All posts by M.J.

Bible and Theology, Books by the Author

#505: Versers Advance

September 1, 2024 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #505, on the subject of Versers Advance.

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 fifth post for this novel, covering chapters 49 through 60. Previous mark Joseph “young” behind-the-writings web log posts for this book include:

#498: Characters Restart covering chapters 1 through 12;
#501: Characters Orienting, covering chapters 13 through 24;
#502: Verser Setbacks, chapters 25 through 36; and
#503: Versers Progress, 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. 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 49, Brown 299
Chapter 50, Cooper 16
Chapter 51, Takano 100
Chapter 52, Brown 300
Chapter 53, Cooper 17
Chapter 54, Takano 101
Chapter 55, Brown 301
Chapter 56, Cooper 18
Chapter 57, Takano 102
Chapter 58, Brown 302
Chapter 59, Cooper 19
Chapter 60, Takano 103

Chapter 49, Brown 299

We had discussed this at length, and Eric had penned most of the encounter with the Devil which, as mentioned, got moved here to the music hall and after Halloween. We had also agreed that as they were leaving they would meet the Chinese drummer; Eric came up with the name Lei He.

The trick with the cards has often been used to mark someone as a card sharp in film. There’s a joke in my family that one night my father-in-law ran a deck up to his arm that way, asked if anyone wanted to play cards, and flipped them all over in one smooth move. No one volunteered to play.

Chapter 50, Cooper 16

Eric drafted this, following the outline we had discussed. It had to be a tightly plotted story at this point, because there were several scenes that had to have Cooper, Wilhelm, and Hans in the right places.

Chapter 51, Takano 100

Picking up my musings about all the women from whom Davey might choose, Eric drafted this to move toward integrating him into the tribe.

Chapter 52, Brown 300

Because this involved music, I drafted it. I had a pretty good idea of how Chinese Waist Drums were used, and I thought I may actually have seen a performance once.

Chapter 53, Cooper 17

This was part of the outline, that Wilhelm and Cooper would be on a transport downriver to separate trials but the water would be rougher than the soldiers could manage, so they would untie Cooper who would get them to safety and then escape. Because I have over a thousand miles of canoeing experience we agreed that I would draft it.

We could see Cooper’s exit coming, and began discussing worlds to which we could send him.

Chapter 54, Takano 101

Eric drafted this, along the general lines of the story we had been discussing. He had by this point decided who Davey had chosen to marry, but hadn’t told me.

Chapter 55, Brown 301

Since I was the primary writer on the music sections, I drafted this chapter. The mention of Thanksgiving reflected something we had begun discussing behind the scenes, that we needed a Louisiana variant of Thanksgiving dinner to be served at the restaurant.

Chapter 56, Cooper 18

Since I was writing and we had an agreed outline for this, I drafted this chapter to move the story forward to the next connection.

Chapter 57, Takano 102

Eric drafted this, bringing in the idea of a verser rabbit and discussing what happens to animals when they die. I pointed out, privately, that the Bible doesn’t actually tell us what happens to animals when they die, probably because we don’t need to know.

The intelligent verser rabbit with the cybernetic eye is a motif in some of Eric’s stories, a sort of reminder of the ridiculous things that could exist in the multiverse as conceived.

Chapter 58, Brown 302

I drafted this, but the Thanksgiving menu was concocted by Eric (I added the salad, whipped cream, and coffee).

Chapter 59, Cooper 19

Again this fell to me for the theological aspect, as Cooper had to be convicted of heresy by a twelfth century Inquisitor based on some nuance of theology on which people were convicted at the time, while holding to the core of orthodox theology. The statement of faith is essentially the Nicene Creed in the Western version, somewhat paraphrased in spots and from memory.

We had by this point chosen the next world for him, and also decided that we would make it a gather world.

Chapter 60, Takano 103

Eric started writing this before I started on the previous Cooper chapter, and finished it about simultaneously with it. It was roughly following the script.

This has been the fifth 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, Memories, Temporal Anomalies/Time Travel

#504: Why I Started Writing

August 29, 2024 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #504, on the subject of Why I Started Writing.

Someone named Jay Oluwabukunmi contacted me (via LinkedIn) and wrote:

I recently came across your profile and was highly impressed by the quality of your content. Could you kindly share what motivated you to begin writing?

That’s an interesting question with a complicated answer, so I decided it would be better to share it here.

Scratch a writer and you’ll almost always find a reader. I read quite a bit from a very young age, including a fair amount of science fiction and fantasy, but also mysteries, and the Bible, and quite a bit more. I especially enjoyed C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams, and had a vague notion of writing the next great fantasy novel. I suspect, though, that I was one of thousands who had that notion, and I wasn’t all that devoted to it–I was a musician, and envisioned my immediate future as heading into Christian contemporary records.

