All posts by M.J.

Books by the Author

#502: Verser Setbacks

July 21, 2024 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #502, on the subject of Verser Setbacks.

With permission of Valdron Inc I have previously completed publishing my first ten 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, and
In 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 eleventh, Con Version, 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 third post for this novel, covering chapters 25 through 36. The previous mark Joseph “young” behind-the-writings web log posts are #498: Characters Restart and #501: Characters Orienting. 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. This is also the longest book to date, and has quite a few long chapters in it, so there will be quite a few of these background articles.

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 25, Takano 92
Chapter 26, Brown 290
Chapter 27, Cooper 9
Chapter 28, Takano 93
Chapter 29, Brown 291
Chapter 30, Cooper 10
Chapter 31, Brown 292
Chapter 32, Takano 94
Chapter 33, Brown 293
Chapter 34, Cooper 11
Chapter 35, Takano 95
Chapter 36, Brown 294

Chapter 25, Takano 92

This was originally about trying to find a way to catch a giant fish, but it was difficult because Eric had forgotten how they did their fishing. Faced with the complications, he changed it to needing better weapons for confrontations with wild animals. To some degree, this was because we needed to have Tommy develop more survival skills and had no source for her to learn them.

Chapter 26, Brown 290

In our discussion for this chapter I had put forward the notion that Hannah would lowball Maurice on pay, and Derek would object to a black boy being paid less than a white boy, particularly by a black employer. This actually fits into our long-term notion of a racially integrated battle against injustice.

Chapter 27, Cooper 9

I made some suggestions for the outline, including the fact that Eric wanted a miracle connected to Cooper being arrested and escaping. Making a few notes on all of that, I then wrote the arrest.

The four official languages of Switzerland are French, Italian, German, and something called Romansh. I decided that the scene would be complicated if the soldier was less fluent in German and so tried to communicate in the other three languages first.

Chapter 28, Takano 93

I had been thinking that it would be good to have someone else take over the sermons, so that we wouldn’t have to keep thinking about what Tommy was going to teach each week. Sylwi seemed a good choice.

Chapter 29, Brown 291

Our outline for Derek included that there would be a confrontation with something called a Grunch (pictured) on Halloween, and that Maurice would be there. Eric had done the research on the New Orleans monsters for three confrontations we were planning, and he wrote this.

In Brown 302 Eric made reference to Derek and Vashti having explained who they were to Maurice. At that point, I came back here and expanded a one-sentence statement to the effect that they explained who they were to him into the several paragraphs which actually did explain it.

Chapter 30, Cooper 10

There had been significant discussion of the Cooper story, and I essentially pulled together pieces of it to which we had previously agreed, anticipating the next event, which would be the first miracle of Cooper’s experience.

Chapter 31, Brown 292

I suggested that the Brown story should be accelerated here, and that the entire Halloween event should take three chapters. Eric thought it would be completed in two, but as we reached the beginning of the second it was unclear exactly how it would resolve despite having an outline.

Eric wrote this, expanding on some of the ideas he had presented previously, and taking it to a cliffhanger as I had suggested.

Chapter 32, Takano 94

I saw this as follow-up to Tommy giving Sylwi control over the weekly services. I decided on Boronir because he had been one of the Tennans and therefore a noted fighter and probably a burly guy and less social.

I wrote this while waiting for Eric to catch up the Brown story.

Chapter 33, Brown 293

Finishing the Halloween confrontation, Eric wrote most of this, but was faced with the problem of killing a monster immune to bullets. I had suggested a “spiritual weapon” which was unclear, so Eric passed the writing to me to finish, and I brought in the notion of quoting something from the sprite scriptures which disempowered the Grunch and let them kill it with their weapons.

Chapter 34, Cooper 11

Eric had suggested a miracle, and we had discussed the options, so I took to writing this chapter. I had left two Brown chapters for Eric, because he understood the monster better, but filled in the Takano and Cooper chapters between them.

Chapter 35, Takano 295

Eric had written this quite a few chapters back, but I said it was too soon, and there were a lot of little mistakes, “continuity errors”, about her situation. It wouldn’t be until later in the year that there might be food shortages, but it was a good chapter. Having reached early December in her story, Eric resurrected the chapter from the notes and made significant revisions; I had trouble with only a small part of it, which he revised.

Chapter 36, Brown 294

We had several loose futures dangling. One was that I had said the band would pick up the Sousaphone player shortly after Halloween. We had also collaboratively written a portion in which the Devil is playing poker at a dance hall Derek visits for some reason, and I had decided that it should belong to an uncle of the Sousaphone player. Eric wrote the beginning of this, with the owner of a music hall, Pascal Beaufoy, asking Derek to come play there, and then segued into the devil playing cards in the restaurant. I moved that part back to the notes, because I couldn’t imagine Hannah Johnson allowing anyone to play cards in her restaurant, least of all the devil, and it would work much better at the music hall. I then penned the section introducing Pierre Beaufoy, grand-nephew of Pascal, as a wealthy Sousaphone player who wants an opportunity to play in a band.

This has been the third behind-the-writings look at Con Version. 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

#501: Characters Orienting

June 30, 2024 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #501, on the subject of Characters Orienting.

With permission of Valdron Inc I have previously completed publishing my first ten 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, and
In 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 eleventh, Con Version, 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 second post for this novel, covering chapters 13 through 24. The previous behind-the-writings post is mark Joseph “young” web log post #498: Characters Restart 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. This is also the longest book to date, and has quite a few long chapters in it, so there will be quite a few of these background articles.

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 13, Takano 88
Chapter 14, Brown 286
Chapter 15, Cooper 5
Chapter 16, Takano 89
Chapter 17, Brown 287
Chapter 18, Cooper 6
Chapter 19, Takano 90
Chapter 20, Brown 288
Chapter 21, Cooper 7
Chapter 22, Takano 91
Chapter 23, Brown 289
Chapter 24, Cooper 8

Chapter 13, Takano 288

Eric wrote this to wrap up the mountain lion story. In discussion we found that we were both a bit stymied regarding what to do with Tomiko, but he had several suggestions.

Chapter 14, Brown 286

We discussed a string of events from which we outlined about five or six chapters of Derek’s story, including hunting for food, meeting the as yet unnamed trombone player whom we had detailed some already and the owner of a local restaurant whom we had barely touched on the details. I started this chapter based on the first part of that outline. Eric took over with teaching Vashti to clean the rabbit.

We also began to discuss what time of year it was, and agreed that we wanted the climax to come at Mardi Gras but we weren’t sure how much lead time we needed before that.

Chapter 15, Cooper 5

We were struggling with having to do all the dialogue in German, which not only do neither of us speak, we don’t expect most readers to understand and we also have the difficulty that our viewpoint character doesn’t speak it well so sometimes we can’t explain what was said. I decided that there could be a reason why Hans could speak English, so I put it into the story.

Chapter 16, Takano 89

I had asked Eric whether he wanted to do anything else with the reading from the Gospel of John before we chose a next book for the weekly service, and he produced this issue of praying for a net full of fish.

Chapter 17, Brown 287

Adjusting the outline slightly, Eric had Derek and Vashti meet Hannah Johnson, who came by looking for Mister Hunter and Maurice Howland, the trombone player. She offers them fifty cents a day plus lunch to play at her restaurant at lunch time, and recommends that Maurice would be a good addition to their group.

Chapter 18, Cooper 6

Eric had designated Cooper’s first universe as “Earth One”, which I changed based on my own consideration of how that could be determined. Eric also included this note: Authors’ Note: Matterhorn was first ascended by a team led by Englishman Edward Whymper on July 14, 1865 on what Barrelmaster would call Prime Earth.

Much of this sprang from my suggestion that Cooper would insist on helping in some way, although Eric figured out what Cooper might be able to do to help.

