This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #82, on the subject of Novel Developments.

With permission of Valdron Inc I am publishing my second novel, Old Verses New, in serialized form on the web (that link will take you to the table of contents).  If you missed the first one, you can find the table of contents for it at Verse Three, Chapter One:  The First Multiverser Novel.  There was also a series of web log posts looking at the writing process, the decisions and choices that delivered the final product; the last of those for the first novel is #71:  Footnotes on Verse Three, Chapter One, which indexes all the others and catches a lot of material from an earlier collection of behind-the-writings reflections that had been misplaced for a decade.  Now as the second is being posted I am again offering a set of “behind the writings” insights.  This “behind the writings” look definitely contains spoilers, and perhaps in a more serious way than the previous ones, because it sometimes talks about what I was planning to do later in the book or how this book connects to events yet to come in the third (For Better or Verse).  You might want to read the referenced chapters before reading this look at them, or even put off reading these insights until the book has finished.  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.

These were the previous mark Joseph “young” web log posts covering this book:

1. #74:  Another Novel (which provided this kind of insight into the first nine chapters along with some background material on the book as a whole).
2. #78:  Novel Fears (which continued with coverage of chapters 10 through 18).

This picks up from there, and I expect to continue with additional posts after every ninth chapter in the series.

History of the series, including the reason it started, the origins of character names and details, and many of the ideas, are in those earlier posts, and won’t be repeated here.

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Chapter 19, Hastings 50

The discussion of magic raises interesting theological issues.  God forbids the kind of magic that calls on spirits other than Himself to work miracles.  The “other kind” of magic, the type in which rituals control supernatural energy directly, simply does not exist.  Yet if it did, there is no argument against its use that does not also apply to technology.  Either God permits us to impact events in the world, or we are wrong to do so; means are a separate issue.  (I address these issues in several of the articles in the Faith and Gaming series at the Christian Gamers Guild website, also available in print.)

I hadn’t really thought about how Lauren would be involved in bringing Arthur to power; these things sort of developed through asking myself what I would do.

Sometime before I began writing the second novel, I knew that Horta and Jackson were both going to kill Lauren at different times–Horta in her Merlin visit, Jackson in the Bethany visit.  I’m not certain when it came to me, but it seemed the route to take.  It also gave meaning to their reluctance to trust her in 2005.

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Chapter 20, Kondor 48

I don’t think I’d realized when Evan was shot that Kondor would become the doctor; but the idea worked.

It may seem odd that Joe argues against his own promotion, but ultimately he is really out of place in this world and there are still a lot of things he does not know about how to do medicine on the ship.  I wanted to have to persuade him, because he’s aware of his own shortcomings in that regard, but he really is the best man for the job.

I think that the mention of the lack of a watch that kept time on a ship reminded me, first, that Joe had that travel clock that should run adequately well on the ship, and, second, that such a clock, set to the standard time in Sardic, would be an incredible navigational aid.  I did not at this point know I was headed that direction, but the clock was going to get me there.

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Chapter 21, Brown 7

The floor plan in this house owes something to that of my parents’ house in Ramsey; but it has a very different feel in several places.  It’s a bit distorted, too, but I didn’t expect the reader would sense that–or if he did, it would add to the eeriness of it all.  Derek starts upstairs in a left rear bedroom; but there are only windows in the back, so there’s probably another room beyond that.  In addition, the hall continues past that room, again suggesting at least one more.  He makes a left, putting the rear of the house on his left, and walks straight down the hall.  There is another door before he reaches the stairs, and I envision at least one on his right.  But, rather incongruously, the stairs seem to continue straight in front of him.  Yet when he falls down them, he rolls straight toward the front of the house–somewhere he’s made a right turn, yet the hall was always straight.  He lands on what I envision as a flagstone front hall, he notices a lightswitch but not a door.  He now makes effectively a right, headed back parallel to the hall but closer to the front of the house, which is now on his left.  This carries him through the living room, which is open to the hall, and then through the arch into the dining room, which is in the left rear corner of the building–but again, has no windows to the side.  My parents’ house is so designed downstairs, but that the front hall is enclosed and the door quite obvious.  Derek seems to have traveled farther upstairs than down, but he is clearly at the end of the house downstairs, when he seemingly was not when upstairs.  Again, it is the layout of the kitchen and dining room from their house:  the table is beneath the hanging light fixture, a picture window on the rear of the dining room, and a door to the kitchen more toward the living room.  Beyond that door, the kitchen area is largely to the left, much as described, with the refrigerator to the right, and a counter extending into the center of the room to separate the dinette.  At this point the model diverges, as we have reached the line of the stairs and seemingly the edge of the house.  I imagine a basement stair behind a door to the right at the far end, and perhaps another door straight ahead to something else, but in the model there’s a door in the far corner across the dinette which leads to a screen porch.  Derek never sees that far, but is driven back into the kitchen.

Breaking up the journey into pieces let me decide things as they happened and avoid bogging down with planning part of the journey that would never occur.  It also allowed for more tension, as I could consider everything that could go wrong with each bit and then make the move, and then consider again, thus giving the feeling of creeping across the set.

It was then time to do something with all that tension.  Up to now it’s possible that it’s all in Derek’s mind, and as long as it is there, it is a mood built on uncertainty.  The revelation that the ghost is real is a fright, in some ways breaking the mood by confirming our fears.

