift everything (not impossible for Lauren to wear a parka in September, but not at all reasonable in August).  It happened that the eclipse would not be total in Philadelphia, but I figured that to be a very small change, and noticed that it would be quite a few years before there would be another eclipse at all, and I could not stretch Lauren’s story that far.  I also felt that the rush gave it a sense of realism, because when you are trying to align actions with astronomical events you sometimes find yourself under pressure.

In play, some of the ideas put forward in the book by Father James came from the player behind his character, Tim Pangburn’s Father Holer, including the banquet, radio jammers, and the tampering with fire boxes and false alarms.  I had conceived of the Mission On the Move (it was the State Street Mission in game, I think, but I liked St. George better, and was not at all certain how much Ed had plagiarized), but I didn’t use it until the third raid, the destruction of a theatre called The Presemium.  I had already decided that Lauren’s story had run long enough, and I was going to eliminate everything I did after that point, in part because some of it was very much off the central story and involved another player character, and in part because I had still been in that world when Ed stopped running the game, and I thought the confrontation with Horta would be a good way to end it.

I also conceived the notion of blessing water in the pumper trucks, but that, too, was done at the Presemium raid; I liked the idea too much to abandon it, so I brought it into the story here.

I was toying with the notion that Horta might be an antediluvian (pre-flood) vampire at this point, and put the notion forward with Annuda.  Werewolves are not so long lived, perhaps comparable to humans, and their history is all oral tradition, so it wasn’t etched in stone just because she said it might be so.  Since Lauren killed Horta, and I was planning to take her to earlier points in the history of this world, I realized while writing the next book that I was going to need someone more powerful than Horta who was going to have to be the villain in the final encounter in the third book.  Thus the destruction of Horta led to the conclusion that Tubrok, not Horta, was the antediluvian.

Chapter 57, Kondor 19

When I run Sherwood as a game, Richard does not return unless the player finds a way to return him; the novel more closely follows the history, in which the merchants ransom their king.  John really did not have the money—Richard and their father had heavily taxed the land to pay for their wars, leaving little in the royal coffers.  It is also the case that upon his safe return, Richard reneged on the deal he had made with France to remove the impediment to his leadership of the Crusade, and crossed the channel to do battle over the ownership of Normandy, Brittany, and D’Anjou.

The connection between the Prince John who ruled as surrogate for Richard and the King John who was forced to sign the Magna Carta is not generally made.  I had never made it until I researched the history for this world, and even now I cannot put a year on it beyond that it was near the end of the first decade of the twelve hundreds.  I figured Kondor wouldn’t know, either.

Chapter 58, Slade 19

Quite frankly, I had no idea that Slade would eventually marry Shella.  It was one of those things, that I thought they were attracted to each other but that he would always consider it impossible and she would never push the issue, and so he would verse out and leave her behind.  So I was playing with their mutual attraction while keeping the boundaries clear.

The communications spell was one of those things I thought might be useful at some point in the future, but was done more to give the impression that Slade was learning magic, at least a bit.

I also found myself building a friendship between Slade and Filp.  It, too, was expected to end when Slade left, but I found that much of it lingered with Slade as he visited other worlds.

When I began Slade’s dungeon crawl I thought he would probably be killed somewhere early in the game; I had not anticipated making him a lord and keeping him there for decades.  I realized that I had painted myself into a corner, as there weren’t too many ways to remove him that would be consistent with his character, but I also saw some advantage in having the story go this way, so I wasn’t too worried.

Chapter 59, Hastings 21

My editor was not a religious man, and he found Lauren’s affront at the competing religion to be irrational.  I had to do some extensive rewriting here to make it clear why the religion Gavin espoused was dangerous.

Throwing a “spanner in the works” is probably a distinctly British version of that concept; I had always heard it as a “monkey wrench”.  The latter is a vernacular name for a pipe wrench, which I assume the former also is; I got it from a Doctor Who episode long ago and liked the word at least for that expression.

“We Shall Overcome” has long struck me as a peculiar song.  I learned it at church camp, and it comes across as one of those contemporary Christian songs of the early sixties, like Kumbaya or They’ll Know We Are Christians By Our Love, but it lacks any specifically Christian thematic elements.  Thus I thought it would work for a religion that was imitating Christian ritual.

