This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #142, on the subject of Characters Unite.

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 those for the previous novel, 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)–although it sometimes raises ideas that were never pursued.  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 is now also a new 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, hopefully giving them at different stages as they move through the books.

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),
3. #82:  Novel Developments (which continued with coverage of chapters 19 through 27),
4. #86:  Novel Conflicts (which continued with coverage of chapters 28 through 36),
5. #89:  Novel Confrontations (coverage of chapters 37 through 45),
6. #91:  Novel Mysteries (which continued with coverage of chapters 46 through 54),
7. #94:  Novel Meetings (which continued with coverage of chapters 55 through 63),
8. #100:  Novel Settling (which continued with coverage of chapters 64 through 72),
9. #104:  Novel Learning (which continued with coverage of chapters 73 through 81),
10. #110:  Character Redirects (which continued with coverage of chapters 82 through 90),
11. #113:  Character Movements (chapters 91 through 99),
12. #116:  Character Missions (100 through 108),
13. #119:  Character Projects (109 through 117),
14. #122:  Character Partings (118 through 126),
15. #128:  Character Gatherings (127 through 135),
16. #134:  Versers In Space (136 through 144).

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.

---

Chapter 145, Brown 49

Lauren uses a telepathic thought projection skill to project a “pattern” of how to do this into the minds of her companions.  We have not seen the skill used before, but it makes sense that she would have developed it in order to teach the “inner powers” to Bethany.  It is even plausible that she learned it from Merlin, who taught some of the inner powers to her as well.

Technically, watching what someone does with their mind to do something is not the same as reading what someone is currently thinking—e.g., your brain controls your movements when you walk (to some degree—muscle memory is also involved), but when we think of reading someone’s thoughts we do not expect to pick up the way they move their feet to maintain their balance as they walk.  However, reading what someone does is technically reading a different part of their mind, so Derek is adapting what he just learned to a new application.

---

Chapter 146, Kondor 91

One of the lessons to which Lauren keeps returning is that the ability to do something is not necessarily the license to do it.  Joe begins to see that as he experiments with reading minds around him.

I realized about this point that this book was already considerably longer than the first—this is the twentieth chapter past the last number of Verse Three, Chapter One.  Although I knew that a lot of writers tended to have the books get longer as the series progressed, I also knew that I was going to have to bring this to an end soon.  Thus Lauren did not get to stay here very long, and I was beginning the final mission.

Lauren has a solid argument for why each of the three of them should be part of the mission.  There are other good reasons for it, that is, other skills they bring to the table that will prove useful, but she’s right in the basics.

In creating the problem of the incoming ship, I had to figure out how to make it something that the space station people couldn’t handle.  I would be a while working out why it was the way it was, but at the moment I merely had to describe the problem.

---

Chapter 147, Hastings 91

The good-bye to Raeph was an important scene to resolve Lauren’s involvement here.  She was not in this world long, but it was an important step in her view of herself and her world.  He would not matter again, but the fact that they had these few days would matter in her story in the future.

---

Chapter 148, Brown 50

Lauren has decided that she can walk the twilight to reach the ship.  She does that by magic, and to do it she has to have a very clear unique image of her destination—we already know what happens if she gets it wrong, from the Camelot story.  So she uses her clairvoyance to search, trying to close on the ship in huge jumps, and then trying to get an image of something inside the ship.  We get to see what she’s doing, because Derek has already developed that “watch how this psionic skill works” skill.

The problem with atmosphere in zero gravity is one that people miss—convection currents which cause air temperatures to become relatively uniform happen because cold air is heavier than warm air, and as it falls it pushes the warm air up, creating motion and causing the air to mix.

---

Chapter 149, Kondor 92

The encouragement of having someone believe in you often has this aspect of wanting to be as good as they believe.  It here motivates Joe to do this well, and to believe he can do it, because Lauren believes he can do it.

I needed some kind of alien predator that would look frightening and not be a retread of something else.  I went with a dragon/lizard/snake motif.

Using the capture rod to crush something to death was invented at this point.  As far as I know, no one had ever used it that way, although it was Ed’s invention.

A laser scalpel as a tool for cutting something from a high-powered electrical circuit has the distinct advantage that you don’t actually touch anything with anything conductive.  That’s why he chose it.

---

Chapter 150, Hastings 92

Lauren has been thinking of this as a rescue; when Joe prepares for a fight, she realizes it’s more on the order of a raid, and she’d better be ready to fight.

Lauren thinks through a lot of reasons for using the capture rod as her primary weapon, but omits the most obvious one:  it’s in her hands, and she has no other way to carry it.

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Chapter 151, Brown 51

The difference Derek notices between his own response to the fallen bit of metal and Joe’s response is the difference between Joe’s trained combat mind and Derek’s minor experiences:  Joe quickly determined that the metal was not itself important, but that it might have been tripped by something dangerous overhead.  Derek is stuck on the object that fell.

The notion that pipes and cables constituted a sort of high-tech jungle canopy occurred to me here:  it provided potential habitat for the predators.

The idea of using an opponent trapped in the force field bubble as a club to hit other opponents was also new here.