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Chapter 22, Hastings 51

Tubrok came into existence entirely because I needed a reason why Merlin had not killed Horta.  A more powerful enemy seemed the best idea.  Once I had thought of him, I began to get the idea for the grand conclusion of the third book.  That is, I had already determined that Lauren, Bethany, Slade, Shella, and Derek were going to be together fighting something in the vampire world in the future, but now I knew what.

Lauren overlooks the fact that the Horta she sees here will be more than a millennium older when she fights him in the future; she is estimating his power based on her memory of a greatly strengthened future version of him.  Thus Merlin is not so worried as she is.

Tubrok’s strategy came largely from extrapolation from Gavin’s, figuring out what a vampire might try to do to further his own ends in that milieu.  I later saw something similar in the television series Being Human, but that was years after I wrote this and it wasn’t quite the same.

There is a sense in which Lauren has created a predestination paradox by mentioning the sword in the stone:  she has brought from the future an idea that she got from history.  However, we know that she is not from this universe, so it’s not really a problem—we just need to figure out how such a story came into existence in her world, and since we know the story exists we know it can come into existence without the suggestion from the future.

What Merlin teaches Lauren here is something we learned to call SEP invisibility.  It stands for “Somebody Else’s Problem”, and is a sort of psionic trick that doesn’t make you invisible but puts you beneath the level of notice—the way you walk around people on the sidewalk without really seeing them.  Lauren and Merlin do not vanish, but they pass unnoticed because they’ve persuaded the minds around them that they’re not important, not worth noticing.

I back-wrote that teaching moment after the book was finished, because I needed Lauren to have that skill when she arrived in the final world of the book.  I added her using it several times in earlier chapters to get it there, this being the first.

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Chapter 23, Kondor 49

The problem about leaving Doctor Evan in Durnmist had two levels.  One was that I needed to figure out what job Kondor would do on the next route, and I didn’t really see continuing the Kondor as Doctor bit too much longer; the other was I needed a plausible reason to keep Evan on the ship if Kondor wasn’t going to be the doctor.

I hadn’t considered what would happen when Kondor got to New Haven; but I thought I’d get things pointed in the right direction for that.

Joe knows the route from having worked the other Mary Piper.  Captain John would assume he just found out from being aboard the ship.

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Chapter 24, Brown 8

I had no idea how Derek was going to die in this world; but once the battle got fierce, it was just a matter of playing both sides and seeing what I could cause to happen.

The bit with the glass shards is I think a wonderful poltergeist effect.  They should be falling with him, landing around him.  Instead, they pause in the air high above him, and then target him in rapid flight as projectiles.  I don’t know whether it comes across, but I didn’t want to be too technical about it.

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Chapter 25, Hastings 52

The argument about vampires led logically to one of those most difficult questions:  how can you prove that something does not exist?  I particularly like the notion that these magical creatures could exist unknown to her.  I think most people take too much on faith, and don’t realize they’re doing it.

The issue of whether Lauren can use magic to do what she thinks God wants done is a difficult one altogether, and worth bringing up again.  Merlin’s answers are useful; they make it easier to build a diversified sorceress who is yet something of a prophetess, because there’s no conflict between the magics she uses and the mission she pursues.  The answer to the problem seemed to lie in whether there was a difference in kind between doing what you think God wants done and doing it by magic, or whether that was only a difference in style.  I think this conversation, although it didn’t fully convince Lauren, fully convinced most readers.

The idea that criminal accusations had to be made in the king’s courtyard at noon was something that easily sounded right and made it impossible for vampires to make use of the legal system.  I liked it.

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Chapter 26, Kondor 50

Oddly, I turned the loop around in my mind when I wrote this.  I somehow envision the ship going east through the northern latitudes at the beginning of the route and then returning west closer to the equator.  The fact is that the major currents do exactly the opposite, going west near the poles and east near the equator, and they do so precisely because of the direction of rotation of the planet.  The only way I could maintain my circle and have it fit with known laws would be to put the major settlements in the southern hemisphere–one too many things to try to explain to the reader.  Thus this passage is always jarring to me, because I expect Kondor to be going east and he claims to be going west.

I might have included the clock bit because my wife is related to the Harrison clockmakers of England, and that might include the John Harrison who solved the longitude problem by building a clock that kept time at sea.  I saw the special on A&E, but now can’t remember whether I’d come up with the idea before that (based probably on some of James Burke’s shows) or because of it.

The GSPS thing was a throwaway.  Not having Bob Slade in this book, I didn’t have the usual anachronistic comments he makes, but Joe sometimes made them as well, so I let him make one here.

I think I was using the game mechanics from the Mary Piper world again to generate events; sea monster is such an event, and dropping a sea serpent into the story here was a fun idea.

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Chapter 27, Brown 9

E. R. Jones had run a world for my eldest when he was first playing in which there was a castle in the midst of a swamp, the castle inhabited by what was not so obviously a vampire and his mildly deformed idiot servant.  This world was inspired by that, but all the detail was invented.

I did a lot of camping in my teens, but by the time I was in my twenties I’d had enough of “roughing it” and have not done any tenting since, although I once went to a festival in a pop-up camper.

The mosquito was, I think, prefiguring the real villain of the world.

I mentioned the need for a larger pack, but had not yet solved it.  When I introduced the characters in the next world, I created Bill specifically to be the source of the backpack.

The block was originally a wall; but the wall bothered me.  It couldn’t really look big enough to be mistaken for a cliff and be far enough to take that long to reach.  I changed it on my read through from wall to block, hoping that would work better.

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I hope these “behind the writings” posts continue to be of interest, and perhaps some value, to those of you who have been reading the novel.  If there is any positive feedback, they will continue.