Lauren’s speech and actions are calculated to incorporate as much supernaturalism as possible into what should come across as very natural and ordinary, as if magic and vampires were things everyone encountered on a daily basis.  It was part of the psychological attack on their faithlessness.

Chapter 60, Kondor 20

Kondor’s uncertainty concerning what to do next reflected my own.  I was not eager to attempt to create a tour of early thirteenth century England, and I really had done most of what I could do with Kondor as founder of modern medicine.  I was also faced with the problem of how to remove him from the present world, since if arrested he would logically face a trial, a rather drawn out and not terribly interesting part of the story.  So I looked for a shortcut, and managed to find one.

Sir Guy’s accent is different, of course, because he is high-born Norman, whereas all the commoners and recruits of the shire reeve are Saxon.

I have often wondered whether to return Kondor to a future version of the world he formed here.  I do that with players in this world, particularly if they kill or otherwise depose Prince John and so prevent the signing of Magna Carta.  Joe took no interest in politics here, ultimately (despite his initial interest), so he did not change that—but he did change their medical science drastically.  I chose to bring him back to a future version of his next world, though, and if I ever do it with this world it will be far enough removed from the present to give it distance.

I have always been fond of the opening of Quest for the Vorgo, in which the verser arrives on the table on the dais during the ceremony to summon a supernatural deliverer.  No one has ever been able to answer whether the magic brought him there, or whether it was something else.

Interest in these “behind the writings” continues, so I’m still thinking they’re worth producing.  Feedback is always welcome, of course.  Your Patreon support is also needed to maintain this.

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Books by the Author

#37: Character Diversity

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #37, on the subject of Character Diversity.

This is about the creation of my book Verse Three, Chapter One:  The First Multiverser Novel, now being posted to the web site in serialized form.  This “behind the writings” look definitely contains spoilers, so you might want to read the referenced chapters before reading this look at them.  That link will take you to the table of contents for the book; links below (the section headings) will take you to the specific individual chapters, and there are (or will soon be) links on those pages to bring you back hopefully to the same point here.  There were also five similar previous mark Joseph “young” web log posts:

  1. #18:  A Novel Comic Milestone (which provided this kind of insight into the first six chapters),
  2. #20:  Becoming Novel (covering chapters seven through twelve),
  3. #22:  Getting Into Characters (for chapters thirteen through eighteen),
  4. #25:  Novel Changes (chapters 19 through 24),
  5. #27:  Novel Continuation (chapters 25 through 30),
  6. #30:  Novel Directions (chapters 31 through 36),
  7. #33:  Novel Struggles (chapters 37 through 42), and
  8. #35:  Quiet on the Novel Front (chapters 43 through 48).

This picks up from there.  Our three characters are defining themselves very differently from each other, and in some ways differently from the way they began.

img0037cabin

There is some essential background to the book as a whole in that first post, which I will not repeat here.

Chapter 49, Slade 16

At this point, Shella is the girl Slade can’t possibly marry.  I knew they were going to be close, that I was going to play with this flirtation, but also that he would verse out and be gone leaving her behind.

Torrence is the better fighter, because he has been training all his life to become a knight, where Slade has been approaching it with considerably less devotion despite his religious views.  Slade doesn’t really grasp what it is to be dedicated to anything in particular.

I decided that Slade was going to have to explain who he was and what was going to happen to him to Torrence at some point, because Torrence would eventually face the problem that Slade was gone and there was no body to show to prove his death.

The death of Omigger was at that point tossed into the mix in part so I would have something different to do with Slade’s story, in part because I wanted the sense of the years rolling past, and in part because I had decided that Slade was going to have to pick up a bit more magic at this point.  I figured that Omigger was now out of the story; it was never my intention or expectation that any of these characters would be seen again (other than, of course, Slade), but it turned out that I had come to like them too much and had to bring some of them back later.

Filp is not literally Torrence’ uncle; he’s a distant cousin.  Slade, though, uses such words in the inaccurate way most Americans do, basing them more on relative ages than actual biological relationships.