Still, I took a class in college entitled Creative Writing: Fiction, partly because I needed to fill a slot and it fit my schedule, partly because I had this notion that when I retired I might write that novel. I even started working on a novel while I was still in school, although it wasn’t all that good and I abandoned it. However, for quite a few years I maintained, intermittently, the practice of keeping a literary journal. My friend C. J. Henderson says don’t do that because you’re never going to sell such a thing, and you shouldn’t waste time writing something for which no one is going to pay you. However, it is not only good practice, I have more than once remembered something I wrote in those journals and used it to write something new.

Pursuing my music career I got a job on the air of a small but significant contemporary Christian radio station, and eventually became the program director. At some point we compiled a mailing list, and management decided we should send out a monthly newsletter. It became my job to create this, so I wrote a fair amount of the content (my degrees in Biblical Studies helped immensely at this point) assisted by our overnight DJ for a time. I also was introduced to the associate editor of a local newspaper, who liked my style and invited me to write some satire for his paper; two columns were published under the name M. Joseph Young, to avoid confusion with the Mark Young who was on the local radio station (also me).

Along the way I discovered role playing games, specifically beginning with Dungeons & Dragons™ but also playing several others in a variety of genres and settings. Largely through this I was introduced to E. R. Jones, who needed someone who could write (and by this time I had finished a juris doctore, so I could certainly handle the technical aspect of writing) to help create a role playing game on which he had been working for half a decade. We put a lot of work into that, he dropped out of the process before the final edit, but I’d made promises and so I pushed through and published Multiverser: The Game: Referee’s Rules along with Multiverser: The First Book of Worlds. I continued on that line, with Multiverser: The Second Book of Worlds, and along with some people working with me on that (artists, supporters, gamers) we tried to make a go of that.

Then someone came up with the idea of creating a Multiverser comic, and as the in-house writer it fell to me to do the text. I created three characters with two stories for each of them to be the basis for three issues, but then the artists said no, it couldn’t be done with our resources. That fell into the back burner, and then emerged as Verse Three, Chapter One: The First Multiverser Novel. I learned quite a bit about structuring a novel by doing that, and have followed it with more than a dozen additional novels continuing those stories.

I was also writing web pages on a wide variety of subjects, mostly to get attention to sell the game. I wrote about Bible and law, in which I had my degrees, and time travel, which had been discussed extensively in writing the game, and several other subjects, and suddenly one day I felt that I needed to put together a book, What Does God Expect? A Gospel-based Approach to Christian Conduct, because it seemed to me that a lot of people didn’t understand the basics of Christian living. After this, my wife suggested that one of my web pages should be expanded, and that resulted in About the Fruit, and I was now writing Christian non-fiction books. Most of those came from a sort of compulsion, that this needed to be said and I was going to have to say it.

Along the way someone asked me to write a series for a new web site, Game Ideas Unlimited. The site never materialized, but Gaming Outpost grabbed the series for a redesigned site. At the same time I decided that since I had been elected Chaplain of the Christian Gamers Guild I should do something, and so I launched the Faith and Gaming series. That subsequently got published in book form, and then a publisher approached me to release an expanded edition. I was established as a writer in the role playing community.

More recently a publisher contacted me and asked if I would write a book for him, and we agreed that I would create The Essential Guide to Time Travel based on my internet writings on that subject if he would publish my at that time just finished apologetics book Why I Believe, and that established a continuing relationship which got several books back in print and introduced my New Testament analytical commentaries.

I’ve linked several of the books that are still in print. The Multiverser books should be back in print soon; we’ve created a LinkTree which will be expanded as the new material goes online. Other books both in and out of print are listed here.

That’s probably more than Jay wanted to know, but I’ve often said in my mouth all stories are long, and this was obviously going to be a long story. I hope it helps.

Books by the Author

#503: Versers Progress

August 10, 2024 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #503, on the subject of Versers Progress.

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 fourth post for this novel, covering chapters 37 through 48. Previous mark Joseph “young” behind-the-writings web log posts for this book include:

#498: Characters Restart covering chapters 1 through 12;
#501: Characters Orienting, covering chapters 13 through 24; and
#502: Verser Setbacks, chapters 25 through 36.

There is also a section of the site, Multiverser Novel Support Pages, in which I have begun to place materials related to the novels beginning with character papers for the major characters, giving them at different stages as they move through the books. 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 37, Cooper 12
Chapter 38, Takano 96
Chapter 39, Brown 295
Chapter 40, Cooper 13
Chapter 41, Takano 97
Chapter 42, Brown 296
Chapter 43, Cooper 14
Chapter 44, Brown 297
Chapter 45, Takano 98
Chapter 46, Brown 298
Chapter 47, Cooper 15
Chapter 48, Takano 99

Chapter 37, Cooper 12

Our conversations had a major event ahead for Wilhelm, but we agreed that there should be something less dramatic in the Cooper story before that happened, and Eric had set up the idea that he was going to climb the northeast face of North Hill, so that was the focus of this chapter. I had specifically said I wanted to write this internal dialogue thing in the middle of the climb.