Chapter 19, Takano 90

Eric had raised the question at the end of the previous Takano chapter, and I meditated on it overnight. It happened that I had just completed teaching (at the Christian Gamers Guild Chaplain’s Bible Study) the last chapter of the Gospel of John, so the events were fresh in my mind. I put together this as a sermon rather than as her thoughts to communicate it more effectively.

Chapter 20, Brown 288

I wrote this. I had to look up what andouille sausage was, and figure out how it went together with rice and beans, but hopefully I got it right.

Chapter 21, Cooper 7

Eric wrote this. In brief editorial discussion we agreed that on well-traveled paths and roads in the mountains Cooper would walk about four miles per hour, about thirty percent faster than average walkers. We also decided that Tell raised goats before the cheese press burned down, and still has a few from which he gets a bit of milk before breakfast, and then releases them to graze on the mountain slopes.

Chapter 22, Takano 91

We were both a bit uncertain about Tommy’s story, but I recognized it was inevitable that she would begin teaching from another book, not unreasonable for her to hit Acts, and plausible that she would find lessons from their early efforts to form a community that she could apply to their community. It still was a bit of a struggle to pull those lessons out of the text.

Chapter 23, Brown 289

We had copious notes on things that were going to happen to Derek, and just needed to get them in some kind of sequence. I wanted to write this to bring Maurice Howland into the band.

The handshake is a subtle indicator that it’s not normal in New Orleans at this time for whites to touch blacks, and that blacks are aware of the affront.

Chapter 24, Cooper 8

Working from a rough outline he had proposed, Eric put together this chapter in which Wilhelm sneaks into town to do business, and Cooper feels like there is something dishonest happening. He resolved it and sent Cooper into the neighborhood to do some sightseeing, but we had some uncertainties involving several possible directions.

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

Bible and Theology, Books by the Author, Games, Law and Politics, Logic and Reasoning, Memories, Music, Reviews, Temporal Anomalies/Time Travel

#500: A Five Cent Review

June 23, 2024 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #500, on the subject of A Five Cent Review.

As I was posting the four hundred forty-ninth mark Joseph “young” web log post, I realized I was approaching half a thousand, and wondered whether I should do something to note that milestone. I decided that a quick look back picking out some of my favorite posts might be worth the effort. If you missed these, well, I won’t say that there weren’t other good posts nor even that these are all necessarily the best, only that they are the ones I remember fondly.

Unfortunately, on my first pass through those original four hundred forty-nine posts, I marked sixty-five as significant in one way or another, and realized that I would be publishing another fifty before I hit the milestone in question, so I was going to have to go back and read quite a few articles and pare down the list a bit. I did remove some of those originally included, but I added one or two as well. Hopefully I’ve succeeded in producing something of quality.

Of course, I have made a practice since this mark Joseph “young” web log began of posting an annual review of almost everything I published over the previous year, here or elsewhere. The most recent one was #490: Looking Back, and the previous ones are linked from there.