Lauren is probably right about swapping the power packs:  if they trade, they change ownership.

---

Chapter 152, Kondor 93

The idea hit me that if you were generating gravity artificially and you had elevators, it would be logical to have the gravity generation decrease when you rose and increase when you descended, so that there would be no change in the feeling of movement.

This side trip to the galley was primarily because I needed to make the mission more difficult without cluttering it with a series of fights along the straight route.  Diverging to the galley in order to distract the lizards had an advantage in telling the story.  I wound up running them into a fight anyway, but it was considerably less like trying to fight your way through packs of creatures on the way to the bridge.  It also seemed a reasonable plan to lure the creatures away from their path.

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Chapter 153, Hastings 93

I had the problem with Lauren that the three rods were all useful, but she couldn’t effectively carry more than one, and even that limited what else she could do.  Thus here she drops the capture rod, and is without it for the rest of the book.

I decided that creatures that glide would not do well in narrow vertical tubes with ladders.  They might have been in there when the gravity was out, but if so they’d probably have fallen to the bottom within the first ten minutes of struggling.

---

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 #134, on the subject of Versers in Space.

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 those for the previous novel, 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)–although it sometimes raises ideas that were never pursued.  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 is now also a new 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, hopefully giving them at different stages as they move through the books.

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),
3. #82:  Novel Developments (which continued with coverage of chapters 19 through 27),
4. #86:  Novel Conflicts (which continued with coverage of chapters 28 through 36),
5. #89:  Novel Confrontations (which continued with coverage of chapters 37 through 45),
6. #91:  Novel Mysteries (which continued with coverage of chapters 46 through 54),
7. #94:  Novel Meetings (which continued with coverage of chapters 55 through 63),
8. #100:  Novel Settling (which continued with coverage of chapters 64 through 72),
9. #104:  Novel Learning (which continued with coverage of chapters 73 through 81),
10. #110:  Character Redirects (which continued with coverage of chapters 82 through 90),
11. #113:  Character Movements (chapters 91 through 99),
12. #116:  Character Missions (100 through 108),
13. #119:  Character Projects (109 through 117),
14. #122:  Character Partings (118 through 126),
15. #128:  Character Gatherings (127 through 135).

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.

---

Chapter 136, Kondor 88

Joe has been building a tech base which I needed for the final adventure of this book, and since he was doing it in the previous world it flowed naturally as a continuation in this world.  He also has quite a few weeks to do it, which matters because his knowledge had to seem credible.

He realizes that the notion of jinxing your luck is a supernaturalist idea, and despite his rejection of supernaturalism he falls into that kind of thinking sometimes.

---

Chapter 137, Hastings 87

The disappearance of versers when they die is suddenly distressingly like the decay of vampires in the same situation—but it’s an entirely different process.  Horta was fooled, but he wasn’t entirely wrong:  he had killed Lauren, but she doesn’t stay dead.

The idea that Tubrok was so powerful he could survive being decapitated I think gave a lot more threat to him when he returns in the future in the third book.  He is dangerous already, and he will have many centuries in which to become more so.

---

Chapter 138, Brown 47

Lauren has been a wizard for long enough now that her use of the mental cloaking skill seems second nature.  Derek wasn’t really aware of it because she didn’t have cause to use it in the post-apocalyptic world, but she used it extensively in Vampire Camelot and Vampire Wandborough, so she’s had lots of practice.

---

Chapter 139, Kondor 89

Lauren and Joe knew each other in the previous book.  As they meet again, part of this has to re-establish their relationship for those who never read that book, and part of it has to show their fondness for each other despite their differences.  They thus kid each other about their respective religious views while filling in the gaps since their last meeting.

Lauren has given herself a problem, and it’s a humbling experience to realize just how arrogant she has allowed herself to get.  It is an important lesson for her here, and she learns it.

---

Chapter 140, Hastings 88

I have Lauren at stage 3, although I don’t really describe it other than to say that she arrived fully awake.  I’m going to knock her back a couple stages in the shifts ahead, because I need her to enter the fifth book in stage two.  That’s rare, but it happens.

Raeph Williams is named for the composer, without the Vaughn in the middle.

Lauren’s explanation of her fear, that she would find herself in a position of using power over people to survive here, reflects the danger of being a wizard.  She has to learn to serve even though she has the power to rule.

---

Chapter 141, Brown 48

Lauren’s strangeness is fascinating, and she’s about the right age for Raeph, so it seemed to me that a mutual attraction would be an interesting direction to take it.  She started in the first book so entirely isolated, and gradually she has been connecting to people—Bethany, Joe and Bob, Derek.  Raeph is an interesting character for this, because he’s not a verser and he’s not in any way extraordinary other than being brilliant at computers, but he’s good-hearted and interesting, and in a lot of ways he and Lauren mesh well.  So I immediately picked up how much he liked her.

Lauren treats Derek as one of her children.  It doesn’t matter that he’s aged a decade, he’s still younger than she is in every way and looks the part, and she to some degree raised him as a young verser; he is still on some level a twelve-year-old boy, and so he perceives her as a surrogate mother who rescued him when he was lost.  So they have that mother-son relationship, and it’s reflected in their interactions here.