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #78, on the subject of Novel Fears.

With permission of Valdron Inc I am publishing my second novel, Old Verses New, in serialized form on the web (that link will take you to the table of contents).  If you missed the first one, you can find the table of contents for it at Verse Three, Chapter One:  The First Multiverser Novel.  There was also a series of web log posts looking at the writing process, the decisions and choices that delivered the final product; the last of those for the first novel is #71:  Footnotes on Verse Three, Chapter One, which indexes all the others and catches a lot of material from an earlier collection of behind-the-writings reflections that had been misplaced for a decade.  Now as the second is being posted I am again offering a set of “behind the writings” insights.  This “behind the writings” look definitely contains spoilers, and perhaps in a more serious way than the previous ones, because it sometimes talks about what I was planning to do later in the book or how this book connects to events yet to come in the third (For Better or Verse).  You might want to read the referenced chapters before reading this look at them, or even put off reading these insights until the book has finished.  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.

There was at this point one similar previous mark Joseph “young” web log post covering this book:

1. #74:  Another Novel (which provided this kind of insight into the first nine chapters along with some background material on the book as a whole).

This picks up from there, and I expect to continue with additional posts after every ninth chapter in the series.

History of the series, including the reason it started, the origins of character names and details, and many of the ideas, are in those earlier posts, and won’t be repeated here.

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Chapter 10, Hastings 47

When writing the Multiverser rules, I had described “stage two” as “attempting to achieve that higher level of consciousness known to the ancient monks of Tibet as ‘awake’”.  I didn’t use the whole line here, but I still liked the description.  Lauren supposes herself surrounded because her dream-state is overlaying the mossy trees of the new world with the imagery of giant birds from the previous one.

Those who have read the previous book know that there is some connection between Lauren and Merlin.  This is where it starts.

I knew from the beginning of the first book–even before it was going to be a book–that eventually Lauren was going to become Merlin’s pupil.  It was, I suppose, one of those ideas Ed Jones had that he never fully executed; but he credited me for it in a round-about way.  I had been running his character in Multiverser games, and had a crazy idea for a Narnia series.  It would begin with an adventure connected to The Silver Chair, a rather easy one to build an adventure around, but people in the world would recognize him from an earlier visit in the time of Prince Caspian which he had not yet made.  Thus I was going to run him through a series of adventures in this world in reverse chronological order, and tease him in the present with things he was going to do in the past.  He liked the idea so much he had a character named Henry show up and tell me that I was Merlin.  I’ve probably already covered this (I’m writing this history of the ideas entirely out of sequence, so I have not yet written the history of the ideas in the first book that far).  I worked out that I was eventually going to meet Merlin and then later be mistaken for him.  I figured out how to get around the fact that Lauren was a woman (and so could not be mistaken for Merlin), but she was still going to be his student.  It was time to do that.  I knew I needed in this book to train Lauren, give her her other name of Laurelyn, connect her to Wandborough, introduce Bethany as her student, and not make it seem like this was the entire point of the book.  That meant I needed ample time to do other things, and I had to create story lines that led her to these events smoothly.

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Chapter 11, Kondor 45

CPR—Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation—was not taught to lifeguards when I took my training, nor part of Boy Scout first aid.  It was not developed until I was starting college, I think, and then it became very popular very quickly.  More recently it has been revised to eliminate the interruption for breaths when working alone, but Joe would have learned the version that was taught at the turn of the century, which is the one I represent here.

My father once commented on that aspect of the history of medicine.  We were taught a couple ways to pump air into the lungs of someone who was not breathing, with Mouth-to-Mouth Resuscitation the most modern of them.  It wasn’t until the 1960s that someone thought to blow air into the lungs of someone not breathing.  I’m guessing that before that they thought that exhaled breath wouldn’t have enough oxygen in it, but there must have been a time before that when they wouldn’t have thought to consider that.

The reaction seemed apparent.

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Chapter 12, Brown 4

Derek is working through the process of proving to himself that this nightmare of his present experience is not a dream.  It’s not really that easy to do.

The line “But a wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser” is taken directly from Poe’s story.  I was very impressed with it, and brought it over into my dialogue.

When I ran this game for my son, Montresor’s gun was a muzzle-loaded cap-and-ball.  After reading Poe, I moved it up to the early nineteenth century and gave him a revolver, which made more sense as a weapon in Multiverser terms.  It also meant that even if Montresor responded faster than Derek, Derek would have a chance to kill him before dying.

I needed the talking killer; but I needed to make it seem reasonable.  Thus I came upon the idea of moving Derek to a spot where he would not be seen, and letting Montresor spill his guts about the murder as a way of trying to flush him out.  I also wanted Derek to kill the killer, but die in the process, which is a difficult stunt to arrange, but I think I did it.

This is terribly athletic for Derek, but it is an act of desperation in a desperate situation.

It is also improbable in Multiverser that a knife wound would be rapidly fatal; I’m assuming that Derek is teaching himself a kill technique, which he refines in future encounters.

Derek takes the knife with him; it is now his, and becomes his first real weapon even though it’s only a butcher knife.

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Chapter 13, Hastings 48

I never explained how Merlin knew anything he knew; at this point, he was just Merlin, Lauren’s teacher for this part of her adventures and part of the mythology of Camelot.  He expects her because by some magic he knew she was coming, but I don’t know how he knew.