I test, politically, as a moderate slightly left of center, but I hold a number of more conservative views; one of those is on abortion. I somewhere suggested that conservatives needed to find way to promote and explain their views to people on the fence, and this, #7: The Most Persecuted Minority, was a proposed television spot. It was eventually turned into a radio spot and aired on Lift-FM for a while.
Also on the subject of abortion, #9: Abolition compares the pro-life movement to the abolition of slavery, in an unexpected way.
#10: The Unimportance of Facts is my proposed explanation for why voters don’t care what the facts actually are, only whether the politician holds the same views as themselves.
Written a few days after my father died, #51: In Memoriam on Groundhog Day memorializes him with my recollections.
Having read that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg (now deceased) believed that abortion should be strictly a woman’s decision as an equal protection right (and not a privacy right to be decided by her and her doctor), I wrote #63: Equal Protection When Boy Meets Girl, suggesting that in regard to unexpected pregnancies most of the advantages are with the mothers.
I’m glad I wrote #65: Being Married, because I have referred quite a few young couples to it in the years since. It is a collection of some of the best marital advice I ever received, and worth a read even if you’ve been married as long as I have.
#72: Being an Author discusses how to identify such a person, that is, how to know whether you can call someone, including yourself, an author, or indeed a poet, artist, or musician.
Having read that Neil DeGrasse Tyson stated it was highly likely that the universe was a similation, I suggested in #76: Intelligent Simulation that this was entirely inconsistent with his assertion that the theory of intelligent design was not scientific. The article quotes from my then-pending book Why I Believe.
A satirical article becomes the springboard for a consideration of #79: Normal Promiscuity, which looks at the fact that what were once identified as illicit and abberant sexual liasons because they were dangerous are now embraced and encouraged as normative.
I genuinely enjoyed writing #83: Help! I’m a Lesbian Trapped in a Man’s Body!, a satirical look at the notion that our gender is dependent on something we believe about ourselves.
#84: Man-Made Religion challenges the notion that the diversity of religions demonstrates that they are all human inventions.
A famous landmark ice cream shop in Milwaukee faced a protest and a boycott when the owner would not permit customers to order in Spanish, and in #87: Spanish Ice Cream I explain why expecting him to do so is unreasonable.
#88: Sheep and Goats explains why the popular parable is so badly misunderstood and what it really means.
I almost cut this one as I reread it, but it struck me that #90: Footnotes on Guidance, as a recounting of my own experiences, might be useful to those whom God is leading to places they did not expect to go.
#93: What Is a Friend? describes two different understandings of what constitutes friendship, and how that matters.
The notion of government taxing the rich to help the poor is put into perspective in #105: Forced Philanthropy, asking whether we want the government eagerly awaiting our deaths so it can spend our money.
I wrote what I consider a very valuable nine-part series about ministry, how to recognize and identify it, and how music sometimes fits into it. The last of those, #107: Miscellaneous Music Ministries, is not the best of them nor the most useful, but it does briefly identify and link the other eight, and so is the easiest to include here. I would recommend the entire series, but usually find myself recommending specific entries in it which relate to particular ministries.
Reacting to a discussion of my previously mentioned article on forced philanthropy, #108: The Value of Ostentation looks at how ostentation actually helps the poor, and why it is a bit illogical to object to it.
I explain why so much current popular Christian music is comprised of simplistic songs, and why this is not so bad a thing as good musicians tend to think, in #109: Simple Songs.
#114: Saint Teresa, Pedophile Priests, and Miracles responds to the argument that God cannot exist if He allows priests to abuse children.
Inspired by a television show, #115: Disregarding Facts About Sexual Preference applies it to reality, noting that people who deny a connection between environmental factors and homosexuality are ignoring facts.
#120: Giving Offense is primarily about tolerance, that it does not mean declining to state opinions but only willingness to respect those with whom we disagree.
#126: Equity and Religion addresses the argument that governments should not provide funding for pre-school education run by religious organizations.
#130: Economics and Racism explains why racism, by and against everyone, rises when economic conditions fall.
#132: Writing Horror gives a few tips on writing horror stories and running horror in games which must be worth reading, because Places to Go, People to Be republished it in French as Maîtriser l’Horreur.
A misunderstanding of what it is to be “racist” inspired the composition of #135: What Racism Is, clarifying that blacks and other non-whites can be and frequently are racist against whites, and that assuming that because someone is white she is racist is a racist assumption.
I wrote a four-part miniseries on the sin and judgment in the first chapter of Romans. The fourth part, #141: The Solution to the Romans I Problem, links and summarizes the first three, and gives the solution, that we Christians need to repent of our hidden idolatry.
Responding to a foolish statement from PETA, #162: Furry Thinking discusses the proper relationship between humans and animals.
In the 70s and 80s I asked a lot of major contemporary Christian musicians their advice for anyone wanting to do what they do, and in #163: So You Want to Be a Christian Musician I consider the best of that advice, and what we should really want.
I refer people to #168: Praying For You frequently–whenever someone asks me to pray for them–as it explains what I think is a correct understanding of the obligations created by such prayer requests.
I was hesitant to write #193: Yelling: An Introspection, which discusses the futility of yelling and the negative counter-productive impact it has, but several readers thanked me for it.
I would be remiss were I not to mention at least one article about temporal anomalies, and my list includes #199: Time Travel Movies That Work, a few films in which the outcome is not disastrous.
#200: Confederates actually argues that the American Civil War was about modern issues like state drug policy and immigration rules.
#207: The Gender Identity Trap suggests that the idea that someone can be a different gender inside than their physical sex is entirely about prejudices and stereotypes, with nothing to support it in reality.
#208: Halloween is one of two articles I wrote about the holiday (the other Faith in Play #11: Halloween) examining Christian attitudes toward it.
Following up on #207: The Gender Identity Trap, #212: Gender Subjectivity observes that no one can know that he feels like the wrong gender inside, because that isn’t more than that he doesn’t feel the way he thinks society expects him to feel, and in this case society is simply wrong.
#215: What Forty-One Years of Marriage Really Means is an addendum to the previous #65: Being Married, providing an important understanding of what it means that marriage is a covenant, not a contract.
#216: Why Are You Here? answers the existential question, that is, why do we exist.
#230: No Womb No Say challenges the notion that men, not having uteruses, should not be able to express an opinion about abortion, by raising a different issue in which men lack the requisite anatomy but still are expected to express an opinion.
#239: A Departing Member of the Christian Gamers Guild answers suggestions that involvement in fantasy role playing games is detrimental for Christian faith.
#245: Unspoken Prayer Requests explains why I think they are theologically invalid.
In June of 2019, after attending The Objective Session of The Extreme Tour, I began publishing my songs on this web log. I ranked about forty of them based on music, lyrics, and the quality of the performance and recording I had available, and began with the one I thought (with a bit of input from one of my sons) best, #301: The Song “Holocaust”. It includes a link to a recording of the song. Additional songs are chained beginning with the second, at the bottom of the article.
#309: Racially Discriminatory Ticketing highlights and explains a blatant example of racial discrimination by blacks against whites.
In March of 2018 I began a miniseries about early contemporary Christian and Christian rock musicians, still ongoing, with Larry Norman. Two years later the thirty-ninth entry in that series focused on one of the best bands of the eighties, #342: Fireworks Times Five, with extensive links to videos from all four of their excellent albums. It also links the previous thirty-eight such articles.
In 2020, after COVID-19 caused the cancellation of the live Origins game festival, Black Lives Matter protestors demanded that the corporation running the gaming convention make a public statement in support of their position or face a boycott, which shut down efforts to launch an online convention. #344: Is It O.K. Not to Make a Statement? attacks this divisive and destructive policy as a blow against the constitutional right not to speak about something.
A frustrated musician asked the question on a Christian music Facebook group, and I offered an answer in #352: Why No One Cares About Your Songs, which I think might be a must-read for those who aspire to any creative endeavor.
In the discussion of the polarization of America, I suggest in #375: Fixing the Focus that many Christians have our eyes on the wrong things.
The old economic principle derived from sheep grazing on common land finds a new and problematic application in the world of online retailing, elucidated in #377: A New Tragedy of the Common.
Normally I link reviews, but this one was sent to me privately, and was the first review I saw of my book Why I Believe, so I feel I would be remiss if I failed to mention my reprinting of it in #386: An Unsolicited Private Review.
A popular song, a friend’s pregnancy, and the recollection of a spoiled surprise party prompted me to write #394: Unplanned, suggesting that there aren’t really any accidents, and, again, talking about abortion.
The question was asked, specifically in relation to worship, and I offered an answer in that context which extends beyond it, explaining #396: Why Music Matters.
#406: Internet Racism gives reasons for rejecting the call (in Great Britain) that those who post racial slurs against the poor performance of black athletes should be brought up on criminal charges.
I was personally asked to respond to a long article giving ten reasons why the Biblical account of the exodus was untrue, so I wrote an eleven-part miniseries. It concluded with #425: Do Similarities Between the Accounts of Moses’ Birth and Certain Myths Make Him a Fictional Character?, which also links and briefly summarizes the ten previous articles.
One of my patrons asked me for #426: A Christian View of Horror, which suggests that to some degree it can be embraced, but ultimately there is one insurmountable problem.
#429: Luther College of the Bible and Liberal Arts speaks of the legacy of a small school whose campus has been almost completely obliterated by time.
A couple decades back, the respected Australian role playing e-zine Places to Go, People to Be launched a French edition, and asked my permission to translate articles I had written for them to release in another language, and subsequently to do so with articles I had published through other sites. Late in 2021 I finally got around to compiling a linked list of what was was then twenty-six translated articles, in #431: Mark Joseph Young En Français.
#434: Foolish Wisemen draws a lesson about celebrating Christmas versus the rest of the story from the account of these visitors.
#444: Ability versus Popularity discusses contests in which the public is asked to vote for the best, and contestants encourage friends who know nothing of the competitors to vote for a friend.
I had recently seen the argument that laws restricting abortion were an impingement on the religious practice of Jewish women, and since I had heard the same argument decades before in Senate hearings I wrote #446: The Religious Freedom Abortion Argument, and decided to include it here.
#449: Cruel and Unusual is not exactly about the death penalty and expresses no opinion on it, but does find fault with the protest that opposes it by attempting to make it more painful.
#459: Publication Anticipation provided a list of my books recently published in 2021-2 plus my expectations for 2023 and beyond. Those mentioned there which have been published since are listed in the 2023 review article mentioned at the top of this page.
I’m listing #469: Church History because it was an answer to the last question I was asked by my long-time friend John Mastick which I answered in a web log post before he died. His question was about what distinguished Calvinists, Pentecostals, and Charismatics from each other, and I threw in Catholics, Lutherans, and Evangelicals for clarity. He had previously prompted #413: The Abomination of Desolation and #465: Believing in Ghosts.
The issue arose in our study of the Gospel According to Mark in the Christian Gamers Guild’s Chaplain’s Bible Study, leading to an expanded exploration of it in #475: The Mother of Jairus’ Daughter, which I contend is the woman cured of bleeding in the healing nested in the middle of that miracle account.

Temporal Anomalies/Time Travel

#499: Temporal Anomalies in Dean Koontz’ Lightning

June 23, 2024 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #499, on the subject of Temporal Anomalies in Dean Koontz’ Lightning.

A time travel fan wrote to me praising a book and asking me to review it. The book is by thriller author Dean Koontz, and it is a compelling and exciting story–however, I was less enthused about the time travel elements. You can read my book review at Goodreads, if you wish.

I was suspicious from the start. We have in essence two central characters, Laura and Stephan. Stephan is a time traveler. I’m not certain that this is obvious from the beginning, because of course I was told up front that it was a time travel story, so I was anticipating that. However, we begin with Laura’s birth. Her mother’s obstetrician had become an alcoholic, but had kept that secret, and apparently in the original history the delivery of Laura went very badly–we ultimately learn that she was born paralyzed from the waist down, and her mother died. In the version of the story we see, Stephan arrives at the doctor’s home and forces him to call the hospital and report that he cannot come perform the delivery because he is drunk, and the doctor on call would have to do it. Although her mother still dies, Laura is born healthy.

The complication I have is that somehow Stephan knows that the doctor is going to botch the delivery, and so travels to this time and place to prevent it. That means he is relying on information from the future to change the past, and in so doing is erasing the events in the future which are the basis of his knowledge.

Koontz attempts to get around this by stating that a time traveler cannot change his own past and indeed cannot travel to his own past, he can only travel to points in his future and return to his own time, but he can always change his future. Stephan is part of a World War II German experiment in time travel in 1944, and all of his visits to Laura are in his future, in that sense. However, if he travels to 1964 and discovers that Laura was murdered in 1963, how is that not his past, and if he then travels to 1963 and prevents that murder, has he not changed his past–and how is it that his visit to 1964 can reveal a murder that never happened because he traveled to 1963 to prevent it?