Chapter 50, Hastings 18

In-game, when Ed introduced me to my self, he was a nationally syndicated religious broadcaster—picking up on the five years I had been in Christian radio and suggesting that I became one of the program creators.  I didn’t want to make the other Lauren an on-air Bible teacher or evangelist, so I shifted it slightly.  I also made her single.  Ed had not dealt at all with the fact that I was married before I was in radio, but I had not had that much contact with my other self.  Also, in game I discovered that I was on the radio, and holding meetings in town, so I went to find myself; here I thought a chance meeting a better approach, as I could not think of a reason for Lauren to seek her other self otherwise.

I prefer not to drink coffee without something on my stomach, and am fond of corn muffins, so that’s what Lauren ordered.

The places in Lauren’s bio are all real.  They are not connected to me in the ways I describe for Lauren.

Chapter 51, Kondor 17

I did not yet know where I was going with the Kondor story, but decided that this was not yet the end of his time in Sherwood, and that the soldier was seeking medical treatment for a child.  That worked well, opening new directions for me.

I think Jim Denaxas gave me the Kondor name, and I  always knew it was the name of a bird, but I only mentioned it here.

I saw potential complications with the soldier, the one being that Kondor had no housing for family members of his patient, the other being that he would be a threat to the freedom of some of those who visited the clinic.  I used both.

Chapter 52, Slade 17

I gave Slade the books to push him in the direction of wizardry, but he really did not want to go that way so he never learned much.  Still, it introduced the other option.

I have Slade improving on his combat skills, now more nearly equal to Torrence.  I need him to become a hero soon, and I need his skill to be credible.

I had decided most of what was in the letter when I wrote of it, although I’m not sure whether I had already thought through the part about Shella.

Chapter 53, Hastings 19

Creating alternate life paths is an interesting aspect of play when you introduce divergent selves.  Here, though, Lauren has to introduce her duplicate to the nature of the world, mostly to set up the encounter with Bob the Ghoul.

I think, if memory serves, I had Lauren Meyers rush out of the first meeting so I could split the discussion into two parts, and think a bit about how I wanted to handle the second.

Chapter 54, Kondor 18

Even in our time people won’t finish taking their antibiotics once they feel better.  The result is the creation of superbugs, virulent bacteria that are resistant to the medicines, and frequently relapsing into illness that is more difficult to cure the second time.  For Kondor, the problem is multiplied by the lack of understanding of the time.

At times the speech of the Nottingham people seems stilted.  It was intended to, and I achieved it in part by avoiding all contractions.  Thus when Tuck says, “You are right, of course.  But I really do not like it.”  It sounds archaic because we would say “You’re right” and “don’t like it”.  So I think it had its desired effect.

Interest in these “behind the writings” continues, so I’m still thinking they’re worth producing.  Feedback is always welcome, of course.  Your Patreon support is also needed to maintain this.

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Bible and Theology, Books by the Author, Elections, Games, Law and Politics, Logic and Reasoning, Temporal Anomalies/Time Travel, Time Travel Movies

#34: Happy Old Year

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #34, on the subject of Happy Old Year.

At this time of year, readers are bombarded with “year in review” pieces, part of the media’s need to have news even when there is no news, to make news out of nonsense and trivia–the reason Time Magazine first created its “Man of the Year” issue (the first was Adolph Hitler).  When I was at The Examiner, I began doing something of the same thing, creating indices of articles from the year for readers who missed something or who vaguely remember something.  Quite a bit has been published this year, and it might help to have a bit of a review of it all, as some of you might have missed some of it.  We have articles in quite a few categories.

The web log is of course self-sorting, and you can find articles in its various categories by following the category links, or in subjects by following tag links; still, it will be worth touching on those pieces here, and there are also quite a few “static pages”, that is, regular web pages added to the site, that you might have missed.

At the beginning of the year we were still writing for The Examiner; all of that has been republished here, much of it which was originally done in serialized format consolidated into larger articles.  My reasons for that are explained here on the blog in #8:  Open Letter to the Editors of The Examiner, if you missed them.  It is still hoped that the Patreon campaign will pick up the slack and pay the bills needed to support continuing the efforts here at M. J. Young Net.

img0034MJYNet

Let’s start with the law and politics pieces.  This is a good place to start, because when at the beginning of the year we moved everything from The Examiner, we included a final New Jersey Political Buzz Index Early 2015, with articles on Coalition Government, Broadcasting, Marriage Law Articles, Judiciary, Internet Law, Congress, Discrimination, Election Law, Search and Seizure, Presidential, Health Care, and Insurrection, most subjects covering several articles consolidated with other articles, along with links to earlier indices.  There was also a new main law/politics index page, appropriately Articles on Law and Politics, covering the old and the new, and we added a static page to that, continuing a series on tax we had begun previously, What’s Wrong with the Flat Tax?.

