This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #527, on the subject of Characters Reorient.
With permission of Valdron Inc I have previously completed publishing my first eleven Multiverser novels,
- Verse Three, Chapter One: The First Multiverser Novel,
- Old Verses New,
- For Better or Verse,
- Spy Verses,
- Garden of Versers,
- Versers Versus Versers,
- Re Verse All,
- In Verse Proportion,
- Con Verse Lea,
- In Version, in collaboration with Eric R. Ashley, and
- Con Version, in collaboration with Eric R. Ashley,
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 twelfth, A Dozen Verses, again written in collaboration with Eric R. Ashley, I am again offering a set of “behind the writings” insights. This “behind the writings” look may contain spoilers because it sometimes talks about my expectations for the futures of the characters and stories–although it sometimes raises ideas that were never pursued, as being written partially concurrently with the story it sometimes discusses where I thought it was headed. You might want to read the referenced chapters before reading this look at them. Links below (the section headings) will take you to the specific individual chapters being discussed, and there are (or will soon be) links on those pages to bring you back hopefully to the same point here.
This is the fourth post for this novel, covering chapters 37 through 48. Previous posts are:
- #524: Twisting Worlds, covering the first twelve chapters;
- #525: Character Battles, covering chapters 13 through 24; and
- #526: Versers Adjust, chapters 25 through 36.
There is also a section of the site, Multiverser Novel Support Pages, in which I have begun to place materials related to the novels beginning with character papers for the major characters, giving them at different stages as they move through the books.
History of the series, including the reason it started, the origins of character names and details, and many of the ideas, are in earlier posts, and won’t be repeated here.
Quick links to discussions in this page:
Chapter 37, Slade 263
Chapter 38, Kondor 268
Chapter 39, Cooper 85
Chapter 40, Slade 264
Chapter 41, Kondor 269
Chapter 42, Cooper 86
Chapter 43, Slade 265
Chapter 44, Kondor 270
Chapter 45, Cooper 87
Chapter 46, Slade 266
Chapter 47, Kondor 271
Chapter 48, Cooper 88
Eric said he expected Slade’s stay in this world to be short; he would identify the problems and solve them. This was his beginning of that.
Eric decided to transport the duo back to London in the helicopter, and this was his work.
Eric had set up a minor conundrum in practical theology, and fired a message to the player on whom the character was based to ask how he would handle it. However, it was mid January and the player, a college professor, was just starting a new term and didn’t have time to address it, so I decided questions of theology were my domain, and I drafted this chapter. I did ask Eric whether the alien’s syncretism was a “one of these might be right” or an “all of these are right” sort, and went with his decision. He had already leapt ahead and written the next two chapters, for Slade and Kondor, and the gap was bothering me.
Eric wanted Slade to solve the farming problem, and so he set up a minor irrigation system. He commented that this was taking longer than he anticipated, so Slade was going to be in this world longer than he had planned, but that was not a problem for me.
I was surprised that Eric used the helicopter to fly from Cambodia to London. When I had landed Derek in Brazil, the helicopter only took him to an airport from which he flew on a comfortable jet. However, I was still finishing the character papers for In Version and working on formatting my Romans analytical commentary.
The day Eric drafted this was the same day I finished the HTML version of the Joseph Kondor character sheet for In Version, so I was probably approaching the point at which I would be sharing more of the writing–although I was not at all certain how to jump into any of the stories he was creating.
Eric gave me a lot of input on the flora and fauna of this world, and also suggested that Slade’s blaster wouldn’t work. That gave us a moderately low tech bias, and perhaps the first time that someone’s tech device wouldn’t work at all in a universe. He then suggested that Slade was going to go hunting, which seemed out of character to me but right for the story, so I put this together. I had just finished novel 10 character sheets for them, so I could see what they were able to do, and recognized their limitations.
I skipped Slade 265 and drafted Kondor 270, because this was a world with which I was familiar and I could handle all the characters, particularly as this was the setup, the introduction in which the versers get the new jobs, and it mattered that having heard Derek’s stories they were both familiar with the situation already.
Eric had made some suggestions for what Cooper might do on this planet once he was given shore leave, but I noted that I would expect that as soon as the cargo was offloaded and the first batch given leave those who remained would be put to work cleaning the ship and freshening the interior, so I wrote this.
I had set up the problem of how to move the large “jumpig” Slade had killed, and Eric and I tossed out a few ideas. Ultimately I thought the best choice was a force-shield-as-vehicle idea, but Eric wanted it to be different from the usual disc used by others, so I decided to set up a ritual by which Shella marked out the borders of a force wall by pacing and then it formed a couple inches below the surface and lifted the dirt and whatever was on top of it. Then, of course, I realized I had another problem, because neither of the Slades do much cooking.
Eric put Kondor and Zeke in the temporary apartment in the office, which he described in some detail. I had always imagined it as more of a VIP luxury apartment, but had never described it, so I went with it. He then moved them to their apartment across town.
There was a problem with Eric s conception of Reptile House. He thought they were based in London and connected a lot of the ideas for Kondor and Zeke s training and equipment to them. I explained that being CIA, the Reptile House team was based in their headquarters outside Washington, that when they were in the field their local base was called Terrarium, and that they had no permanent base in England, so he rewrote to accommodate that.
He described a rug in the apartment that didn t create a clear image in my mind, so he sent me a link to a picture of one. I liked it a lot, and rewrote the description to convey the idea.
Expanding this world’s version of Venus after some ideas had been shared, Eric created this chapter. We had a significant discussion about his idea of a gun enspelled so as never to misfire, since a misfire is what I would call a “safe” botch, and that means that if misfire is prevented something worse has to happen. After kicking around ideas, I came up with a solution which I outlined, in which if the gun misfires magic causes the powder to explode anyway, so it seems as if it doesn’t–but other tech botches are still possible, and it is possible for the magic to botch if activated by a misfire.
Eric’s view of this universe has Cooper going on mini adventures on different planets, and this visit with a local family was to facilitate setting up such a thing.
This has been the fourth behind-the-writings look at A Dozen Verses. If there is interest and continued support from readers we will endeavor to continue with more behind-the-writings posts and another novel.