The book is full of such complications. It also has a few more difficult ones. It is an interesting twist that when the German secret service is trying to find Laura they travel to the future and search police reports and newspaper archives looking for a time and place at which she will appear. However, ultimately they learn that she was pulled over by a patrol car on highway 111 at a certain date and time, so they launch a team to meet her there and kill her, and on the way they kill the patrolman who was going to file that report. How, then, did they read the report?

There were two other quirks, both based on the notion that nature or fate is self-preserving.

Stating that nature prevents paradox, Stephan explains that it is not possible for a time traveler to travel to a time and place he has already been. However, in the critical scene he arrives at the critical location, realizes he is too late, returns to his own time, and reprograms the machine to deliver him five minutes sooner–but it won’t, which is explained that if he arrives five minutes sooner he might still be there in five minutes when his other self arrives, which would create a paradox. How, though, would the machine, or nature, recognize that although he is not present at the desired coordinates, he will be there in a few minutes?

The other quirk is that it is often repeated that fate tries to reassert itself–what was meant to happen, if prevented by a time traveler, will happen later a different way. That occurs sometimes during the story, and sometimes it looms over the story as a threat but is somehow avoided. I can’t help feeling, though, that this fate, or nature, or whatever it is, has elements of a divine being, someone who knows what was supposed to happen and has the power to make it happen.

Were I to name one other problem, it is evident that Stephan has seriously changed Laura’s life. The weird thing is she is still a best-selling author, but the books of hers which he read are not the books she wrote. Further, he fell in love with the character of the author, but I can’t help wondering whether that character would have been altered by such details as that she did not spend her life in a wheel chair, and she was not rescued from a rapist-murderer by a mysterious stranger as a young girl. I can’t help thinking she would have been a different person, but it seems she did not change.

Overall, poor marks on the time travel elements despite being a very compelling book.

Books by the Author

#498: Characters Restart

June 8, 2024 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #498, on the subject of Characters Restart.

With permission of Valdron Inc I have previously completed publishing my first ten 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, and
In 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 eleventh, Con Version, 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 first post for this novel, covering chapters 1 through 12. 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. This is also the longest book to date, and has quite a few long chapters in it, so there will be quite a few of these background articles.

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 1, Takano 84
Chapter 2, Brown 282
Chapter 3, Cooper 1
Chapter 4, Takano 85
Chapter 5, Brown 283
Chapter 6, Cooper 2
Chapter 7, Takano 86
Chapter 8, Brown 284
Chapter 9, Cooper 3
Chapter 10, Takano 87
Chapter 11, Brown 285
Chapter 12, Cooper 4

Chapter 1, Takano 284

We had just finished the final readthrough edit of In Version, and although we weren’t in a hurry to continue we had agreed to work together on the next probably two books, this one picking up Tomiko’s story and continuing Derek’s, and the next one returning to Slade and Beam. We had agreed that the second chapter would be the continuation of Derek’s spooky New Orleans world, but the first would bring Tommy back, so I wrote this to recall the end of Tommy’s story in Con Verse Lea and did a quick edit to a chapter Eric had written, part of which had been included in In Version, to make this a continuation of that.

Titles are always a conundrum for me, and my suggestion for this one came from a long chain of reasoning. In Versers Versus Versers there were five versers in the same world and they were at war against each other, and nearly all of them were versed out by the end of the book. That was the inspiration for the title Re Verse All, that almost everyone had versed once again. That book, though, only covered Lauren Hastings, Tommy Takano, and James Beam, and so when it ended and the next one dropped all three of them and picked up Joe Kondor, Bob Slade, and Derek Brown, it made sense to call it In Verse Proportion. I then swapped back to the other three characters and had much of the action centered around a lake in a meadow, which logically fit the title Con Verse Lea. The tenth book returned to Kondor, Slade, and Brown, but they were all in the same universe and this was continuing the story from In Verse Proportion, so I named it In Version. Pondering a title for this book, I realized that readers have been waiting to hear what happens to Tommy, so this is in one sense a continuation of Con Verse Lea, and it would probably be the only time that the title Con Version made sense.

Chapter 2, Brown 282

Eric had written a chapter as a proposed New Orleans world where Derek could get the trumpet I wanted him to have eventually. I had thought it sounded like an excellent and very different setting, but wanted to split it so that a short part of it would be a cliffhanger ending for In Version and the story would continue in a subsequent book. Because there were good arguments for interrupting most of the other stories, we put the continuation here.

Chapter 3, Cooper 1

There was a fair amount of uncertainty about who should be the third character in this book. Slade’s story would be continuing the alien empire where he and Derek had been involved in the very intense combat tournament, and because it had so many ties to both the parakeet world and the space traveling aliens of the previous books we wanted to break away from that and return later. We weren’t sure what to do with Beam but that he had been a viewpoint character in several recent books so we thought he should be out for a while. I had wanted to shelve Lauren for a few books, mostly because I needed a break from her. Kondor was continuing the story Slade had started in an earlier book, and it felt like the parakeet world needed a break. The suggestion was made that we launch a new character, and there was a player who reportedly hoped we would base a character on him. At the same time we thought the best solution to Tommy’s problems would be to bring a character into her world who could bring survival skills they didn’t have. That could be Kondor, but we had set him up for an interesting and challenging storyline where he was, so he would be arriving somewhat later. Johnny Angel was a possibility, because his background was at this point vague enough with enough of a suggestion of a long history in the verse that we could fill in a lot of skills. Or it could be the new verser. I was hesitant to create another new verser, because the six presently in use already meant a lot more skipping. But it was an option, and in the end we designed a character loosely on a player who had been in games with both of us and had suggested to Eric that he be included.

Even so, there were a lot of points to debate. We changed the name, but the original player used an English translation of his German name, and we wanted to retain that as well–but we made this decision before we decided to introduce him in Switzerland, which complicated the name use very early. I suggested that he would be black, mostly for racial diversity, but also because his very conservative Evangelical Christian faith fit with a black man. Eric agreed, but said he was also part German, which seemed good. There was a discussion concerning whether he might maintain his physical shape by participating in a martial art; the original player did not do so, but taught himself to fight in one of his early worlds. There are several advantages in game terms to having such skills, but we decided he was a strong enough character without them. At first I had given him a Bible, but the player provided notes in which he suggested that he didn’t use books, instead relying on his laptop, so that was changed.

I had long thought that having a character meet William Tell and learn the use of the crossbow from him was as promising as having someone learn the longbow from Robin Hood. The player had been in Sherwood Forest as one of his first worlds, but I had used Sherwood in Verse Three, Chapter One, and even though no one learned to use the bow I was reluctant to use the same world for a different character. Still, I had mentioned this, along with several others, and Eric decided to run with this one, partly because it had religious issues alongside the political ones.

We also decided that Barrelmaster would have seen Slade verse out, and then followed the scriff sense to Umak Tek, where he would have stayed for some time before being versed out; we did not decide on anything he did there, or what killed him.

I was a bit bothered by the notion that Barrelmaster was already at Stage Two, the stage at which versers have weird dreams when versing, but decided to let it slip, as it was possible.

Chapter 4, Takano 85

We had some trouble getting the Takano story moving. I was short on ideas, and while Eric made up for this he was not on top of either the geography and environment of an unspoiled southern New Jersey area where this was set, or the specifics of Tommy’s skills and equipment and those of her companions. There were a lot of rewrites in the early chapters.

Chapter 5, Brown 283

Eric created the confrontation with the bull and the damage to the robot. The development of the new telepathy to animals skill was a good extrapolation from what he knew.

For a long time I was very bothered by the notion that a bull could gore the outer shell of a robot made of Duralloy, one of those super hard science fiction materials that can withstand bullets and meteoroids, but I let it stand. Ultimately it appears that the bull is supernaturally gifted. I was still vexed by the problem of how Derek could repair it. Ultimately I undid the goring.