---

Chapter 142, Hastings 89

Using a bit of magic to rejuvenate the ancient makeup was the first indication that at least some magic worked here, along with the psionics.  Psionics work well; magic at least works.

Twentieth century makeup techniques of the sort that Lauren would use are designed to enhance natural features, and thus they would be significantly cross-cultural.  She doesn’t have to learn much about how people of this world apply their makeup, because what she knows is good for enhancing her own features.

She notices that her one dress is more conservative than she would buy now, and that reflects how very daring she has become through her experiences.

Courtesy, too, would have some universal aspects.  Helping someone with a seat is an obvious and natural courtesy, as long as there are chairs that move.

It is always said that versers never go home, never return to their own place and time; yet for the reasons Lauren gives, that can’t really be known.  Of course, if you didn’t resume aging you would start not to fit, but that’s a separate question.  Lauren thinks she won’t get home because that’s what she was told by people who had been trying for a lot longer than she has been.  She doesn’t know it with certainty, and that makes a difference, because as she says tomorrow she might be back with her husband and her children.

I remembered in the first book my wife saying that she didn’t feel as if Lauren were credible because she was a mother who didn’t seem to miss her children.  I figured at this point the experience with Raeph would remind her of her family, and it would break out despite two centuries of separation.  Thus she cries.

---

Chapter 143, Kondor 90

I created the idea of a bed with controlled reduced gravity and temperature-controlled airflow in play long ago, and I like the concept so much it keeps reappearing in my space worlds.  Personally I am not certain I would be more comfortable in a warm breeze than under a blanket, but it sounds good.

The line about Joe marrying Lauren for her cooking fits the twentieth-century mindset they share, and also segues into Lauren’s concerns about her relationship with Raeph.

The distinction between the vows “as long as we both shall live” and “until death parts us” becomes important with the concept of a verser:  Lauren died, but she is still alive.  It is part of her dilemma.

Joe has never been married, probably never been in a serious relationship (army straight out of high school), but he thinks of marriage as a religious thing and therefore a superstitious idea.  A life-long commitment sealed by promises does not strike him as a practical practice.

---

Chapter 144, Hastings 90

I saw video phones at the Bell Telephone/AT&T exhibit of the 1964 New York World’s Fair.  A decade later I asked my father what became of them.  He said that there was insufficient interest in them, and since transmitting video required so much more data capacity than transmitting audio it wasn’t worth the effort to switch.  By now people do use video calls rather regularly via computer over the Internet, without giving a thought to the data transmission requirements.  I figured that that would be the norm for a world where large screen data systems replaced everything else, and it seems already to be happening well ahead of my expectations.

I also figured that the system would have the intelligence to connect the call when the intended recipient indicated she was there.

I have Lauren in that teenager courting situation.  There is a girlish giddiness about her in this situation—she hasn’t been the object of someone’s romantic attention for a long time, and she’s responding to it in ways she had forgotten.

It was an interesting bit of psychological trivia I picked up somewhere:  men want to sit next to women to whom they are attracted, women want to sit across from men to whom they are attracted.  (I’m pretty sure I have that right; it’s been a long time since I read it.)  Lauren sits across from Raeph because she has the choice, and it’s more natural at small tables.

---

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 #128, on the subject of Character Gatherings.

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 those for the previous novel, 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)–although it sometimes raises ideas that were never pursued.  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 is now also a new 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, hopefully giving them at different stages as they move through the books.

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),
3. #82:  Novel Developments (which continued with coverage of chapters 19 through 27),
4. #86:  Novel Conflicts (which continued with coverage of chapters 28 through 36),
5. #89:  Novel Confrontations (which continued with coverage of chapters 37 through 45),
6. #91:  Novel Mysteries (which continued with coverage of chapters 46 through 54),
7. #94:  Novel Meetings (which continued with coverage of chapters 55 through 63),
8. #100:  Novel Settling (which continued with coverage of chapters 64 through 72),
9. #104:  Novel Learning (which continued with coverage of chapters 73 through 81),
10. #110:  Character Redirects (which continued with coverage of chapters 82 through 90),
11. #113:  Character Movements (chapters 91 through 99),
12. #116:  Character Missions (100 through 108),
13. #119:  Character Projects (109 through 117),
14. #122:  Character Partings (118 through 126).

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.

---

Chapter 127, Hastings 84

Morgana’s lesson about true power has its own value, but it also explains why she’s not a villain here.
The lesson about not revealing the extent of your power is very similar to the one about magic being more about what they think you can do than about what you actually can do.  It’s a good lesson, re-couched here to cover that which is not magic as well:  the reputation of strength can keep you out of a fight.

---

Chapter 128, Brown 44

Derek notices the value of perspective, that an outsider sees similarities where an insider sees differences.

One aspect of Derek’s movements through TerraNova at this point is that it should increase the impression of how huge it is.

The reader of course recognizes Joe; Derek has never met any verser other than Lauren, so he reasonably expects to find her—and is quite reasonably surprised.