When Lauren was working with the parakeet language, my editor became impatient that I was trying to explain why names did not translate, but that was actually a problem—ordinarily names do translate, because they have meanings.  It seems that the parakeet names did not have meanings, but were musical strings identifying individual birds.  Having established then that the names did not translate, I now had to explain why in this case they did.  It was essential to my story of Lauren that she somehow was going to become Laurelyn of Wandborough, and part of that was that I was making the name “Lauren” a shortened form of “Laurelyn”.  The trick was not quite sudden, and took some thought; but it had occurred to me that I could get to Laurelyn from Lauren if I suggested it was the earlier form of the same name, and that the creation of the name Elsbeth (a popular name in fantasy at least) could give me Spellsbreath, which would be a fun name to give her.

As to that, I never checked.  I don’t know that the names are etymologically related at all, but it sounds good.

I also have no idea about the spell that creates the road, and don’t think I ever used it again.

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Chapter 14, Kondor 46

Medicine is one of those things that seems almost magical if you don’t know what’s happening, but in this case the doctor is intelligent and experienced enough to figure out what it is that Joe did, and try to learn it.

One of the challenges in front of Joe that I did not want to overlook is that he knows how to do things with much more advanced medicine and equipment, and of course he knows what he learned in Sherwood, but it was pretty likely that there would be medicines and procedures here that “everyone knows” that he had never seen.  He had to be able to learn them without suggesting that he doesn’t know any real medicine—but the CPR incident has moved him forward significantly in that regard, an incidental benefit of an event that was intended primarily as a moment of excitement in what is otherwise a routine storyline.

I briefly contemplated whether Kondor should do the medical advances thing here, so I brought it up thinking my readers would probably also wonder about that.  I found reasons why it would not work, and so was able to avoid telling the same story over again.

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Chapter 15, Brown 5

The ghost story I made up out of whole cloth.  It probably has some connection to a lot of haunted house movies that I never saw.

The haunted house was an experiment.  I’d never run it, never really thought much about it, but I wondered whether I could do it.  I later wrote it up for game play, and have used it in convention demos.

The bicycle now came in handy as a reference point for him to track; that part was fortuitous.

I think it was an episode of Seaquest DSV in which the characters were exploring a ghost ship, a haunted sunken passenger liner, and one of them touched a doorknob that was blazing hot but immediately thereafter cool.  I liked the idea, but reversed it to cold, partly because I didn’t want to steal it outright and partly because I think of ghosts as connected more to cold than to heat.

I got the idea at this point of having him pick up souvenirs of each world.  He had the knife from the last world, and I was going to add the blanket from this one.

Part of the trick to this world is that the ghost can do things like slam a door or freeze a doorknob or cause noises, but initially these are all done in a way that admits to being otherwise explained.  Derek has to recognize that there is a ghost here, and until then he will continue to provide rational explanations for everything that happens, or at least attempt to do so.  Providing his rational explanations and maintaining the mood of something eerily supernatural was the challenge through this world.

The house has a shape in my mind that is drawn really from several houses, and ultimately it does not fit into a coherent floor plan.  I attempted to fix this when I made it into a playable world, but it wasn’t too important here.

Versers generally have to find an explanation for themselves.  Lauren chose to believe that God was sending her into worlds to do good, Bob that he was training for Ragnorak, Joe that there was a scientifically explainable accident that infected him with scriff resulting in random travels.  Derek is still exploring possibilities, and the notion that “this is the afterlife, and you’re a ghost” certainly is one.

When I was twelve we moved into a new development, and over the course of the next dozen years there were always houses being erected within a block or two of where we lived.  Being kids, we always explored the building sites on weekends and summer evenings, often collecting scrap wood with which to build tree houses.  I spent a fair amount of that time looking at the way the buildings were constructed, and that nervousness Derek has about the open space where the stairs had not been installed was my own—if I fell into the basement, not only was I likely to be seriously injured, there would be no way for me to climb out again.

There were times when my mother would put clothes on the stairs for us to take to our rooms.  She didn’t do it often, partly because she tended to do the laundry before anyone else was awake, and partly because we weren’t very good about putting the clothes in closets and drawers, but there was a time when I had to check to see if anything piled on the stairs was supposed to go up with me to my room.  I figured Derek had the same experience.

It occurs to me that in my mind’s eye I have a pattern, a floor plan, of Derek’s home.  We never see him there but in his own recollection of the moment his friend broke the game controller and he versed out the first time.  However, I see that as the living room of a house in which we lived briefly on Del-a-vue Avenue in Carney’s Point.  It had a couple of small rooms upstairs, and my mind made one of those Derek’s bedroom.  I don’t see that it ever mattered, but it was part of the character background.

The wait has made Derek the more nervous, and so he rushes as he decides the stairs are safe.  Thus his fall is abrupt.

The wooden floor was an accommodation to the fact that I did not want him seriously injured in the fall.  When I see this stairway, it is the one in my mother’s house in Ramsey, carpeted stairs with a flagstone hall at the bottom.  (The floorplan here is very like that house, but that at the bottom of the stairs there is no door to the left leading into the family room, and there is no front door leading outside, and the archway to the living room is open—my mother’s has folding doors concealing that room.)

I worried about the electronics he was carrying—laptop, video game.  I decided that between the backpack and the blanket these things were probably adequately wrapped such that they could survive the tumble, even though they might have broken, and so since I needed them to survive they did.

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Chapter 16, Hastings 49

The uncertainty in regard to the date helps me avoid the problems associated with dating the Camelot stories; all extant accounts are considerably later and highly fanciful, but exactly when any of these people might have lived is debated.

My vision of Merlin’s home probably owes something to Disney’s The Sword in the Stone.