Chapter 6, Cooper 2

Eric had launched Cooper, and wrote this as well. The use of German was an unusual touch, but made sense in the setting.

Eric had envisioned Cooper going for a short walk outside the confines of Umak Tek and being killed (presumably by a coral bush?), and thus being separated from his possessions and needing to recover them. That meant some wandering in the mountain, but it was something already in the character’s backstory.

Chapter 7, Takano 86

The mountain lion story was Eric’s idea. The animal was plausible; there are such lions in the northern mountains, and they could spread south. However, we had to hammer out a lot of details related to where it would be and how Tommy would find it.

Chapter 8, Brown 284

I wrote this. We had agreed that Derek would get his trumpet in this world, and that it would be integral to the story, given to him by a person who seemed ordinary but at the same time was mysterious. At this point I created Pierre Hunter as an old black man who had been the protector of New Orleans and was retiring as Derek would be the one to face and hopefully defeat the devil. He would be expecting them, and would have the trumpet for Derek.

I have never actually seen a four-valve trumpet, but they make four-valve brass instruments and I understand the use of the fourth valve from playing a four-valve tuba; I wanted this to be recognizably special and yet for practical purposes a regular trumpet, so I went with that.

Our discussions about this world, while we were still working on In Version, included that part of the battle would have Derek leading a Dixieland band in the song When the Saints Go Marching In. It struck me that a Dixieland band usually has a woodwind player, a clarinet or saxophone most typically, that plays what in a Sousa march would be called the descant and would be played on flutes and piccolos, and so I did some quick research into ancient Persian woodwinds. That gave me the Ney, very like a recorder but made in multiple sizes so it can play in different keys. It seemed the sort of thing a young Arabian princess would be expected to learn, and this would enable Vashti to play along with Derek.

I also decided to give them the house as a base of operations.

We also sketched several points still to come, including the members of the band and some of the events at the story’s climax.

Chapter 9, Cooper 3

Trying to pick up where Eric was headed with the William Tell story, I wrote enough of this to gather the equipment and bring Cooper within sight of the Tell homestead. My description was limited to the fact that there was a house, a stable for the donkey, and the wagon parked outside. At that point I stopped to raise a question about the setting. Traditions surrounding Tell disagree as to whether he was a peasant with a crossbow (presumably for hunting) or a gentleman living outside the city. That had to be decided before his residence could be further described, so I waited for input from Eric on it. We agreed on the nobleman status, and I continued.

Chapter 10, Takano 87

Eric wrote this, with conflicting plans and the odd result that the opinion of the three team leaders outvoted the separate opinions of the three group leaders, and the consequent outcome that they were going to attempt to trap a mountain lion.

Chapter 11, Brown 285

I was moving the music side of the Brown story forward, and wanted to build the foundation for a Dixieland band. Sousa March trios and Dixieland standards have very similar structure, and I don’t remember much of either repertoire, but it was a start.

Chapter 12, Cooper 4

Eric picked up the dinner.

At one point I commented that I was relying on an online translation program to give me the German for Cooper 3; Eric responded that he was also using that translation program. We could only hope that our snippets of German are close enough for the purpose.

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

Games

#497: Game Ideas Unlimited: Vivid Recovered

June 6, 2024 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #497, on the subject of Game Ideas Unlimited: Vivid, Recovered.

Decades ago I was writing the weekly Game Ideas Unlimited series at Gaming Outpost. It was in the main lost when that site crashed. Then about six years ago the monthly series RPG-ology launched, and the webmaster at the Christian Gamers Guild said he hoped to see ideas from the earlier series revived. I had a few saved on my drive, and converted them to repost, and rewrote a few from remembered ideas. Then editors at the French edition of Places to Go, People to Be discovered that quite a bit of the series was preserved at the Internet Archive, and provided information for me to access it. Conversion of many of the articles to the new series began, with an effort to keep them in the original sequence, although interspersed with new material.

However, some of the earlier ideas were recreated in articles in the new series before these were recovered. In some cases, it made sense later to recover the original as a new entry. However, the rewritten RPG-ology #15: Vivid was similar enough to the original Game Ideas Unlimited version that a second article on the same point would be overly redundant. Still, I was reluctant to lose the original. Hence I made the decision to include here: Game Ideas Unlimited: Vivid

[~~Five weeks~~ A few months] ago, in an episode of [~~this~~ the RPG-ology] series entitled Senseless, I spoke of my terrifying trip through Skinner’s Falls during the flood. Then I told it in order to look at those moments at which we are completely robbed of our ability to think or act; but I also said that I usually tell it for another reason, and that when I do I tell it with another story.

This is that other story.

We were hiking through some caves. The plan had been for us to enter in one place and exit from another, so we had our gear with us. But things did not go well; a weak ceiling collapsed, and we were cut off from our guide. We were not certain even whether our guide had survived. Fortunately we had food and water, and some reliable lamps which would last quite a while if we were careful. So for lack of a better plan, we began exploring the caves beyond where we were in search of an escape route.

We kept pushing ourselves, exhausting every path we found. But eventually we were faced with the possibility that there was no other exit.

There was one chance. We had at one point come to what we had ruled a dead end; but it was not a dead end–there was a crevice, a wide crack in the floor like something from the mines of Moria, and another passage on the other side. The heat rising from this fissure was intense, but the way it split there were islands, pillars, fragments of floor between us and the far side. There were also stalactites within reach above us, good heavy ones that would probably suffice for safety lines. We had rope; we had other gear. It appeared that we would either cross here, or wait in the hope that someone would dig us out.

Over the course of the next several hours we built a pair of makeshift bridges–catwalks, really. We doused ourselves with water to help tolerate the heat. Plotting a route across the gap, one at a time we moved from the edge to one of the nearest columns, to another, moving the bridges. We tied ropes around our waists and had someone hold the other end; we tied ropes to stalactites as well as we could, and used these for extra security. It seemed like hours.

In the end, all six of us collapsed in the corridor on the far side. We were not out yet–we would still face several obstacles–but we would never forget this. I can still see the makeshift bridges, the eerie light from the depths, the exhausted look on the face of my Yazirian friend as he collapsed next to me.

That’s right, it was a game. You probably knew that–there are enough things in it that are unrealistic even with my editing. We had built the bridges from strange mushroom-like growths we found in the caves; the pillars were huge crystals, and the crevice was flowing with hot magma about thirty meters below us, and we made a two hundred meter crossing. But I remember it. I remember it vividly–I see these things in my mind’s eye, as clearly as the images I see of Skinner’s Falls, the four-foot walls of water coming at me as I stared helplessly into the surf. The place comes alive in my mind, as if I had been there.

Total Recall [(1990)] suggested the idea that when a vacation is over all you really have of it is the memory of the vacation. Thus if you don’t have the time or the money to take a truly exotic vacation, you can spend a couple of hours at a memory implant center and have them tailor the memory of a wonderful holiday. You never actually experience the trip itself, but you have the ability to go back over it in your mind, recalling the high points and telling people what you never did. It is a brilliant idea, and if the technology is ever developed I’m sure it will become very popular.

But we have something of that reality now. Through our role playing games, we visit exotic places. We can visit Mars, Titan Colony, even Middle Earth and Talislanta–places that don’t exist at all save in the minds of people; yet in our memories they are as real as anything else we remember.

And normally having told both stories and explained that the second is from a game, I would say that this is one of the great things I enjoy about games: that I remember going places and doing things that were completely impossible, yet the memory is the same as if they were real. It is one of the great things that sells me on this hobby. But today I’m going to push beyond that point to something else.

Why is that game moment so clear in my memory? There are other game moments I can call to mind–the time I in desperation challenged a skeletal warrior to a psychic duel to save the lives of my party, the time the illusionist accidentally opened a partial portal for a demon lord and I had to find a way to prevent it from coming through, the time we tricked a batch of space pirates into bringing us a second jetcopter so we would be able to carry all of our equipment with us when we left to assault their main base. I certainly don’t remember every moment of every game; I probably don’t even remember every life and death moment (particularly not in Gamma World, in which it seemed that life and death were a regular crisis, occurring several times per session). But I do remember some moments. What is it that makes these moments so memorable, so vivid?