After I had written the beginning through the internal dialogue, I encouraged Eric to expand the climb, which he did.

Chapter 38, Takano 96

Before we started writing this book we had discussed bringing someone to Tommy to help her survive. Our top ideas then were to bring Johnny Angel back into the story and give him a wealth of survival skills, or to create a new viewpoint character and bring him there. We chose to create Cooper; but Cooper wasn’t really turning into the survival expert we needed and was very much involved in a very interesting storyline, so we came back to whether to bring Angel here. Instead, I proposed a new indig. Discussion included whether he was big like Grizzly Adams, or tall and thin, or just an unimpressive looking guy, and what his name should be, and Davey is what emerged.

I had pictured the meeting, and so I drafted this chapter.

Chapter 39, Brown 295

As the musician, it was up to me to do a lot of the more musical end of things. I also had the advantage that I had played the Sousaphone, and also dabbled on the trumpet, and had been in a wide variety of musical combos including a Dixieland band and a marching band. I wrote this chapter.

Chapter 40, Cooper 13

Eric drafted this, covering quite a bit of the story outline. We are moving toward the famous apple story, but in our researches encountered a few other William Tell adventures worth adapting into our story.

Chapter 41, Takano 97

Eric drafted this, but we went back to make a lot of changes, partly because there were things Tommy already knew and partly because I wanted to take her out of the middle and have Davey teach the tribe directly.

Chapter 42, Brown 296

Eric drafted the beginning of this, including bringing forward the southern reaction to the “Yankee” opposition to apartheid in the south, and the initial arrival at the restaurant. We had discussed the issue of whether the owner would pay them for playing, and his solution, that Pierre would insist on it, resolved that.

Once Eric started writing about the music, he passed the baton to me to continue it. I provided music for Alphonso and created a couple of other acts, then ended with Derek’s band starting their set. However, we eventually realized we had not done enough to push the racial tensions and devil involved in politics concepts forward, so I came back and cut the chapter short, adding the introduction of the mayor and moving the rest to a new chapter to expand the Brown stories.

Chapter 43, Cooper 14

We were each waiting for the other to write this, but I realized that and drafted it. I had some concerns about how to continue that story with Cooper as the viewpoint character, but it seemed still to be unfolding well, and I sketched some ideas for it.

Chapter 44, Brown 297

Brown 296 was already long when I decided to use it to introduce the mayor, so when we were around chapter 80 I came back and split 296, expanding the second part as this chapter. This increased all the chapter numbers below this point by one, and all the Brown chapter numbers also by one.

Chapter 45, Takano 98

We needed Davey to teach survival skills to a large group of people without belaboring the story. Also, I observed that Davey lived with his family but had never met a girl who wasn’t less closely related to him than a first cousin, so this would be his opportunity to find a wife. I had suggested that Varlax and Sylwi would be candidates but problematic, but if we introduced someone else we’d also have to develop another character. Eric ran with those ideas and drafted this, with only a few minor edits from me.

Chapter 46, Brown 298

I was inclined to skip Derek’s set, but Eric said he enjoyed reading the music sections so I tackled it. I combed the book to this point and found eight songs confirmed as in their repertoire; I wanted ten, but couldn’t think of more. Peace in the Valley had been mentioned a couple times in our discussions, but it turned out to be written by Tommy Dorsey a quarter century in the future, so I put that on the back shelf. While I was writing I thought of At the Cross, the words to the verses from Isaac Watts, and although I wasn’t sure about the music I thought it was probably nineteenth century and went with it. I want to add Also Sprach Zarathustra, but want to have a session where the band learns it.

The setup with the devil at the card table was written by Eric quite a while back, originally set at the restaurant, but I objected that Hannah would not allow anyone to play cards at her restaurant, least of all the devil. We agreed to move it here, and to split it so that the meeting was a cliffhanger. The song reference is actually to one of my songs, entitled Never Alone, so it is unlikely that many readers will recognize it.

The original segment about the devil had ended with the restaurant mostly empty, and I simply copied that here; but the lead-in was very short, and it didn’t seem as if the hall would have cleared, so Eric expanded it with more music after the band, pies, and a bit more before moving to their departure and that encounter.

Chapter 47, Cooper 15

Following the rough outline, I wrote this short chapter establishing that Wilhelm had been arrested, and suggesting that Hans was bound to be caught.

Chapter 48, Takano 99

I wrote this mostly so I could continue the Brown story in the next chapter, but also because I wanted to lay the foundation for the idea that Tommy was not going to marry Davey.

This has been the fourth 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

#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.

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