I had by this point worked out what the acorn was.  It was one of those abrupt flashes of realization, but now I had to figure out how to keep it from becoming known before the reveal.

Some of this was rewritten, particularly in reference to Bob Slade, after I had finished the third novel, because I surprised myself there and needed to anticipate that here.

I picked up from C. S. Lewis the notion that it was possible that the myths of Paganism were preparing the world for the coming of the gospel, and perhaps expanded it a bit to suggest that the gods of Paganism were real spirits charged with the care of various peoples in the world until such time as the gospel reached them.  That allowed me to suggest that the gods of the druids were lawfully deities in Britain as servants of God—spiritual mid-level managers running their part of the world to the best of their abilities—and so I didn’t have to make Merlin a Christian for him to work with Lauren.  The idea had been cooking in my mind for many years.  God chose to have the gospel carried by people, not by angels.  There seems a plausibility to the notion that some, at least, of the pagan gods were appointed to care for the nations to whom that message would not yet come.  Lauren’s supernatural presence here might or might not change that.

In a sense, Lauren’s magic is less interesting to Merlin than her technology.  He predates the invention of buttons, and so almost everything she carries is futuristic for him, and thus interesting.

It occurs to me that Merlin uses the Socratic Method; they use it in law schools.  The idea is that you don’t tell the student what you want him to know, you ask him questions that will force him to reach the information himself.  That way you’ve taught him how to think.

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Chapter 17, Kondor 47

The idea of a major operation had the appeal that it would be exciting without being more combat (which can only be interesting so many times).  Having it be the doctor who was injured meant first that there would be no question of whether someone else would care for the patient and second that new avenues would open for Kondor, as he would then have more to do in medical.

I read about using microwave scalpels to cauterize spleen injuries in Omni Magazine in the 1980’s; it still sounds futuristic to me, though.  Spleens are so rich with blood that they don’t normally clot and seal.  I included it in Kondor’s bag as a tool from the future.

The blood typing thing, and the notions that the humans aboard the Mary Piper might not be quite as “human” as they appear, is a consideration in a lot of games.  I remember Eric Ashley dropped me in one world where all the proteins were linked opposite to ours, with the result that there was no nutrition in anything I ate.  Here the concern is about matching blood types, and the recognition that there’s not much Joe can do without a lot of research he can’t do.

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Chapter 18, Brown 6

Derek connects the sight of an electric light switch with proof of “civilization”, having just come from a nineteenth century home where lanterns and candles were the illumination of choice.

Derek’s internal struggle is part of the tension here.  He can enjoy horror movies because they are not real (he ultimately recognizes this), but he would be terrified if for one moment he thought this was real.

As the ghost begins throwing objects, it starts surreptitiously, trying not to reveal its own existence at this point.  It seems more as if things are falling than that they are aimed.

It occurs to me that I always envisioned Derek as finding his own as a computer whiz.  That’s why he started with the laptop.

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I hope these “behind the writings” posts continue to be of interest, and perhaps some value, to those of you who have been reading the novel.  If there is any positive feedback, they will continue.

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #74, on the subject of Another Novel.

My first novel went to print now over a decade ago; the second has been languishing, awaiting the financial situation in the publishing company that would permit to committing to printing another book.  That may never happen, so with their permission I am publishing it in serialized form on the web.  I already republished Verse Three, Chapter One:  The First Multiverser Novel that way, and as I did it I also posted a series of “behind the writings” web log posts–the last of them, #71:  Footnotes on Verse Three, Chapter One, indexing all the others and catching a lot of material from an earlier collection of behind-the-writings reflections that had been misplaced for a decade.  Now the second novel, Old Verses New, the one that made it up to the point of needing to be put in publication format and then stopped, is being posted to the web site in the same serialized form, and I am again offering a set of “behind the writings” insights.  This “behind the writings” look definitely contains spoilers, and perhaps in a more serious way than the previous ones, because it sometimes talks about what I was planning to do later in the book or how this book connects to events yet to come in the third (For Better or Verse).  You might want to read the referenced chapters before reading this look at them, or even put off reading these insights until the book has finished.  Those links to the titles will take you to the tables of contents for the books; 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.

There were numerous similar previous mark Joseph “young” web log posts covering the first novel, but rather than clutter this I’ll refer you to that last one and let you find the others from there.

History of the series, including the reason it started, the origins of character names and details, and many of the ideas, are in those earlier posts, and won’t be repeated here.

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Chapter 1, Hastings 44

I had decided sometime before that I was going to introduce Derek Brown and put Slade on sabbatical for the second book; but it wasn’t until the very end of the first book that I’d decided to have Lauren and Bob together over the span.  That meant Slade would be with her, and I had to find a way to verse her out.  But it also meant I had the opportunity to do some backstory, to bring people up to speed.  That’s where this begins.

Our story begins where we left Lauren and Bob, in the parakeet valley.  When we left, winter was approaching; now it has been on them for some time.  Bob is not going to be in this book beyond his interaction with Lauren at the beginning—as I mentioned in connection with the other book, with the killing of the snake his story has been told, he has become the warrior he dreamed himself to be.  I knew that intuitively at this point, and needed to replace him.  Of course, I really liked Bob, and so I let him cook for a bit and developed a new story for him which begins in the third book—built on fragments from his time on the djinni quest.  Besides, readers missed him.  But for the moment, Bob is a supporting character still present at the beginning of Lauren’s story.