In every case in which I can remember clearly the moments of the game, in which they come alive in my mind’s eye, there seem to be two factors at work: setting and tension. Both of these must be present in some measure; but more than that, they must somehow connect to each other. That is, the moment must be tense, in that there must be something at risk to the characters; and the setting must be clear, described in terms that make it easy to visualize; but more than that, understanding the scene must be important to resolving the tension.

In the situation described above, in order to get my people across that canyon I had to make myself aware of the details. Where were these crystal pillars? Could we trace a path that would take us across? What was the stuff growing in these caves? Could we make bridges from it? How hot was it here, and what could we do to mitigate that as a problem? What else could we see in this cave that would help us? Getting a complete picture of where we were enabled us to overcome the obstacles–and also left that image imprinted in our memories.

In another game, we were being pursued by mind flayers into a vast cavern, a home of myconids (fungus men) which was heavily overgrown with exotic underground plant life. They were going to catch us; it was a matter of time. So I ordered a battle plan that would split us into three groups and catch them in our midst–an ambush in which one group would be the bait and the other two the trap. In order to do that, I had to see the lay of the land, the nature of the bush, and be able to plot it. I still remember it, because I needed that visual information to succeed.

Another fight was inside a prefabricated building. There were security cameras on the walls, and we were caught in a firefight around a corner in the halls. The terrain was part of the battle–we had to maneuver so that we could all fire at them while maintaining some degree of cover for ourselves around the bend. That image comes to mind.

Yes there are images in my mind that do not involve battle; but even then, the scene was important to success. Trying to break into that compound in which we had that fire fight involved us in identifying security measures and countering them, disabling a security robot on regular rounds, doing reconnaissance from the roof of the building–in all, trying to visualize the situation because our character’s lives might be on the line. The settings were not all unusual, but they all had memorable features; the situations were not all life-and-death, but they all had the feeling of danger.

So I think to create truly vivid memorable moments, bear these things in mind. You need to describe a scene clearly enough that your players are able to visualize it; and you need to create a sense that the scene itself matters in a way that makes them pay attention to the details. Those are the moments they will recall, of which they will say they were there.

[~~Next week, something different.~~]

Books by the Author

#496: Character Setbacks

May 3, 2024 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #496, on the subject of Character Setbacks.

With permission of Valdron Inc I have previously completed publishing my first nine 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, and
Con Verse Lea,

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 tenth, In Version, 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 twelfth and final post for this novel, covering chapters 133 through 144. Previous posts were:

#476: Versers Deduce, covering chapters 1 through 12;
#478: Character Conflicts, covering 13 through 24;
#480: Versers Think, 25 through 36;
#482: Versers Engage, 37 through 48.
#484: Characters Maneuver, 49 through 60.
#487: A World in Space, 61 through 72.
#489: Battle Worlds, 73 through 84;
#491: Verser Ventures, 85 through 96;
#493: Verser Engagements, 97 through 108;
#494: Warring Worlds, 109 through 120; and
#495: World Crises, 121 through 132.

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 133, Brown 278
Chapter 134, Kondor 253
Chapter 135, Slade 247
Chapter 136, Beam 195
Chapter 137, Brown 279
Chapter 138, Slade 248
Chapter 139, Kondor 254
Chapter 140, Brown 280
Chapter 141, Slade 249
Chapter 142, Kondor 255
Chapter 143, Slade 250
Chapter 144, Brown 281

Chapter 133, Brown 278

Eric drafted this, inventing the park and the mountains. The description of where the park was within the mountain range was the last issue we had to clarify between the two of us during the readthrough edits.

Chapter 134, Kondor 253

This was my idea, that the best Parakeet to develop a way for Parakeets and Little Green Men to speak with each other would be that same language professor who created the Morse Code.

Chapter 135, Slade 247

I wrote this mostly for the opening, in which Slade is asked not to shape change during the fight. I created the snake-like alien because I wanted an opponent who would appear to have excellent dodging abilities, so Slade could suggest banning them for the fight and so win the argument on behalf of Derek.

Chapter 136, Beam 195

Eric had said he wanted to verse Beam out in this confrontation with Norax, so I left this chapter for him. Then overnight Eric wrote it, outlined the remainder of the book, and drafted several other discontinuous chapters.

It was considerably later, during the readthrough edit when I had reached Beam 194, that we realized all of Beam’s party’s equipment including the food cart would be about twenty floors below, which would be about ten miles, so wherever they went from here they would have to deal with that. No decision had been made about where they were going next, other than that they would not be in the next novel, Con Version.

Chapter 137, Brown 279

Eric marked this as a combat between Derek and a Xoark. It had been my idea that he should fight a four-armed opponent with three spears and some kind of ability that caused Derek’s thrown knife to miss, although it was left open whether it was a telekinetic shifting of the weapon, a warping of space, or a distortion of the visible position of the opponent.

Chapter 138, Slade 248

Eric marked this as Slade’s final battle against a Fenex. I insisted that Slade should reach the awards ranked #25 despite being the only undefeated contestant, and therefore he should win this contest with some difficulty.

Eric handed me a briefly-described alien and a detailed write-up of a German sword-based martial arts style that a player had created for game play, and left it to me to create a fight. The name “Fenex” was connected to the character name used by that player, and Eric had promised to use it in a book. It was agreed that Slade would win, but barely, and that it would be obvious that this would be the most challenging opponent he fought, but also his last fight.

Chapter 139, Kondor 254

Eric wrote this chapter the night he drafted the outline for the rest of the book. We had agreed that he was going to leave this world either at the end of this book or at the beginning of whatever was his next.

Chapter 140, Brown 280

We had agreed on a confrontation with thugs in the hall outside their apartments in which Derek would be versed out. Eric wrote this the same night he drafted the outline of the remainder of the book.

Chapter 141, Slade 249

Eric indicated that in this chapter Slade would kill the thugs including the Anders he did not get to fight in the contest. He left it for me to write.

Chapter 142, Kondor 255

Eric marked this as a Kondor chapter when he created his outline, but did not indicate what would happen here. As he was drafting it, he suddenly got an idea for a major plot twist, and since this would be the cliffhanger for the Kondor story we agreed to go with it. There was some concern that it might echo Lauren Hasting’s story in Garden of Versers, but we decided that this would be a very different handling of a similar situation.

Chapter 143, Slade 250

Eric had indicated that there would be an awards ceremony, and as we agreed Slade would rank #25. I added the note that Derek would be acknowledged posthumously, along with the Anders who had threatened Slade at the party and killed Derek.

Eric had originally outlined this as the last chapter, with the last Brown chapter preceding it. Having previously said that I wanted a short part of Derek’s new New Orleans to world end the book, I changed them.

This turned out to be the last chapter drafted, on the last day of July, 2022.

Chapter 144, Brown 281

When we were discussing characters and worlds for the next book, Eric remembered me saying that eventually Derek would get a trumpet and go to New Orleans to meet Johnny Angel. He put together a chapter with a “spooky New Orleans” feel, and I agreed that this would be a great idea for the new book, and that Derek would get his trumpet there, but that it was not the version of New Orleans in which he meets Johnny Angel, which would come later. I proposed cutting what Eric wrote into a short cliffhanger and a longer chapter in the new book, and so I did that here, with a few other adjustments to cover the fact that Derek was nowhere near Vashti or their equipment when he versed out. This was written before some of the previous chapters were started.

This has been the twelfth and final behind-the-writings look at In Version. 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

#495: World Crises

April 8, 2024 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #495, on the subject of World Crises.

