463: Characters Unsettled

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #463, on the subject of Characters Unsettled.

With permission of Valdron Inc I have previously completed publishing my first eight Multiverser novels,

  1. Verse Three, Chapter One:  The First Multiverser Novel,
  2. Old Verses New,
  3. For Better or Verse,
  4. Spy Verses,
  5. Garden of Versers,
  6. Versers Versus Versers,
  7. Re Verse All, and
  8. In Verse Proportion,

in serialized form on the web (those links will take you to the table of contents for each book).  Along with each book there was also a series of web log posts looking at the writing process, the decisions and choices that delivered the final product; those posts are indexed with the chapters in the tables of contents pages.  Now as I am posting the ninth, Con Verse Lea,  I am again offering a set of “behind the writings” insights.  This “behind the writings” look may contain spoilers because it sometimes talks about my expectations for the futures of the characters and stories–although it sometimes raises ideas that were never pursued, as being written partially concurrently with the story it sometimes discusses where I thought it was headed.  You might want to read the referenced chapters before reading this look at them.  Links below (the section headings) will take you to the specific individual chapters being discussed, and there are (or will soon be) links on those pages to bring you back hopefully to the same point here.

This is the second post for this novel, covering chapters 18 through 34.  The first, covering chapters 1 through 17, appeared as web log post #460:  Versers Reorganize.

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

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

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Quick links to discussions in this page:
Chapter 18, Beam 126
Chapter 19, Takano 64
Chapter 20, Beam 127
Chapter 21, Hastings 238
Chapter 22, Beam 128
Chapter 23, Takano 65
Chapter 24, Beam 129
Chapter 25, Hastings 239
Chapter 26, Beam 130
Chapter 27, Takano 66
Chapter 28, Beam 131
Chapter 29, Hastings 240
Chapter 30, Beam 132
Chapter 31, Takano 67
Chapter 32, Beam 133
Chapter 33, Hastings 241
Chapter 34, Beam 134

Chapter 18, Beam 126

I was figuring out a lot of detail for this world.  I had run it at least thrice before, but never with a group and only once with an adult character and usually in the “alpha” setting (medieval).  At this point I did not know where Beam was going to stay or what he would do.  Returning to Ashleigh’s home was the best option.

The original of this chapter contained this text:

“Did you make your own sword?”

“My sword was made by the blacksmith we visited earlier.”

“I didn’t see any swords in his shop.”

“Of course not.  The soldiers would arrest him if they knew he made swords for anyone other than them.  When someone needs a sword, they save up the rice for it and then visit the smith to ask him to make it.  In a day or two they pick it up.”

On a re-read it struck me that the ninja-to was a feature in the medieval version of this world, but absent from the modern one, and so since it hadn’t been mentioned I deleted the reference.

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Chapter 19, Takano 64

I had spent some time trying to figure out what the scouting teams would see and what they would report.  I realized that I needed them all to return quickly, and one excellent way to do that would be to terrify them with some machine.  Ploughs were the first and simplest choice.

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Chapter 20, Beam 127

I was very much delayed on this, partly because I was working on other projects including that web log series about the credibility of the Exodus account, but partly because I was inching forward.  I had had a mental breakthrough on Lauren and Tommy’s story, but was still trying to work out how Beam and Ashleigh manage to get moving forward.  The idea that she would go on a mission without telling him seemed the right first step.

I was also working through the right level of technology for peasant homes in this world, and decided on cold running water and plumbed outhouses.

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Chapter 21, Hastings 238

I wanted to bring back the third team, but I didn’t want it to seem either as if the three teams all came back at once, or on the other hand that one of them was out longer than was reasonable.  Thus I wound up with this chapter about Lauren and Tommy waiting.

I had expected to describe what Boronir’s team found in more detail, but thought that it was time to transition back to Beam and that I should delay it for the next chapter.  It also gave me a sort of cliffhanger, which I liked.

I had spent quite a long time thinking about what this third scouting team would have found and how Lauren would proceed from here.  There was going to be a place to camp, and I considered having Boronir describe it, but the more I considered it the less sense it made.  Ultimately I decided that the brave former tennan would have to be stopped by something he didn’t understand how to pass, and that Lauren could find the campground by magic.  I also worked out how the technologically-oriented deity of that world could answer her prayer, but that’s for the next chapter.

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Chapter 22, Beam 128

I was still unsure how Beam was going to become integrated into this world.  I didn’t see him apprenticing to an herbalist, which several players have done, but his style was not terribly consistent with the ninja program.  He was going to need a place to live, food, and something to do, none of which seemed obvious at this point.