One of the toughest parts of writing a series is that you know that some of your readers read the previous book or books and some did not, and you need to bring the new readers up to date on characters and events without boring the established readers.  That’s what the opening paragraphs are attempting to do regarding Lauren, and indirectly Joe and the verser concept.

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Chapter 2, Kondor 42

Very early in the Kondor story I decided that the first book should end with him on the early gunpowder sailing vessel version of that same Mary Piper world in which he had been on the spaceship version.  It was time to continue that story.  There are really two ways people try to explain their presence on the ship in these; one is the drink with the stranger, the other the kidnapping.  Kondor had tried the one, I thought the other would work this time.  Also, the first time he had tried to hide, and it played against him, so this time he took the bull by the horns and introduced himself right away.

The idea Bob raised in the end of the previous chapter about where Joe is “now” segues into where Joe went when he was killed by the sparrow people.  It has been months for Lauren and Bob, and in a sense we’re stepping back to a moment months before, but since, as explained, time doesn’t matter, we can pick up Joe’s story from the moment he came back to life and move it forward from there.

Joe’s concern about being thought a runaway slave is part of his inherent racism—a small hint at his thoughts on the subject, but an important one.

In the age of sail, pilots steer from the aftcastle, because the rudder is in the rear and it is considerably less complicated to put the wheel there.  They are reliant on navigators and deck hands to keep them informed of anything ahead, but the ocean is pretty big and they only really need to see when they are coming into port or trying to approach another vessel.

In game play, it is usually the case that players land in worlds where they know the language, but not always so.  Players develop skills in multiple languages and learn tricks to communicate where they don’t know it, but I keep it simple more often than not.  Somewhere in Doctor Who they suggested the conceit of a “gift of the Timelords”, that enabled anyone traveling with a Timelord to speak and understand whatever languages they encountered without thinking about it.  We don’t do that, and sometimes a language barrier is part of play, but not this time.

To recount, The Mary Piper is a game world from The First Book of Worlds which was designed to illustrate the principle that you can have the same plot and character elements in entirely different settings.  In the book, the “alpha” world is this one, a wooden cargo sailing vessel with simple cannon and muzzle-loaded guns, and the “beta” world is an interstellar spaceship with kinetic blasters and high-tech medicine.  The two worlds work much the same, with simple cultural and technical adjustments (an iceberg becomes a comet, a whirlpool a black hole, and names like “James” and “Donald” become “Jamison” and “O’Donnell”.  We’re going from the high tech version to the low tech version, and that gives Joe some advantages, because he knows some of this world already and just has to look for how it fits.

I never paid attention to the race of any of the crew until I was writing Kondor into things, and realized that he had a race issue.  That meant I had to figure out who was black, not because it mattered to me but because it mattered to him.  I was color blind, but I had to see the world through his eyes.

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Chapter 3, Brown 1

When I started playing in playtest in the fall of 1993, my eldest son Ryan, then ten years old, joined the game shortly thereafter.  In the summer of 1995 I started running a playtest game, and my second and third sons, Kyler and Tristan, were two of my five players (the other three Bill Friant, who had played D&D with both Ed and me, Dorian Mantell, who had little experience in games with us, and Chris Jones, who had played in Ed’s Multiverser game before I did and played in quite a few games in a short time).  Kyler was nine and Tristan was seven.  I thus had quite a bit of experience with games starring young boys, and felt it would be good to put one in the book—but not as young as that.

I owe something to my son Tristan for the Derek Brown story.  He had gone to The Cask of Amontillado as his second world, and it had played out in an interesting way precisely because he was a child.  I decided to try it with Derek, although it was different.

Derek Jacob Brown gets his given names from the British actor Derek Jacoby (played Cadfael in the mystery series of that name, better known for I, Claudius).  The surname is from my wife’s family, as I wanted a common surname to go with the rare given names.  Call it a mnemonic device; I never forgot his name.  I also remembered a Doctor Who companion, Perpugilliam “Peri” Brown, who in a very funny moment introduced herself to Brian Blessed’s character as, “Perpugilliam.  Of the Brown,” only to have him react as only Blessed can with a booming surprise, “Of the Brown?!”  I haven’t used that, but I love it, and it contributed to the choice of name.

I am not certain why I did the horror settings for him.  As he developed in my mind, I imagined a string of horror settings beginning with this one.  Part of it was that I saw a potential moral in the idea of coming to grips with the horror worlds, which I eventually included.  Perhaps some was due to Ed Jones’ influence.  He once commented of C. S. Lewis, upon reading That Hideous Strength, that the man could have written horror; he meant that as a compliment.  He also said that my Post-sympathetic Man game world was the most insidious horror scenario he had ever read, and although I had not thought of it as such before that I could thereafter see what he meant.  (Even now I think perhaps I’ll bring Derek to that one of these days; it would work well for him.)  I wondered whether I could write horror.  I never run horror games (although I have since run some of Derek’s worlds as Multiverser worlds at conventions); I don’t know whether I can maintain the required atmosphere.  But my wife said the Derek Brown stories were frightening, and if some others, at least, think so, I’ll be pleased.

Also, I needed to take a different tack, and although both Lauren’s Vampire Philadelphia and Joe’s Quest for the Vorgo were packed with undead monsters, neither of them really had a horror feel—Lauren’s was more a superhero-versus-monsters feeling (like the television version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, perhaps), and Joe’s a comic horror film (definitely on the order of Army of Darkness).

One of the things that makes the horror work for Derek is that he expects it.  He has seen “all the” horror movies, and knows the tropes, and knows that this is exactly the kind of situation that leads to some kind of horror.  He can’t accept that it’s normal, because horror stories work when things seem normal.