With permission of Valdron Inc I have previously completed publishing my first nine 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, and
Con Verse Lea,

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 tenth, In Version, 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 eleventh post for this novel, covering chapters 121 through 132. Previous posts were:

#476: Versers Deduce, covering chapters 1 through 12;
#478: Character Conflicts, covering 13 through 24;
#480: Versers Think, 25 through 36;
#482: Versers Engage, 37 through 48.
#484: Characters Maneuver, 49 through 60.
#487: A World in Space, 61 through 72.
#489: Battle Worlds, 73 through 84;
#491: Verser Ventures, 85 through 96;
#493: Verser Engagements, 97 through 108; and
#494: Warring Worlds, 109 through 120.

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 121, Beam 191
Chapter 122, Kondor 250
Chapter 123, Slade 244
Chapter 124, Beam 192
Chapter 125, Brown 276
Chapter 126, Kondor 251
Chapter 127, Slade 245
Chapter 128, Beam 193
Chapter 129, Brown 277
Chapter 130, Kondor 252
Chapter 131, Slade 246
Chapter 132, Beam 194

Chapter 121, Beam 191

Eric drafted this one, giving one major battle to the war but leaving Norax on the run somewhere aboard the ship.

We ran into a bit of confusion. In the Empire Throne World, where Slade and Derek currently were, I had suggested that the Little Green Men–the same little green men as were on Wanderer and Seeker–were there called Chlorophytes; this was because when you have many different “races”, as science fiction writers call them, they need names to distinguish them from each other. However, Eric started using the name in the Seeker world where Beam was, which was incongruous because a people that regards itself the only fully evolved life form would not use a distinguishing name for itself. We don’t call ourselves “homo sapiens” in normal use; we call ourselves “people”. This all had to be fixed in editing.

Chapter 122, Kondor 250

I drafted this. It did not contain the part I wanted to write, but I decided that should fit in the return trip, which would be the next chapter of that thread. We had agreed that there would be a damaged railroad bridge, that they could patch it, and that this would lead to Kondor remembering the log bridge he crossed in Verse Three, Chapter One. We were toying with other ideas as well.

Chapter 123, Slade 244

Eric put this together. The alien races were mostly his, with very little input from me, and so he periodically took opportunities to flesh them out some.

The quote “wandering through a wilderness of mirrors” appears to be from an author named David Grann in a book entitled Killers of the Flower Moon.

Chapter 124, Beam 192

Eric drafted this. It originally included suggestions from Bron that they tunnel into the bedrock beneath the ship, and Beam’s objections as to why that wouldn’t work, but I thought it relied on information Bron wouldn’t know at this point and cut it, replacing it with Beam’s suggestion that he should meet with the LGM officers.

Chapter 125, Brown 276

We had agreed that Derek would work his way up in unarmed combat to somewhere between four and five hundred and then have his fourth loss; Eric created this combat to be the first loss.

Chapter 126, Kondor 251

I had been planning to write this at least since before writing the previous Kondor chapter; we had discussed it, and liked the idea that the trestle crossing would recall the log crossing of the first novel.

Chapter 127, Slade 245

This was my work, fast-forwarding the competition some.

It struck me that the constant fighting could be a crucible for a crisis of Slade’s Norse faith. He believed that all things end in a great battle, but is a bit vague about whether that battle runs forever, or if not what happens after it. Six weeks of combat four days out of five has him wondering whether he would want to be in a perpetual war.

Chapter 128, Beam 193

I pushed myself to write this so I could get my concerns on the page. It was a bit awkward, because Eric had been writing as if events were happening over many days, and I was of the view that the next day couldn’t come until somehow Beam’s people were given sleeping quarters and let a night pass. There were several minor changes to chapters since the meeting with Norax to eliminate any suggestion that more than one day had passed, and since everything ran on artificial light it was easy enough to suggest that Beam’s people were still awake until they were provided with quarters.

Chapter 129, Brown 277

Eric wrote this up to the point where the Anders grabbed Derek’s wrist and left it hanging there; I picked it up and finished the fight. We had previously discussed having Derek win one by transforming into Morach and using the arrow, and I figured this was as good a time as any.

The Tivoci makes a cameo in this chapter, another of Eric’s minor races.

Chapter 130, Kondor 252

Kondor’s name came to the top of the pile, so I wrote this mostly to bring him home and to introduce the complication of what to do with the alien captives.

Chapter 131, Slade 246

I had made a note that Kelp 1942 would want to know more about the versers’ special abilities following Derek’s transformation, so I came back and wrote this chapter to cover that.

Chapter 132, Beam 194

I drafted this, but left open the question of whether Norax would already have reached the simulator room.

At this point, we were not anticipating that Beam would not return to their assigned quarters, and obviously neither was he, because he instructed that equipment be left behind.

This has been the eleventh and penultimate behind-the-writings look at In Version. 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

#494: Warring Worlds

March 10, 2024 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #494, on the subject of Warring Worlds.

With permission of Valdron Inc I have previously completed publishing my first nine 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, and
Con Verse Lea,

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 tenth, In Version, 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 tenth post for this novel, covering chapters 109 through 120. Previous posts were:

#476: Versers Deduce, covering chapters 1 through 12;
#478: Character Conflicts, covering 13 through 24;
#480: Versers Think, 25 through 36;
#482: Versers Engage, 37 through 48.
#484: Characters Maneuver, 49 through 60.
#487: A World in Space, 61 through 72.
#489: Battle Worlds, 73 through 84;
#491: Verser Ventures, 85 through 96 ; and
#493: Verser Engagements, 97 through 108.

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 109, Kondor 247
Chapter 110, Slade 241
Chapter 111, Beam 188
Chapter 112, Brown 273
Chapter 113, Kondor 248
Chapter 114, Slade 242
Chapter 115, Beam 189
Chapter 116, Brown 274
Chapter 117, Slade 243
Chapter 118, Kondor 249
Chapter 119, Beam 190
Chapter 120, Brown 275

Chapter 109, Kondor 247

Our discussions suggested that this city had more survivors and thus more work, and that they had captured an alien and a ship, but both had been caught by the tsunami, with the ship visible in the shallows off shore.

I live within an hour of the southern New Jersey Atlantic shoreline, and my wife and I often walk along the Ocean City boardwalk in the evenings. The houses edging the landward side of the boardwalk are generally rather large and cost millions of dollars. The opening of this chapter calls these to my imagination.

While I was somewhat socially isolated the acronym “POC” arose to refer to non-whites as “Persons of Color”. Bothered by unnecessary acronyms generally, I decided to give the designation a different meaning in Zeke’s universe, and use here it in a universe where the meaning in our world would be effectively meaningless.

Chapter 110, Slade 241

Eric invented the Tso and gave me a rough description; I set about creating the fight. The combination of avian features and the alien name made me think of General Tso’s Chicken, and so there were several jokes along that line in Slade’s thoughts.

The difficult part about writing a lot of combats is making them different enough to be interesting. It was obvious that this creature could pounce, but Slade’s first opponent had leapt at him and I didn’t want to repeat that.

Chapter 111, Beam 188

Eric raised the stakes in the propaganda battle when he created this chapter. It was an interesting move which kept the conflict alive.

Chapter 112, Brown 273

Eric drafted this chapter, bringing in criminal efforts to throw a fight and the detail that the verser’s apartments were rentals paid for by the Kelp.

This chapter includes a cameo appearance of a race called Vrai.

Chapter 113, Kondor 248

I drafted this, pulling the ship out the seabed. Having Zeke do it keeps the sidekick useful, something that sort of matters to the reader. The decision to leave it behind was made for all the reasons given in the text and no others.

Chapter 114, Slade 242

I wrote this. Part of it was that we had agreed we were going to have to skip fights (top contenders probably have to fight near a hundred times before being eliminated), and I was suggesting a way to accomplish this.

The notion that alien restaurants would be as varied as human ones is an extension of my frequent suggestion that alien cultures can’t be monolithic, they just have to have elements that distinguish them from human consistently.