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Chapter 23, Takano 65

I had expected to have Boronir describe the fence, but decided that this wouldn’t be terribly interesting and I needed to get the people on the road, so I rushed through that and went as directly to Lauren’s spell as I could.

The idea of the direction coming as a map on Tommy’s cell phone had occurred to me a few nights before as I was driving and mentally trying to unravel how to move all the stories forward.  I remembered that Lauren had that direction spell, and that it had worked before in this world, but I needed a technological way for the magic to work.  Tommy had both a laptop and a cell phone, but cell phone map programs made more sense, being designed to work as GPS systems.

I have also mentally worked out the destination, but I’m still working on how to present the journey.

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Chapter 24, Beam 129

I struck on the idea of attacking villas pretty much incidentally.  I had envisioned most of the nobles living in cities, with peasant servants, but realized that attacking homes in the cities would mean needing a place to hide.  I’m beginning to form a plan.

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Chapter 25, Hastings 239

I had intended this to take them to the gate, but I realized that I needed to stop for lunch, and when I did I realized I needed water, and the best way to do that was by tapping an irrigation pipe.  However, as I invented how those pipes worked, I realized that Lauren and Tommy weren’t going to be able to open it by physical means.  I decided that opening a valve magically would be a release lock or hold spell, within the bias, and that calling for water could use Moses as an example, so I built all of that.  However, it took long enough that my chapter ended there.

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Chapter 26, Beam 130

Again I expected to move further forward in this chapter, which was going to be about making the map, but I first had to figure out the camping arrangements which took more ink than I anticipated.  Still, I wasn’t really sure how to write the mapmaking section, so I’m not complaining.

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Chapter 27, Takano 66

Getting this organized was the trick.  I needed Lauren to kill the turkeys, but I also needed her to examine the gate and talk about setting camp on this side of it.  I had been thinking about Tommy’s concern about dangerous animals for a while, and needed to get that in here as well.  Thus piecing it together in a sensible sequence was the challenge, and I cut off the story before becoming too involved in everything else.

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Chapter 28, Beam 131

The map had been on my mind for a while, a necessary step to Beam starting his actions.  I also decided that they should sleep in the woods, because he was not going to be comfortable celebrating his honeymoon in his bride’s mother’s common room.

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Chapter 29, Hastings 240

I had expected to come to this sooner, and had anticipated the difficulty of conveying everything Lauren had to teach these people and the challenges of working without the best tools.

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Chapter 30, Beam 132

Life stalled this chapter at least a week, and although I knew the essential story elements, I wasn’t sure how to compose them.  The plot has a few chapters to it, but the execution still promises to be challenging.

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Chapter 31, Takano 67

Starting this chapter, I only knew that it began with entering the woods, and that I couldn’t have them reach the campsite until the next chapter because I needed the hike to seem long.  The dialogue arose to give a sense of the passage of time, but it raised important issues.

I wondered about what they would be able to find for food, particularly as Lauren is the only one who has any experience hunting.  I pondered if there were any crops that might be grown in patches in the woods, and wondered about cranberry bogs, but a quick check determined these were not harvested until late fall.  I also considered other berries, which often grow in wild patches, but for a hundred people this would require rather large fields of them.  I thought of my solution, which should come in the next chapter.

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Chapter 32, Beam 133

I had spent quite a while trying to decide how Beam could take over a villa.  The moving in did not seem to be a problem; it was avoiding being evicted.  What I decided was that he had to make the commanders reluctant to attack.  I thus knew before Beam took over the villa that he would be leaving it early in the morning and demolishing it when the soldiers arrived to retake it.

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Chapter 33, Hastings 241

I long pondered how to make the shooting work.  I tried to imagine how the buck would fail to notice or react to the arrival of a crowd of people, or how Lauren could manage to be carrying her bow and pulling her cart.  That pressed me to finding a reason for Lauren to scout ahead, and Tommy’s fear of predators gave me something.

I had looked up the amount of meat on a buck, and whether a bow hunter could bring one down with one shot, just to be certain I wasn’t being unreasonable.  It turns out forty percent of the weight of a one hundred fifty pound buck (large) is edible meat.  It also occurred to me that deer is kosher (cleaves the hoof and chews the cud) so it would probably be fairly safe.

The water spout was one of the first features I’d envisioned for the campsite.  It occurs to me that I’ve got a couple more, and I’m going to have to consider why Lauren has not yet seen them, but she hasn’t explored far yet.

I wanted Lauren to say, or think, “Hi, honey, I’m home”, and even returned to the chapter looking for how to fit it into what I’d written, but it wouldn’t work with what I had.

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Chapter 34, Beam 134

Beam’s expectation is that after what he did to the soldiers who came to retake the first villa, the military will be a bit less rash in their response this time.  In game he would need a good general effects roll for that, but I’m giving it to him here, partly because I think it likely despite the attitudes of the soldier nobility.