---

Chapter 129, Kondor 85

The comment about getting in trouble by carrying guns even when there weren’t any rules was supposed to recall the fiasco at the bank.

Once again Joe gets the advantages of learning about a new world from another verser who is already there and settled.

---

Chapter 130, Hastings 85

I had actually forgotten the aspect of sleeping in the daytime, but then, it’s probably because Lauren had changed her sleep schedule in the parakeet world and had not changed it again; plus the fact that in the Camelot and Wandborough settings it was not so simple to work at night and in the post-apocalyptic with Derek there was no reason for it.  I remembered it here, and wondered why Lauren had not been traveling by night, but of course it simply had not occurred to her, having adapted to a more normal schedule.

I liked the idea that she had been forced to stay awake until she told Bethany this.  I knew Lauren would die tonight, and the idea that God would not let her die without allowing her to convey that bit of information to her student had a lot of appeal.

---

Chapter 131, Kondor 86

Comparing ways in which they were killed is actually a common pastime of verser player characters.  After all, sometimes the stories are funny, and sometimes there’s an aspect of one-upmanship—a bit like comparing scars.

---

Chapter 132, Brown 45

Eric Ashley advanced the notion that universes had weak walls in specific places that resulted in versers landing in those places frequently.  Although it might explain gathers, I always thought he was taking as evidence something that didn’t really happen:  referees will often use the same worlds, such as the Mary Piper worlds, for different players at different times.  Eric took that to mean that those characters were landing in the same worlds, but I took it to mean that they were landing in different worlds that were nearly identical to each other.  No one who ever landed in any of my Mary Piper worlds ever met an indigenous character who had ever met any other verser.

Derek at this point becomes my impartial judge between Lauren’s supernaturalism and Joe’s naturalism.  He will continue trying to make that decision for a while.  It gave me a new way to put the issues in front of the reader.

---

Chapter 133, Kondor 87

Ed had never run kids in his experimental games, or I think in any of his games, until he began playing with us.  I had always had the rule that my kids could join our Dungeons & Dragons™ game when they could read and write and add and subtract well enough to take care of their own character papers.  Ryan was thus nine years old when he started in Ed’s Multiverser experimental game.  Not quite certain what to do with someone that young, Ed used a botch to age the character several years.  Finding ways to age younger player characters has since become a part of the game, and I ultimately do that some for Derek, but at this point Joe knows nothing of that.  From his perspective, Derek will always seem twelve.

Joe’s insistence that you would have to prove the existence of magic before accepting any possible instance of it underscores the failure of that view:  he has faced magic himself, but does not believe it exists.

I was stalling Lauren’s chapter a bit so I could establish Derek and Joe a bit better in TerraNova before I brought her into it.

---

Chapter 134, Hastings 86

The grouping of Tubrok, Horta, and Jackson was carefully considered.  Lauren would from this know that she could not win.  She would know that anyone she fought in the future she could not kill in the past.  Then, though, that told her that Bethany was similarly protected—having been alive in the future, it could not be that she would die now.

---

Chapter 135, Brown 44

I read about trinary computing systems in Omni in the early ‘80s.  Binary computers worked originally with on/off switches, and gradually were improved to charged/uncharged storage cells on a chip; we thus have millions of “bits” organized into “bytes” that hold the coded information for the computer.  However, the idea of a trinary system is that those same chargeable cells could be charged either positively or negatively, or uncharged, and thus where our binary bits are 0/1 our trinary bits are -1/0/1, or more functionally 0/1/2.  An 8-bit binary bite has potentially 2^8, or 256, potential values, but the same space converted to a trinary system has 3^8, or 6561, potential values.  Since computer speed is largely a question of how tightly you can pack information, this drastically improves performance, provided you can operate it stably.  However, the languages are completely incompatible, so an entirely distinct coding system is needed.

Biocomputers were also discussed in Omni.  They use something akin to RNA molecular coding instead of electrical coding.  Since they work on the molecular level, they are again an advance on miniaturization and thus a potential improvement in speed.

---

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 #122, on the subject of Character Partings.

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 those for the previous novel, 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)–although it sometimes raises ideas that were never pursued.  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 is now also a new 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, hopefully giving them at different stages as they move through the books.

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),
3. #82:  Novel Developments (which continued with coverage of chapters 19 through 27),
4. #86:  Novel Conflicts (which continued with coverage of chapters 28 through 36),
5. #89:  Novel Confrontations (which continued with coverage of chapters 37 through 45),
6. #91:  Novel Mysteries (which continued with coverage of chapters 46 through 54),
7. #94:  Novel Meetings (which continued with coverage of chapters 55 through 63),
8. #100:  Novel Settling (which continued with coverage of chapters 64 through 72),
9. #104:  Novel Learning (which continued with coverage of chapters 73 through 81),
10. #110:  Character Redirects (which continued with coverage of chapters 82 through 90),
11. #113:  Character Movements (chapters 91 through 99),
12. #116:  Character Missions (100 through 108),
13. #119:  Character Projects (109 through 117).