The idea of an alien race using something like arsenic as a spice comes from the Volturnus series of modules for Star Frontiers® from TSR. The Ul-mor referred to a flavoring they used in their food and much of their water as “spice”, but it was actually poison.

Chapter 115, Beam 189

I composed this, an attempt to overcome the obstacles Eric had created in relation to the combat robots. The information about robots being all the same was established in Derek’s stay on The Wanderer.

The number 32,768 is eight to the fifth, and thus written 100,000 in base eight; it is thus a round number in their math and language.

Chapter 116, Brown 274

This was mostly Eric’s work. However, there was an extended section in which he had the versers order outrageous clothing from the vid screen, including custom-tailored tuxedos and ridiculous nineteenth century hoop dresses, and I objected first that it would be impossible to get those without special tailoring in this universe, there being no human clothing at all, and second that none of the characters would be at all willing to or interested in obtaining such clothing, so it was cut.

For the record, a tuxedo is a high-fashion dress suit with a vertical stripe of a silk-like material down the outseam of each leg.

A Tniap is introduced in this chapter, and they have a minor role in a few future chapters at the party.

Eric had written that there were 640 columns in the center, and explained it by saying that Chlorophytes built it, a reference I didn’t grasp until the final edit–it was intended to connect to the fact that they work in base eight. I changed it to 512, the base eight value of the digits 1000.

Chapter 117, Slade 243

Eric wrote nearly all of this, but left it with the mention of two green-scaled aliens doing something and a note that he wasn’t sure how to handle the middles of parties, and I finished out the chapter with the Slades exiting and the note that I didn’t do parties terribly well, either.

Chapter 118, Kondor 249

I drafted this, originally intending only to cover that they were headed for another town and possibly the arrival, but getting sidetracked into Kondor’s realization that the charitable effort was failing because the parakeets didn’t have the kind of religion that humans had.

Chapter 119, Beam 190

I drafted this chapter, which would simplify the battle by taking the combat robots out of the equation entirely.

Chapter 120, Brown 275

I drafted this chapter, following up on the notion that the alien mafia was looking for Slade.

This has been the tenth behind-the-writings look at In Version. 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

#493: Verser Engagements

February 9, 2024 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #493, on the subject of Verser Engagements.

With permission of Valdron Inc I have previously completed publishing my first nine 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, and
Con Verse Lea,

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 tenth, In Version, 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 ninth post for this novel, covering chapters 97 through 108. Previous posts were:

#476: Versers Deduce, covering chapters 1 through 12;
#478: Character Conflicts, covering 13 through 24;
#480: Versers Think, 25 through 36;
#482: Versers Engage, 37 through 48.
#484: Characters Maneuver, 49 through 60.
#487: A World in Space, 61 through 72.
#489: Battle Worlds, 73 through 84; and
#491: Verser Ventures, 85 through 96.

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 97, Kondor 244
Chapter 98, Slade 238
Chapter 99, Beam 185
Chapter 100, Brown 270
Chapter 101, Kondor 245
Chapter 102, Slade 239
Chapter 103, Beam 186
Chapter 104, Brown 271
Chapter 105, Kondor 246
Chapter 106, Slade 240
Chapter 107, Beam 187
Chapter 108, Brown 272

Chapter 97, Kondor 244

Eric wrote more of this relief effort, and set up a cliffhanger in which Kondor was beginning to use psionics to address the problems.

I noted after the fact that the railroad company would have equipment to clear tracks of such debris, but they could get away with two such blockages. I also suggested that we could use a broken train trestle and a hike across a valley, with memories of the log crossing in the first novel, which Eric agreed would be good.

Chapter 98, Slade 238

Eric marked this for Slade, and I decided that it should start with Derek describing the experience of visiting the Ichthoi, and Slade rejecting the notion that it would be at all desirable to feel at peace like that. That led to the notion of what happens after Ragnorak, and perhaps the first doubts Slade has ever had about his faith. Having the robot cook Chlorophyte food just seemed obvious.

Quite a few of the aliens had essentially cameo appearances; the Ichthoi were among these.

Chapter 99, Beam 185

Some of this was discussed before I drafted it. Eric had suggested that on the way Beam should bless a child and have a lock of its hair turn white, but I objected that it is part of the team dynamic that Beam doesn’t do anything magical or indeed have any special abilities other than organizing the others. Still, some sort of “magical” display seemed to be appropriate, and I decided that Beam could have Bob snatch the arresting officer and levitate him, and no one would know that Beam wasn’t doing that.

Chapter 100, Brown 270

Eric wrote this with a view to moving Derek toward my hope that he would obtain a trumpet. I changed the ending because I thought the Brown chapter should have Derek raise Slade’s notion about gladiator games meaning that there was war somewhere, but it was fine to delay that.

The ‘Iorg was a name that Eric wrote because he liked the look, but I took issue based on the fact that I don’t like words in sci fi and fantasy books that the reader couldn’t pronounce. We discussed the opening symbol and whether the letter I was a vowel or a consonant, and came up with a click followed by two syllables, as described in the text.

Chapter 101, Kondor 245

Eric had set up the situation in which a bird was trapped under the center of a very large debris pile, and I assumed he intended for them to use psionics to rescue him, so I wrote this. I was as it were interrupted by the realization that this was going to attract attention, so I covered that, and then decided that for story purposes it would be better to complete the rescue in Kondor’s next chapter.

Chapter 102, Slade 239

I struggled a bit to write this from Slade’s viewpoint; I was going to start with Derek talking to 1942 in the limo, but realized Slade wouldn’t see that part. Gradually, though, it came together.

Eric’s backstory for the universe includes that there is a threat of intergalactic war, and the emperor in this galaxy has been trying to prepare for it. Part of that included building this huge artificial planet and relocating all sentient beings to it; part of it was initiating the gladiator games to help identify and prepare great fighters.

Chapter 103, Beam 186

We discussed several of the ideas in this chapter. It was Eric’s suggestion that Ashleigh would offer to assassinate Norax, and mine that Beam would choose a propaganda campaign. Eric put it together and brought it to the point where Beam had hacked the system and was ready to speak, when I realized that Beam couldn’t speak alien, so we had a cliffhanger into his next episode.

Chapter 104, Brown 271

Eric wrote all of this with only a bit of input from me. After this first shot at the preliminary we discussed a bit about how the main competition would go.

Chapter 105, Kondor 246

I picked up the story of rescuing the parakeet with telekinesis and finished it.

Chapter 106, Slade 240

I started this chapter, but realized Eric and I hadn’t discussed how big this contest was so I wasn’t sure of how to rank the versers. I made a rough suggestion, and Eric agreed with it; it assumes there are between forty and fifty thousand fighters in each division.

Eric took over and wrote the arrival and the fight.

This is the cameo appearance of the Tso race, and everything decided about it appears in this section.

Chapter 107, Beam 187

I started this chapter with three proposed solutions to the language barrier problem, but then suspended it to get Eric’s input on how to do it and jumped down to write the propaganda speech and the court martial of Norax. When I thought of the step of removing Norax from authority by delisting him from the computer roster it seemed he should do that before he made the speech, but since I didn’t think of it until he was writing the speech I decided Beam didn’t, either.

Eric punted, putting the decision back with me, and I returned to make the choice. Although Bob’s solutions had been reliable, I decided that there was a story advantage to having Sophia solve this one, so figured out why Beam would go that way.

At this point we gave some serious discussion to where the book was headed and what would be in the next one.

Chapter 108, Brown 272

The question coming into this chapter is whether to have Derek watch Slade’s fight against the Tso or fight his own primitive weapons battle and come back to Slade later. I suggested that if Derek were to face a Parakeet he might feel the suppressed anger of the battle he fought against the spy.

I had also realized that Derek had several psionic skills which could be used in combat if needed. I checked, and was disappointed to find no force shield, but decided that the telekinesis would be useful.

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

A generalist: learning less and less about more and more, one day to know nothing about everything.