What I don’t have is a next step for him.

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This has been the second behind-the-writings look at Con Verse Lea.  If there is interest and continued support from readers we will endeavor to continue with more behind-the-writings posts and another novel.

#462: The Song “John Three”

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #462, on the subject of The Song “John Three”.

Sometime around 1969-70 I wrote a song entitled I Die At the Dawn–I wrote a lot of songs about death and dying back then.  It had rather vapid but sad lyrics and long instrumental stretches.  Then in 1973 when BLT Down morphed into The Last Psalm, I rewrote the words, created melodies over the instrumental sections, and created Saturday’s Song, about the despair the disciples must have felt between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.  It was one of the rockier songs in the repertoire, and a crowd pleaser.

This is not that song.

However, that song was the impetus for something.  My lead guitarist Jeffrey Robert Zurheide subsequently wrote a duet, a conversation in which a soldier orders a cross from a carpenter, and we were off and running on a rock opera about Passion Week, every song told with Jesus off stage by people who had been there.  We eventually had about a dozen songs in the series, and this was one of them.

I have not recorded many of these, partly because there are several on which I would not be able to sing the soprano part, partly because I never finished writing the massive finale.  There will be another that I recorded mostly because when I wrote it I had no one to perform it and wanted to preserve the intricate music.  This one I wrote because it was co-written with David D. Oldham (and his friend Stephen Fredette), who insisted I make these recordings, so I included it on the first disk I made for him.

It follows the crucifixion, and sees Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus sitting outside the tomb in which they have just sealed the body of Jesus, talking about their own despair and lack of direction.  The “three angry men” section is a musical variant of the original theme from Saturday’s Song (it’s in 3/4 in the original, developing into a fugue, while here it is in a syncopated 4 with harmony).  The two characters sing it as a duet, and we performed it with The Last Psalm, another of the rockier songs in the repertoire.  The vocals-over-midi-instruments recording of it is one of the better ones.

John Three.

So here are the lyrics.

Oh, Nicodemus, I’m asking you,
Where do we go from here?  What do we do?
Joseph, I’m horrified–my hopes are crucified.
He died on a cross for three angry men,
None of whom will be blamed.
He died all alone, the cross was His throne–
The world must have gone insane.
Where do we go when we know that our hopes have been crucified?

Now that we’ve buried Him, where do we go?
I’d like to tell you, but I just don’t know.
If He had made it clear,
Then we would not be here.
He died on a cross for three angry men,
None of whom will be blamed.
He died like a man, with nails in his hand.
How could he stand the pain?
Where do we go when we know that our hopes have been crucified?

Oh, how could one day, so brief and grim,
Bring such distress to us, and death to Him?
So now we stand for Him against our fears,
But since we rose too late, we’re standing here.

We’ve gone too far my friend to turn back now.
We should go on ahead, but don’t know how.
We can’t forget Him friend.
Have we been born again?
He died on a cross for three angry men,
He died on a cross for three angry men,
He died on a cross for three angry men–
Where do we go when we know that our hopes have been crucified?

*****

Previous web log song posts:

#301:  The Song “Holocaust” | #307:  The Song “Time Bomb” | #311:  The Song “Passing Through the Portal” | #314:  The Song “Walkin’ In the Woods” | #317:  The Song “That’s When I’ll Believe” | #320:  The Song “Free” | #322:  The Song “Voices” | #326:  The Song “Mountain, Mountain” | #328:  The Song “Still Small Voice” | #334:  The Song “Convinced” | #337:  The Song “Selfish Love” | #340:  The Song “A Man Like Paul” | #341:  The Song “Joined Together” | #346:  The Song “If We Don’t Tell Them” | #349: The Song “I Can’t Resist You’re Love” | #353:  The Song “I Use to Think” | #356:  The Song “God Said It Is Good” | #362:  The Song “My Life to You” | #366:  The Song “Sometimes” | #372:  The Song “Heavenly Kingdom” | #378:  The Song “A Song of Joy” | #382:  The Song “Not Going to Notice” | #387:  The Song “Our God Is Good” | #393:  The Song “Why” | #399:  The Song “Look Around You” | #404:  The Song “Love’s the Only Command” | #408:  The Song “Given You My Name” | #412:  The Song “When I Think” | #414:  The Song “You Should Have Thanked Me” | #428:  The Song “To the Victor” | #433:  The Song “From Job” | #436:  The Song “Trust Him Again” | #438:  The Song “Even You” | #441:  The Song “Fork in the Road” | #442:  The Song “Call to Worship” | #445:  The Song “How Many Times” | #447:  The Song “When I Was Lonely” | #450:  The Song “Rainy Days” | #453:  The Song “Never Alone” | #455:  The Song “King of Glory” | #457:  The Song “Greater Love” | #458:  The Song “All I Need”

Next song: The Secret

#461: 2022 In Review

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #461, on the subject of 2022 In Review.