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.

---

Chapter 118, Hastings 81

The introduction of Sagrimore’s ghost was a sudden inspiration; I’d not given it any thought.  I needed something to happen here that was not just another vampire fight, and the introduction of a ghost made some sense.  Making it the departed spirit of her perhaps best Camelot friend gave it poignancy, and she was able to deliver one of her life lessons here.

---

Chapter 119, Brown 41

I needed to get past the part where Derek gets integrated into this society, somehow, and at present they were going to treat him as a lost child and a vandal, which wasn’t going to work.  So I had him go on the offensive here.

Derek notes that being confined to a psychiatric care facility is not functionally different from being confined in a prison.  That’s definitely true, from the client perspective.

My limited cybernetic abilities are probably evident to someone who is more literate in the field, but I think I did credibly well in describing Derek’s means of hacking into their computer system and reading his own police report files.

---

Chapter 120, Kondor 82

The gag about the dance steps proving that he was not in his own universe is funny to me; I don’t know how anyone else reacted.

I remember in college recognizing the difference between attending school for the knowledge versus attending it for the credentials.  I was there for the former.  It has adversely impacted my life in some ways—I might have done better with better credentials—but I think that the knowledge is the more important.  Joe had something of the same feeling, particularly as he knew that jumping from universe to universe would make certificates a bit less than completely useful; at the same time, the feeling of recognition for what he has contributed is significant.

---

Chapter 121, Hastings 82

It was my wife whose direction sense amounted to knowing how to get everywhere from her childhood home.  After college we moved to a house several towns away, and for much of the next year whenever we needed to go anywhere she knew and I didn’t, we went to her home town first and then went from there.

It seemed inevitable that at some point Lauren and Bethany would be overwhelmed by their opponents; it would not have been interesting if they always won easily.  Four vampires would be a challenge they would have trouble meeting.

The idea of bringing Bethany’s mother in as a vampire was quite abrupt here.  It was clear that Lauren probably could beat four vampires with Bethany’s help, so there had to be a way to take Bethany out of the picture without serious injury.  Seeing one of your loved ones as a vampire would be a shock for anyone—and as the story explores next, it has another layer of ramifications in the question of how you fight someone who was once your mother.

I often wonder what parts of a story the author anticipated.  This thread just happened.  I brought Bethany’s mother in as a vampire not knowing how I would handle it or what it would mean, only knowing that it would compromise Bethany’s ability to fight and I would have to find a solution for it (and I did not yet know the solution, I think).  I also did not anticipate that it would prefigure Lauren’s own confrontation with someone from her past in For Better or Verse, but it made good sense and gave me a lot of good story tensions.

---

Chapter 122, Brown 42

I always envision Mary Parker as a forty-something black female social worker, very sure of herself, a bit bossy, and very patronizing.  That’s typecasting, but it plays that way.

I love the line about the smile.

Derek counters the patronizing by insisting on addressing her formally.

---

Chapter 123, Kondor 83

Joe’s reflection that having the piece of paper legitimizes his claimed title reveals that he always felt it something of a pretense.  He never before earned a doctorate; now he has.

For us, the idea that space travel would be a dull routine is difficult to imagine.  One of the reasons Star Trek does well is that it maintains the feeling that this is always new and different.  It probably isn’t, and the seasoned space traveler probably feels about as much excitement as most seasoned professionals.

Not believing in divine guidance, Joe oversimplifies it.

Interestingly, Dr. Breyer in essence teaches Joe that the lack of information about his identity can easily be covered by the idea that he works in top secret projects.  He will use that again in the fourth book.

---

Chapter 124, Hastings 83

Almost everything in this chapter surprised me.  I needed something to make the fight tougher, so I abruptly created the idea that Bethany’s mother was one of the vampires.  I needed to save my characters so I abruptly thought to bring a rescuer, and then thought it should be Morgana.

I also brought in the idea that Bethany had to recognize that the vampire was not her mother.  Presumably Morgana could have killed the vampire, but then Bethany would have watched her mother die without reconciling to the fact that it was not her mother.

I took it that Morgana was changed by the passage of centuries; I deal more with that in Lauren’s next chapter.

One thing I thought was probably happening in the minds of the readers is the expectation that the characters are going to converge on the same world soon.  Lauren’s near death probably plays with that expectation.  I had not actually decided when or how she would leave.  I wanted her to find Merlin but not free him (she couldn’t free him, but she had to show Bethany where he was).

---

Chapter 125, Brown 43

I have a very clear image of Raeph in my mind, and not a clue where I got him.  He’s like one of those composite characters I have in dreams.

The name probably comes from the composer, Raeph Vaughn Williams.  The British probably spell that “Ralph”, but I didn’t want it pronounced that way.

The observation that more recent systems are always reverse compatible with earlier ones held true for most of my life.  Most computers still have a floppy disk drive somewhere, and old standard connectors for a lot of peripherals remain on new computers.  It’s not always so on every system, but they take a very long time to disappear entirely.

In creating Raeph through Derek’s eyes, I was discovering how he perceived Lauren; it was revealing to me to see Lauren “pirated for parts” as it were in the creation of another character.