I didn’t want everyone to go the same way; often in the game it’s a computer that gets people.  A video game controller was an idea I’d recognized but never used.

I expected to need the bicycle.  I think I got that from my son Ryan, who brought the lawnmower with him (it was part of his accident) when he versed out, and used it to transport his stuff.  Derek was going to have a lot of stuff, and bicycle baskets would allow him to move it.  A flat tire, at this point, forced him to go to the first house he found.

I was constantly mindful in the Derek stories that I needed to bring back the foreboding periodically, and had to misdirect it as often as I could.  Thus Carlo is introduced as rather frightening.  He is supposed to appear ominous at this point, because that’s how Derek sees him.

Derek was a risk on another level.  People liked Bob Slade, and I was replacing him.  I had to hope that Derek Brown would become as much liked, for entirely different reasons, as the character he seemed to be replacing.

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Chapter 4, Hastings 45

The spring scene was very much improvised.  I had not considered it until I started writing it.  I realized that I would have to get out of winter if Lauren was to do anything dangerous.  It also gave me more time for backstory, including the pyrogenesis skill, which I hope gave something of the magical nature of Lauren a bit of an airing.

I am not at all sure at what point I realized that a meadow beside a lake in a valley would be a flood plain in the spring, but it suddenly seemed obvious and gave me some excitement.

The experiment with the rocks actually pinpoints the bias curve of the world rather precisely.  We know that Lauren cannot levitate herself psionically in this world although she can lift others.  Levitation is a 4@8 skill, curve of 12.  She uses her pyrogenesis to heat the rocks, a 7@4 skill, curve of 11.  That means the curve has to be 11, to include the pyro but exclude the levitation.

In the first book it was established that Lauren had met other versers and Bob had not, which here gives me the opportunity to have Lauren explain things that readers might have gleaned from the previous book (if they read it) with a few extras that might be worth mentioning.

The guys who believe we’re in the stories or it’s an army experiment were real players in Ed’s game before I was involved.  The girl was my own invention, although players in my games have included that among possible explanations for their experience.

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Chapter 5, Kondor 43

I decided that Kondor’s medical background would give him an inside track on a medical job, and that I could probably do a lot more with that than with any other position.  It seemed easy enough to sell.

The place names in The Mary Piper were all invented, a combination primarily of “make up a word” and “what’s a good name for a place”.  Sardic was, I think, drawn from Sardis, my father’s hometown (and a city in the Asian province of the Roman Empire).  Names like “Syndic” and “Durnmist” were cut from whole cloth; “New Haven” is a town in Connecticut, but made good sense as a remote port.

Again, James (like Jamison) was never any particular race/color until I used the scenario in the first novel for Kondor and started working with his race problem.  Once I’d made Jamison black, it followed that in the parallel James would also be black.

Kondor’s commitment to honesty is reflected in his answer, “Nothing like this” when asked if he’d ever worked on a ship before.  He had been a medic on the other Mary Piper, which was a spaceship, but despite the similarities a space ship is very different from a sailing ship.

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Chapter 6, Brown 2

The story is unfolding much as it would in a game, given the age of the character; but I again recognized the need to create tension, and so started playing the game of juxtaposing Derek’s fears against actual events.  We are more frightened of things here because we see them through Derek’s eyes than because there’s actually anything happening; this is the more important, because there actually is something frightening going on outside Derek’s knowledge, and we can’t see it, so we need to be clued that there is fear here.

I wanted the kitchen to have the look of something early colonial, from a time when fireplaces with chimneys were used for most of the cooking, but with the addition of a “modern” wood stove.  I figure this for eighteenth century.

The details of this story are drawn, to a significant degree, from the Poe story.  I checked maps and such to figure out the setting, and recognized that the town hosting the fair mentioned at the beginning of Poe is in the Alps not far from the northern border of Italy, so it was not completely unreasonable for Derek not to know in what country he was, although it was definitely the kind of question that might have gotten strange looks had he been somewhere else.

Carlo speaks English because this isn’t really Italy, it’s really a world created by the American author in which everyone speaks English.

Derek is applying horror story logic to his situation:  you can’t escape once the killer has spotted you, so your best hope is to be able to defend yourself.

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Chapter 7, Hastings 46

I specifically remember that the opening words “Out came the sun” were pulled from that nursery song about the spider.  I hear it sung when I read it—and the following “dried up all the land” is also an echo from that song.

I have been in frigid water in the late spring, and it is very cold.

The leg warming trick is not something that anyone ever did in any game I remember, but I thought a lot about how seals and divers stay warm and figured that for short-term it should work for Lauren.

Lauren would want her disintegrator rod functional, and I wanted her to have it again eventually—but not yet.  Making and repairing psionic devices are not simple skills, but she only gets as far as trying to view the molecular structure of the rod before she botches.

I had once versed out by trying to build a weapon, as Lauren had.  It seemed reasonable to use fixing one as a means of getting her out again.

The botch is what is called a “psionic shock wave”, an overload of the nervous system of all creatures within a specified radius.  It usually has the potential to kill anyone within ten feet, but beyond that it only wounds with decreasing force for each ten feet.  Bob would probably have felt it, but he probably is not close enough for serious damage.

I needed to move Lauren out of the parakeet valley to start her next adventure, and as it happens my own character is more likely to verse out attempting to create a new skill than fighting a dangerous adversary—I’m too careful in a fight, and too bold in trying to learn things.