We’ve also had a number of law and politics posts on this blog, including

We also covered New Jersey’s 2015 off-year election with a couple posts, #12:  The 2015 Election, and #15:  The 2015 Election Results.

There were a few web log posts that were on Bible/theology subjects, particularly last week’s #32:  Celebrating Christmas, about why we celebrate, and why this particular day; plus some that were both political and theological, including #3:  Reality versus Experience, #23:  Armageddon and Presidential Politics, and #24:  Religious Liberty and Gay Rights:  A Definitive Problem.

Then there was the time travel material.  This also included some that were originally published at The Examiner and moved here, sometimes consolidated into single pieces.  We started the year with a serialized (and now consolidated) analysis of Predestination, followed by one of Project Almanac.  We also gave a nod to (Some of) The Best Time Travel Comedies and (Some of) The Best Time Travel Thrillers, before moving here.

Once here, we began our temporal insights with a couple of web log posts, the first #6:  Terminator Genisys Quick Temporal Survey, and then #17:  Interstellar Quick Temporal Survey, both thanks to the generosity of readers who provided for us to see these films.  We eventually managed to add a new analysis to the web site, Terminator Genisys, one of the longest and most complicated analyses we have yet done–but we were not done.  Remembering that our original analysis of the first two films in the franchise made some suggestions concerning a future direction for the series, and having commented on the problems with continuing it after the latest installment, we wrote #28:  A Terminator Vision, giving some ideas for a next film.  Then in response to a reply to the analysis, we added #31:  A Genisys Multiverse, explaining why we don’t think a multiverse-type solution resolves the problems of the film.

The site was expanded on another long-neglected front, the Stories from the Verse section:  the directors of Valdron Inc gave me permission to serialize Verse Three, Chapter One:  The First Multiverser Novel; as of today, the first forty-seven of one hundred twenty-six chapters (they’re mostly short chapters) have been published; there is an index which conveniently lists all the chapters from the first to the most recent published in the left column and from the most recent to the first in the right, so that you can begin at the beginning if you have not read it at all, or find where you left off going backwards if you’ve read most of it.  The chapters also link to each other for convenient page turning.

I don’t know whether it makes it more interesting or takes away some of the magic, but I also began running a set of “behind the writings” blog posts to accompany the novel.  These are my recollections of the process that brought the pages to life–where I got some of the ideas, my interactions with the editor and other pre-publication readers,, changes that were made, and how it all came to be.  There are now seven of them in print–

  1. #18:  A Novel Comic Milestone,

  2. #20:  Becoming Novel,
  3. #22:  Getting Into Characters,
  4. #25:  Novel Changes,
  5. #27:  A Novel Continuation,
  6. #30:  Novel Directions,
  7. #33:  Novel Struggles,

–and I expect to publish another tomorrow for the next six chapters.

Looking at the few posts that have not yet fit in one of these categories, whether logic or trivia or something else, one, #29:  Saving the Elite, was really advice for writing a certain kind of story.  Our first post in the blog, #1:  Probabilities and Solitaire, was a bit of a lesson in probabilities in card games, and #26:  The Cream in My Coffee applied physics to how you lighten and sweeten your hot beverages.

So that’s what we’ve been doing this year, or at least, that’s the part that sticks above the water.  We’ve answered questions by e-mail, posted to Facebook (and PInterest and Twitter and LinkedIn and MySpace and Google+ and IMDB and GoodReads and who knows where else), kept the Bible study going, worked on the novels, and tried to keep the home fires burning at the same time.  That’s all important, but somewhat ephemeral–it passes with time faster than that which is published.  Here’s hoping that you’ve benefited in some way from something I wrote this year, and that you’ll continue encouraging me in the year ahead.

Happy old year.

Happy new year.

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