Monthly Archives: January 2026

Books by the Author

#529: Characters in Action

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #529, on the subject of Characters in Action.

With permission of Valdron Inc I have previously completed publishing my first eleven 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,
  8. In Verse Proportion,
  9. Con Verse Lea,
  10. In Version, in collaboration with Eric R. Ashley, and
  11. 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 sixth post for this novel, covering chapters 61 through 72.  Previous posts are:

  1. #524:  Twisting Worlds, covering the first twelve chapters;
  2. #525:  Character Battles, covering chapters 13 through 24;
  3. #526:  Versers Adjust, chapters 25 through 36;
  4. #527:  Characters Reorient, chapters 37 through 48; and
  5. #528:  Versers Investigate, chapters 49 through 60.

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.

Chapter 61, Slade 271

I wrote the beginning of this chapter, but dropped it because I wasn’t sure where to go, leaving it for Eric to continue.

Eric wanted to suggest that eating the fruit had temporarily enhanced Shella’s psionic abilities, but I wanted to maintain the rules, that it would be something possible within the definition of the skills she had.  We tried a couple of demonstrations of her telekinesis before I settled on the one we included.

Chapter 62, Kondor 276

Eric had suggested a chase through the streets of the city, so I used this chapter to transition from the auction house to the pursuit.

Chapter 63, Cooper 93

When I finished Cooper 92, I left a note that read, “My vision at this point is that the corridor continues for some distance and then there is a lit space, not quite a room, more like a cul-de-sac, in which there is something, a statue or an idol or something, and light, not terribly bright but sufficient to see.  This will appear to be a dead end.  There will be something here worth taking, and some way to open a secret passage that returns them to the surface.  That doesn’t all fit in one chapter, but that seems to be the direction to go.”  Eric built on that to create this.

Chapter 64, Slade 272

I skipped this chapter because I had figured out what to do with Kondor and not what to do with Slade.  Eric then wrote it before I got back to Cooper.

Chapter 65, Kondor 277

I had left the previous Kondor chapter uncertain how Joe would find the chase, given the probability that both of the others were out of sight.  I then realized that with the scriff sense he could track Zeke anywhere in the world, and I could use that to get him to Zeke.

Eric tinkered with the text to make it more exciting, and we tussled a bit over how specific we could be about details we were inventing, given that neither of us had ever actually visited France.  Eric says, “I ended up creating a new large city in France, Tuolorca, to resolve some of the issues.”

Chapter 66, Cooper 94

I had asked Eric what he intended for the glove, but he tossed it back to me, reminding me that I had suggested some high-tech device that echoed of the Green Lantern ring.  Thus I put together this chapter to introduce it.

Chapter 67, Slade 273

I again skipped this chapter.  Eric created all of it, with only some minor editorial suggestions from me.

Chapter 68, Kondor 278

I had been up in what for me was the middle of the night because my gout flared up and I needed to get started on some medicine to control it so I could manage the stairs with my laundry in a few hours.  I wrote part of this, and went back to bed.  Eric left me significant notes on a way-over-the-top Mission Impossible movie notion.  I had already thought of having Kondor drive Amanda off the road and chasing her into an office building, and so I began with that and took only a little of his ideas into completing the chapter.

Chapter 69, Cooper 95

I got the idea for the way the exits worked while I was writing the previous Kondor chapter.  I also thought it was necessary for the others to find something that would interest them, so they wouldn’t focus too much on the glove, and that although I already knew that the glove had other powers, if it opened the doors that would probably be enough to make the others think that was all it did.

Chapter 70, Slade 274

I was thrown for a few days at this point.  Part of it was that my book RPG-ology Volume I was in the final stages of publication, and I had several tasks to perform to get it into print.  However, part of it was that I felt that Eric had thrown a couple curve balls at me, and I was trying to recover.

I learned something about my own writing process.  I’ll write a chapter or even several chapters, and then walk away with the storylines simmering on a back burner.  Frequently I have no idea what happens next in any of the stories, but then gradually something will coalesce, and I’ll return ready to write.

This time I was still having trouble wrapping my head around Bob Slade’s world, but I expected that Eric was going to write this chapter and I was going to return to write the next chapters for Cooper and Kondor.  Instead, I found a list of questions about which way we should go with Slade, and chapters for Cooper and Kondor already in place.  As I was already pressed for time, this threw me, and I didn’t read more than the Slade questions and the beginnings of the other two chapters, which told me that Eric had treated things very differently than I had intended in both cases.

It was about a day before I apologized for ducking out, and discussed the Slade situation.  Eric was torn between having Slade defeat the priest and go on to finish this world, and having the priest kill Slade then later having someone else deal with the problems here.  While I would have been glad to be done with this world, I had two problems.  One was that I had no idea who would come back to fix it, but that was a minor issue.  The other was that Slade only once lost in single combat (against Dawn in Versers Versus Versers), and I couldn t imagine him doing so here.  On reflection, though, I suggested that we have the fight, that the priest manages to animate the entire forest, and Slade is overwhelmed fighting an army of trees.

Chapter 71, Kondor 279

Eric drafted this.  I objected to a couple minor points, which he fixed, and I tweaked it a bit in one spot.  I would have included a statement of the contents of the drive, which I had previously suggested was research, probably Russian, on the use of superconductors to achieve cold fusion, but there didn’t really seem a good spot for it.

Chapter 72, Cooper 96

Eric drafted this rather lengthy sequence of returning to the ship, which had a lot of excellent color.  I added Cooper’s explanation of why he didn’t expect to be spending much of his accumulated treasure, and I pointed out to Eric that they had abandoned the flight equipment, so we agreed on a way to fix that which I inserted.

This has been the sixth 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.

Books by the Author

#528: Versers Investigate

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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,

  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,
  8. In Verse Proportion,
  9. Con Verse Lea,
  10. In Version, in collaboration with Eric R. Ashley, and
  11. 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:

  1. #524:  Twisting Worlds, covering the first twelve chapters;
  2. #525:  Character Battles, covering chapters 13 through 24;
  3. #526:  Versers Adjust, chapters 25 through 36; and
  4. #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.

Chapter 49, Slade 267

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.

Chapter 50, Kondor 272

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.

Chapter 51, Cooper 89

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.

Chapter 52, Slade 268

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.”

Chapter 53, Kondor 273

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.

Chapter 54, Cooper 90

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.

Chapter 55, Slade 269

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.

Chapter 56, Kondor 274

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.

Chapter 57, Cooper 91

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.

Chapter 58, Slade 270

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.

Chapter 59, Kondor 275

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.

Chapter 60, Cooper 92

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.