The dream sequence came because I wanted to move her toward the state of being awake on arrival; it fit better with the image I was trying to create for her.  It also created a bit of tension at the moment, because it was difficult to know what was real here.

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Chapter 8, Kondor 44

I’ll credit Doctor Who with the bit that the cook on a sailing vessel is called “the doctor”, from a Peter Davison episode.  It also makes sense that the guy who runs the kitchen, where the herbs and spices are kept, also is the head of medical.  Having a staff here was perhaps stretching things a bit, but not unreasonably so for the length of the voyage.

The cleansing of the food and medical areas seemed like the course a modern doctor would take faced with the normal conditions of the age; that didn’t take much thought.  I had wanted to introduce Walter, counterpart to Walters, because I wanted a friend to connect Kondor to other events on the ship.  I think the whirlpool event may have been rolled by the dice, but it gave me the opportunity to do the rescue, and this led to the idea of CPR, so it all flowed quite well.

The introduction of Walters’ doppelganger gave impetus to Joe leaving medical; I had not at the moment I introduced Walter considered the next step.

Square sails generally catch the wind more fully and so provide the greatest propulsion, but lateen sails—the triangular ones—provide more maneuverability, allowing one to tack more effectively.  Thus in the whirlpool situation it is good to have both the power of the square sails and the maneuverability from the lateen ones to escape the current.

Handing Joe a rope made him part of the effort to save the ship, but more importantly it gave him that rope for the next problem.  He has to act fast to get a strong loop around his body and get in the water before the ship has left the man behind to be sucked back into the whirlpool, so I went for the feeling that he barely made it.

I don’t think the question of whether Joe could swim had ever arisen previously, but he needed to have those skills here and there was no reason in his history that he wouldn’t.

It had to be Walter who went over, because that adds to Joe’s motivation in this scene.  This is the doppelganger of a good friend from another universe, and he already feels a connection here.  The idea that he might lose that before he gets it gives us the all-important cliffhanger, the moment that makes the reader want to know what happens next.

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Chapter 9, Brown 3

We have probably all heard one side of a conversation on a telephone.  This is like that, but that the conversants are calling to each other from separate rooms, and the eavesdropper is close enough to hear the one but not the other.  Thus to him he does not know for certain that there is a conversation, only that Carlo seems to be answering someone who might not exist.  I realized that if Derek could hear only one side of the conversation, the reader would be as uncertain as he whether the other side existed.  Yet I could at the same time give the edge of the story behind this one, as Montresor and Fortunato are recognized coming in to the house.

In the original, Montresor had told the servants that he was going to be away overnight and expected them to remain in the house, knowing that as soon as he was well out of sight they would all rush to the annual fair; he then finds Fortunato at the fair and brings him back to the empty house to execute his plan.  In my version here, the butler is the last to leave the house, and the arrival of the verser delays him long enough that the master returns with his victim, making the butler a problem.  In this case, Carlo hears the jingle of the bells on Fortunato’s party hat, and so deduces that there is someone, making him more of a problem.  Apart from Carlo, all the servants would testify that they never left the house and Montresor never returned, but Carlo is now a complication.

Derek is also a problem, now, because Montresor must assume he heard the conversation or spoke with Carlo after that, and so knows that he returned to the house.

I wanted Derek to have a weapon; I wasn’t sure how or when he would use it, but he was going to need it.  Besides, I already knew that he was going to have to kill Montresor, so he would need a weapon for that.  I wasn’t certain myself whether a butcher knife or a cleaver was a better weapon in reality, but I could better envision how to use, and thus how to describe the use of, the knife.  It made no sense for him to have brought a weapon from home, but now I could add this to his equipment for future use.

There are several ways to attach legs to a table, and the better would create indentations in the table top in which the legs fit; but even in those cases, a larger table would probably also have brackets of some kind secured to the tabletop, leaving a potential gap into which the tip of a knife could be pressed.  This is how I see Derek hiding the knife.

We are told that Montresor was wealthy and lost a fortune due to something done by Fortunato.  He still owns the home, and I was attempting to create the appearance of the opulence of wealth here.

I didn’t want Derek to be separated from his things, so I had him bring them in; but in the end, the bicycle became the problem–he couldn’t reasonably bring that inside.  I used that to my advantage, so I was pleased with it ultimately, but at this point it was something I couldn’t figure out how to fix.  I eventually realized that one of the things that would move him forward in the next world was trying to find it.

There really is no likelihood to the idea that Derek would actually have heard Fortunato’s cry, but I needed the reader to know what was happening here—and since Derek has seen “every horror movie” he has probably seen some version of Cask of Amontilado from which his dreams might have pulled the classic line in reaction to the setting.  The dream was an attempt to bring any reader who had not yet made the connection to the original story up to speed.

Carlo’s murder is obvious.  He is thrown from the rooftop, probably after being hit, to make it appear perhaps an accident or perhaps the work of the intruder.  Montresor cannot allow him to mention to anyone that the master returned to the house with someone—once Fortunato is reported missing, he will be questioned, and the universal testimony of the household must be that he left that afternoon and did not return until the next day, which they will report because they have all gone to the carnival and gotten completely drunk.

The obvious way to put Derek on alert, and so ready for Montresor, was to kill Carlo, let him know it, and not have him where he would be seen when it happened.

With Carlo’s death, the scenario turns into the horror story Derek has been anticipating.

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I hope these “behind the writings” posts continue to be of interest, and perhaps some value, to those of you who have been reading the novel.  If there is any positive feedback, they will continue.

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