Each year I try to post an index of everything I published in the previous year.  I’ve done it before, obviously, so working backwards you can find previous years (and in the early days of the web log, partial years) at:

It has been an unusually productive year–in the sense that it has been productive in unusual ways.  In the wake of the release last year of my comprehensive apologetics book Why I Believe from Dimensionfold Publishing, they put to print my summary of time travel theory, The Essential Guide to Time Travel:  Temporal Anomalies & Replacement Theory, and republished three earlier books, Do You Trust Me? summarizing salvation by faith as the only way of salvation ever, What Does God Expect?  A Gospel-based Approach to Christian Conduct about living a Christian life without following rules, and About the Fruit, a study of the famous passage in Galatians and its place in that book and in the history of the first century church.  There is a long list of pending titles moving toward publication next year, beginning with a printed collection of the Faith in Play series–more on that later.

There were twelve entries in that series this year, including several on archetypes, a few on bringing divine acts into the game, some about spirits and the afterlife, and a couple about Christianity and role playing games.  The companion series, RPG-ology, also slated to be compiled and released in book form next year, gave us eight recovered Game Ideas Unlimited articles from the old Gaming Outpost series, plus one more originally in the e-zine Daedalus, and a few new suggestions for running games.  All of those are indexed at the Christian Gamers Guild, 2022 At the Christian Gamers Guild Reviewed, along with a few other articles at that site.

There were also many posts on the Chaplain’s Bible Study, which finished the Gospel According to John and began working on Mark, along with several Musings posts.

The Multiverser novels continued in serialized form, finishing the eighth, In Verse Proportion, featuring Joe Kondor, Bob Slade, and Derek Brown, and starting the ninth, Con Verse Lea, with the return of Lauren Hastings, Tomiko Takano, and James Beam.  These were accompanied by behind-the-writings peeks as mark Joseph “young” web log posts:

In collaboration with author Eric R. Ashley, I’ve got the tenth and eleventh books fully drafted, and we have started on the twelfth.  I also posted updated character sheets for Joseph Kondor, Robert Slade, Derek Brown, Lady Shella, Ezekiel Smith, and Amira Vashti, and am working on the next set of these.

The web log also posted eleven songs–not twelve, because due to government red tape tangles I was off line for a full month, but it only cost us a bit.  We saw, and heard (there are audio files linked from the pages which contain the lyrics and a story behind the song) including:

  1. #436:  The Song “Trust Him Again”;
  2. #438:  The Song “Even You”;
  3. #441:  The Song “Fork in the Road”;
  4. #442:  The Song “Call to Worship”;
  5. #445:  The Song “How Many Times”;
  6. #447:  The Song “When I Was Lonely”;
  7. #450:  The Song “Rainy Days”;
  8. #453:  The Song “Never Alone”;
  9. #455:  The Song “King of Glory”;
  10. #457:  The Song “Greater Love”;
  11. #458:  The Song “All I Need”;

Other web log posts included:

There was a new analysis added to the Temporal Anomalies site, Temporal Anomalies in Time Travel Movies unravels The History of Time Travel, a clever mockumentary in which time travel was never invented because its inventor prevented it.

Those upcoming books include compilations of the first five years of articles in the Faith in Play and RPG-ology series, plus a book of collected essays on role playing games, and then I hope to see a series of commentaries on the New Testament, one book at a time.  I began with Romans a decade and a half ago, worked my way through the end of Revelation, then doubled back to do John, Mark, and Matthew, and am currently working on Luke.  after that, I will be going through Acts, which will complete the New Testament hopefully within my lifetime.

On the web, I have a few Faith in Play and RPG-ology entries queued to post and a couple more waiting for me to set them up.  There will be more web log posts, and hopefully I’ll get to some of the time travel movies I’ve noted are available on various web streaming services.  Of course, the novels continue, and the Bible Study will be around for a while yet.

I have an Instagram account, and early in the year I decided to post some of my Gazebos in the Wild photos to it, along with some other things there.  They are mostly in the categories of nonsense or personal, but you’re welcome to look.

Those who wish to stay current on what is being posted can get that from my social media outlets, but particularly Patreon, where I announce everything that posts on the day it posts, other than the Bible Study; and the Goodreads web log The Ides of Mark which publishes twice a month and includes the Bible Study posts.

There are also still more songs to come, and one should be released later today.