---

Chapter 126, Kondor 84

I had to give some thought to what kind of medical classes Kondor could take that would teach him something he could apply in other universes.  After all, he would not have access to anything he couldn’t take with him.

The difference between designing a technological device and building one is built into the game rules.  Neither skill necessarily includes the other.

An electrical transformer converts alternating current of one voltage to another voltage.  (The current changes in the opposite direction, so the input and output power, that is, wattage, are the same.)  In essence, the alternating current in the primary, input, side creates a constantly changing magnetic field, which overlaps the wires in the secondary, output, side creating an electrical current.  The ratio of the windings in each side determines the output voltage.  Because what we have is in essence a large block of packed metals constantly subjecting itself to changing magnetic fields, the entire object vibrates to some degree, and the greater the power the greater the vibration (an undesirable effect, as it is in itself a loss of power).  As a result you can often hear the hum, usually at 60hz (55hz in much of Europe), somewhere in the lowest octaves of a piano.

Superconductors are in their infancy, but in general the use of supercooling systems reduces line losses.  Electrical resistance creates heat, and heat increases electrical resistance, so by cooling heavy cables with systems such as liquid nitrogen we reduce the amount of power that is lost to heat (and prevent conductors from melting).

I was finished with everything I really had for Joe in the Vorgo world.  The medical certificates were gravy, and I could have kept him there doing that sort of thing a bit longer, but I wanted to get him to the gather and I had no reason to keep him here.  Having what he would have recognized as a foolish attempt to build a huge kinetic blaster provided a good way to do it.

I was before this point aware that the second novel was growing to be longer than the first.  This chapter was particularly significant in that, because this is the last numbered chapter for the first book, but there is still quite a bit to tell in this one.

---

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 #119, on the subject of Character Projects.

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 those for the previous novel, 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)–although it sometimes raises ideas that were never pursued.  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),
3. #82:  Novel Developments (which continued with coverage of chapters 19 through 27),
4. #86:  Novel Conflicts (which continued with coverage of chapters 28 through 36),
5. #89:  Novel Confrontations (which continued with coverage of chapters 37 through 45),
6. #91:  Novel Mysteries (which continued with coverage of chapters 46 through 54),
7. #94:  Novel Meetings (which continued with coverage of chapters 55 through 63),
8. #100:  Novel Settling (which continued with coverage of chapters 64 through 72),
9. #104:  Novel Learning (which continued with coverage of chapters 73 through 81),
10. #110:  Character Redirects (which continued with coverage of chapters 82 through 90),
11. #113:  Character Movements (chapters 91 through 99),
12. #116:  Character Missions (100 through 108).

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.

---

Chapter 109, Hastings 78

I think when I put this vampire here, I didn’t know what it was doing.  I developed that as I went.

It was simple good fortune that I had decided previously on two ghouls—well, not exactly.  I had done so precisely because I wanted each of my heroines to have exactly one opponent, so that Lauren would not be able to kill the enemy quickly enough that Bethany did not participate in the fight.  It thus worked out that the vampire here, looking for those same ghouls, was looking for two persons, and Lauren had the momentary fear that it would be she and Bethany.

The verse that begins, “Wail, for the day of the Lord is near,” is one that Lauren uses that my character does not.  It comes from Isaiah, and I probably recalled it from Randall Thompson’s The Peaceable Kingdom (where it would have been, “Howl ye, for the day of the Lord is at hand) and then looked it up for a modern version.  All my character’s verses came from the New Testament, and my character delivered them in the original Koine Greek.

Bethany’s verse comes from a Hebrew song.

The idea that a vampire could “play dead” was something new here; the way Lauren managed to deduce that it wasn’t was also new.

---

Chapter 110, Brown 38

Derek’s internal argument amounts to the recognition that if you don’t try deceit first you lose the opportunity, and that honesty in this situation was unlikely to be believed.

I didn’t want Derek’s hack to seem simple, so I gave the impression it took several days in which he ate his rations and slept in hidden corners.  It still happens quickly in the context of the book, because I didn’t see this as a terribly interesting aspect of the story, but it should feel like it took several days to do this.

Derek fails because of specialization:  he is so good at computer security he fails to consider whether there might be another kind that would be a problem.

---

Chapter 111, Kondor 79

I think at this point I realized that I had dropped Joe in a relatively dull storyline.  Even if it might be fascinating to read about the development of a new technology, a new scientific discovery, the fictional account of such a thing not actually discovered in reality was much less interesting.  I was creating the background but in a way still looking for the story; much of what was happening here really was that Joe was getting an education in fields he would want to know in the future.

The fact that he, a nineteen-year-old fresh-from-high-school military recruit, was now at graduate student level in a field he only began studying on arrival here should convey that he has been working on this for several years, without dragging out the years.

---

Chapter 112, Hastings 79

I needed to extend the search and keep the girls together longer, so I decided that Lauren’s magic either failed or was opposed at this point, sending them in the wrong direction.  I don’t think I’d yet decided which as the chapter started.

