This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #528, on the subject of Versers Investigate.
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 fifth post for this novel, covering chapters 49 through 60. Previous posts are:
- #524: Twisting Worlds, covering the first twelve chapters;
- #525: Character Battles, covering chapters 13 through 24;
- #526: Versers Adjust, chapters 25 through 36; and
- #527: Characters Reorient, chapters 37 through 48.
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 49, Slade 267
Chapter 50, Kondor 272
Chapter 51, Cooper 89
Chapter 52, Slade 268
Chapter 53, Kondor 273
Chapter 54, Cooper 90
Chapter 55, Slade 269
Chapter 56, Kondor 274
Chapter 57, Cooper 91
Chapter 58, Slade 270
Chapter 59, Kondor 275
Chapter 60, Cooper 92
I was considering how Slade and Shella could cook their kill, but Eric suggested that the peasant Rudolph would know how to prepare and cook jumpig, so he wrote this.
I wanted to play with the names on Kondor’s passports mostly because I knew he didn t really like to lie about who he is, but he had used a different name in the Mystery of the Vorgo world when he worked on the kinetic energy project, and had paperwork in that name but it was Zeke’s name. I pondered names for quite a bit while I was writing, and then when I was done I remembered that before I’d started writing I had Walter Walters in mind, based on the friends Kondor had in his two Mary Piper adventures, so I tagged that on as Kondor’s suggestion to Zeke.
I had left a note for Eric to the effect that the names on Zeke’s passports weren’t important, and indeed I never put names on all of Derek’s, but if he felt like playing with that he could, and he did.
This was the beginning of a mini adventure. Eric wanted Cooper to start a dungeon crawl. I had serious reservations–I had a lot of trouble with Slade’s dungeon crawl in Verse Three, Chapter One, and I avoided them until I took Lauren into an underdark adventure in Re Verse All with characters from a D&D game I had once played, for which I had at least the bare bones of a plotline. However, he set this up, and we talked about possible plotlines.
After a long hiatus in which I was buried under other projects and trying to figure out how to handle the situation Eric had created here, I finally returned to put together this chapter. What had to happen is that Slade needed to be immune to their illusions because he was not afraid, but somehow it had to be communicated that these illusions were there, and the way to do it was to have Shella see them.
In retrospect, Eric wrote, “I’m glad I waited for MJ because he handled this significantly better than I would have in several different ways, with the combat with the sword, the description of the peasant, Shella’s fighting, and the explanation.”
Eric wrote a chapter here which I hated for several reasons, as being all wrong for my vision of Kondor and of the world. Part of it, I admitted, was that I had finished the Slade chapter intending to continue writing, and knew what I wanted this chapter to do, but we agreed to delete it and I wrote the replacement chapter, which effectively skirted past a lot of detail and gave the duo needed training before setting them up for the field.
Eric had set this up for me. I had had qualms about doing what amounted to a dungeon crawl entirely, both from the perspective that I had found it challenging to keep them interesting in the past and because I couldn’t find a good motivation for Cooper to go on one. I resolved the latter of those in the text, and after discussion with Eric about what we could do with this I picked the notion of a ‘trap’ dropping the group to a considerably deeper place so that it would be a challenge for them to find a way out. I didn’t make it a trap–traps make sense in pyramids and other ancient tombs, but not really in ruins of ancient cities or temples. Rather, it was the weakening of ancient construction that caused the floor to collapse.
When I wrote this, my companion characters were named XXX, YYY, and ZZZ, and I pointed out to Eric that we needed a crew roster. When I returned to finish the next chapter, he had constructed a partial, from which I replaced the names with Ren, Lodotti, and Kark, subject to adjustment, since he understood the characters better than I. He then created the roll call.
I started this with only the notion that Rudolph would appreciate the pelts and I had written Slade’s comments about not fearing anything, but I didn’t get far before I was called away and Eric was suggesting ideas. I returned and completed it, with some uncertainty about the story direction but feeling like this was the right way to go, with which Eric agreed.
Eric had wanted to put Kondor in this world so he could run some mystery adventures, and this was the first. He launched it and wrote the chapter.
There were a couple problems in that he thought Kondor’s cybereye could do things that were never part of the design, and that C’s tech team could tap into it, which I thought far too advanced for them. He replaced that with a pair of special glasses.
I particularly liked the introduction of Amanda, and suggested that we might have a love interest here, but a complicated one, as Amanda would be a freelance agent working for clients, and so wind up working against Kondor more than once.
I realized when I started writing Kondor 275 that the auction was in France and so the cash card would have to be in whatever currency they were using in France. A quick check told me that the euro was introduced in 1999 as an electronic currency and became a physical currency in 2002 or 3, and since we were estimating this as about 2003-4 I changed the denomination on the card from pounds to euros.
I picked up Cooper’s story to put them in a position to move forward, thinking through the situation and trying to put different character attitudes with each of the persons present.
Eric created this. When I read the ending (the way to find where we left off involves going to the end and working backwards), and his note to the effect of a fight between Slade and Shella, I was doubtful, but as I went through the chapter I decided that he had set it up well enough and it was an interesting direction, as long as we could figure out why Slade was seemingly unaffected and Shella was severely so.
The ideas here were Eric’s, mostly; that is, he said that the auction should take Kondor above the 100,000 mark he had been given. I looked up twentieth century pottery to come up with the Bernard Leach connection, and created the suggestion that it might be worth more if it had provenance to explain why a low starting bid might lead to a bidding war. I also decided that Kondor would overstep the ceiling based on the fact that he had been given cards to use at his discretion.
Eric also suggested that Amanda would steal the vase and flee, which I pushed to the next chapter, but set up here.
Trying to create a dungeon crawl that would be interesting, I decided to begin with my instinct that this space was vast. It then made sense to put Cooper up front, rather than have him following, and since he had one of the few lights it seemed likely that the others would go with that. From there, I needed him to be going somewhere, so I began to create the other end.
This has been the fifth 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.