Lauren makes the point that it is possible not to know an answer not because you have no idea but because you have too many.  Her process of elimination is an effective means of reasoning through problems of all sorts, not just spell failure.

---

Chapter 113, Brown 39

We see police dramas in which they leave a suspect sitting in an interrogation room for a while to “sweat” him, to get him worried about his situation.  Derek considers that as a possible explanation for why he is sitting alone in such a room, but recognizes that he knows so little about this world there could be what to him is an entirely fantastic reason.

It also gives him a chance to think about his situation, which he does.

Derek is again thinking in terms of his life being like a movie:  this is what happens in scenarios of this sort.

People tend to say that the coral bushes of NagaWorld fire laser beams, but Derek, having studied some advanced physics and electronics, would know that that’s probably not the case (it isn’t—they use mirrors and lenses to fire focused light) and would not use the wrong word.

Derek recognizes that it is entirely possible that he is dreaming all of this, but that if he is that’s not going to be something he can prove even to himself.

---

Chapter 114, Kondor 80

I was in essence inventing the technology as I went along.  It was going to matter, ultimately, that Joe understood it.

The comment about everything he knew being the equivalent of a high school physics class in some universe reflects the observation that as our knowledge increases, the amount we regard as basic also does.  The math and science classes my kids took in high school contained at least some things that I didn’t learn in college.

---

Chapter 115, Hastings 80

Lauren hits several possible explanations for who might be misdirecting them.  I could probably have given more, but the point was only to establish that it didn’t have to be vampires.

Downhill is actually harder than uphill, but it doesn’t feel as hard, and the cart makes a difference, too.  Most people think uphill is harder, and thus psychologically it is.

---

Chapter 116, Brown 40

It makes perfect sense that a verser telling the truth to authorities in a modern setting would face a psyche evaluation.  Derek realizes that that’s what this is, but doesn’t quite know how to get out of it unscathed.

Derek’s ultimate defense is that the authorities do not have a better explanation for him than the one he gives.  That proves nothing, really, but it does shift the burden of proof significantly.

---

Chapter 117, Kondor 81

It was important that Joe was involved in the project and sometimes contributed, but equally important that he didn’t solve everything himself.  So I had him make suggestions and mixed them with the work of others to get the combination.

The Pernicans at this point were connected effectively to the Phoenicians, among the earliest of those traveling the oceans in large ships in the west.

---

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.

[contact-form subject='[mark Joseph %26quot;young%26quot;’][contact-field label=’Name’ type=’name’ required=’1’/][contact-field label=’Email’ type=’email’ required=’1’/][contact-field label=’Website’ type=’url’/][contact-field label=’Comment: Note that this form will contact the author by e-mail; to post comments to the article, see below.’ type=’textarea’ required=’1’/][/contact-form]

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #116, on the subject of Character Missions.

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 those for the previous novel, 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)–although it sometimes raises ideas that were never pursued.  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),
3. #82:  Novel Developments (which continued with coverage of chapters 19 through 27),
4. #86:  Novel Conflicts (which continued with coverage of chapters 28 through 36),
5. #89:  Novel Confrontations (which continued with coverage of chapters 37 through 45),
6. #91:  Novel Mysteries (which continued with coverage of chapters 46 through 54),
7. #94:  Novel Meetings (which continued with coverage of chapters 55 through 63),
8. #100:  Novel Settling (which continued with coverage of chapters 64 through 72),
9. #104:  Novel Learning (which continued with coverage of chapters 73 through 81),
10. #110:  Character Redirects (which continued with coverage of chapters 82 through 90),
11. #113:  Character Movements (which continued with coverage of chapters 91 through 99).

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.

---

Chapter 100, Brown 34

I did not know when Derek would ever need the sort of stealth skills he was learning in this chapter, but I thought he ought to learn them so I would have some logical basis for them if I needed them in the future.

I had read an article in Omni sometime in the early ‘80s about underground homes and their many advantages.  There seemed a reasonable probability that there would be more underground structures in the future, and that these would have a better chance of surviving the kinds of disasters that were likely to lead to a post-apocalyptic scenario of this sort.  It also gave me a good setting for the adventure—and of course the building in which they created the school was also largely underground, although it had a complete ground floor on the surface.

Credibly describing how Derek disabled futuristic security systems was a challenge, but I managed to be specific enough about the things about which I could be reasonably certain and vague enough about the rest to make it credible.  The weapons were easier—I only had to say that Dorelle did it, and Derek was not in a position to see what she did.

I think the idea that the Progressivists used this base was something I decided at this point; it gave me additional tension for the story.

---

Chapter 101, Kondor 76

Joe faces the problem of proving he’s a verser.  To his advantage, they don’t have a better explanation at this point.

The Pernicans were something like this world’s version of Atlantis, or perhaps more like Incans, Aztecs, or Mayans—an ancient lost civilization about which there are always rumors of lost knowledge beyond that of the modern world.  Scientists don’t believe those rumors, but the point is that were someone to offer something beyond what modern science understands and claim that that was the source, they would have little way and less motivation to disprove it.

The planet Fortran is of course named for the early computer language of that name.  My parents and my aunt all worked in it some in the early 70’s, I think.

I managed to invent the job at this point.  I got this, really, from the “contingent scenario” in my world The Perpetual Barbecue, published in Multiverser:  The Second Book of Worlds.  In the primary scenario, the player character has landed in the middle of an infinity loop—a temporal anomaly caused by someone changing history in a way that prevents its own change.  It can be a very fun or very frustrating scenario for many players as they keep reliving the same day and have to determine why.  If they manage it, the next day dawns and they have nothing to do.  However, to involve them in the story I use a mistaken identity trick that brings them to the attention of a government working on a matter transmitter (teleporter) project).  I didn’t want to use the teleporter project, even though I probably would never use it in a future book, but the fact that his gun used something like negative artificial gravity made it perfect for a connection to a physics project, and his need for a place in this universe gave him a good connection for it.

---

Chapter 102, Hastings 76

My future Bethany used magic rather differently from Lauren, and I sought to explain that in a proclivity for the one over the other.  There is a sound game mechanics basis for such a distinction, if Bethany’s best relevant attribute for magic is significantly higher than that for psionics, and Lauren has it reversed.

I thought the reader might wonder why Lauren takes the road to reach Camelot, so I had Ferenna ask the question and provided what I took to be a quite reasonable answer.  In theory I suppose Lauren could scry the land and find a target, but the trip was part of the process.

Lauren has a bit of nostalgia about her homes, even though she has had to leave them and begin anew several times.  In that again she is like me.

---

Chapter 103, Brown 35

I could think of a lot of reasons why it was a bad idea to go forward at this point, and I let the characters explore them.  Ultimately, though, I needed them to go forward, so I had Derek come up with a good reason to do so.

Derek’s reasoning to some degree echoes what Qualick and Dorelle, at least, already know:  better to work from the top down to ensure that your egress is not impeded.  That’s how they explored the compound where they found him.  His last reason, though, is silly enough that he recognizes it to be silly, yet it is still a significant reason in his mind.  I am to some degree playing with what might be called adventurer expectations:  we’ve all played the games, and know that the first level of the dungeon is the easiest.

---

Chapter 104, Kondor 77

The notion that military systems are usually fouled up somewhere comes back in the fourth book, where Joe uses it to his advantage.

The idea that the project had been working on artificial gravity for six years gives a basis for how the agent who first saw the kinetic blaster recognized some of its components:  they hadn’t solved the problems, but they had been working in that direction.

This is an example of a situation in which telling the truth about himself played in his favor:  because he has asserted that he did not exist in this world (apart from the vorgo incident) it makes perfect sense that there will be no records of his existence prior to a week ago.

It’s important when writing, and when running a game, to keep in mind what the characters look like.  It is easy for me to forget that Joe is wearing military fatigues even though I never envision him in anything else.  It is something to which other characters should sometimes respond.

Having Joe’s studies run concurrently with their work on the power supply enabled me to burn up an unstated amount of time, and make it credible that he had gotten fully up to speed on electronics and at that point.

---

Chapter 105, Brown 36

Derek demonstrates one of those facts of reality:  that which comes from your own time you know without thinking, but it might not be intuitive.  Qualick saw the elevator doors closing, and panicked; Derek stepped in the way and they opened again.

I think I learned the lesson about looking like you know where you’re going when I was in high school, but Derek wasn’t in high school so he had to learn it younger.

This again was a dynamic “they win and he dies” finish.  The extermination of most of the population of the complex had begun and would run its course.  Qualick, Meesha, and Holger were holding their own, and had Dorelle to help them.  Derek was gone.

I had at some point realized that this book was going to be considerably longer than the first, and that I needed to bring it to a conclusion.  Because of my vision for the final world, I needed to extract Derek from his present adventure to launch the next one—but I needed to do so in a way that would not be unsatisfying to the reader.

---

Chapter 106, Hastings 77

I’ve had the experience where someone was talking to me while I was asleep, and I thought I was conversing with them, but my answers were all in the dream.

I needed to have these fights against the undead precisely because Bethany said in the first book that fighting vampires would be like the old days.  That meant that the two had had these fights in Bethany’s past, and this was my only chance to make that happen.

---

Chapter 107, Brown 37

One aspect of running a Multiverser game involves telling the player what his character sees, not where he is, and letting him draw his own conclusions.  Derek at present is attempting to determine where he is from what he sees.  One of the challenges for him is that there is a tendency to interpret what you see within the categories of your own experience, and thus he makes guesses and assumptions that fit but are not quite correct.

I was creating this world as I went.  The first person with whom Derek interacts is apparently an alien (or a mutant) but I never follow that line.  In the game version I constructed later, I stuck with humans.

Derek is able to remember that he looks like a child, and use that to his advantage.  He’s just old enough that people wouldn’t treat him as a lost child, and just young enough that they would understand him looking for his mother.

I encountered the surname “Terranova” on a claim form during a brief stint working at Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Delaware.  I immediately saw the meaning—“new earth”—and liked it so much that in about 1984 when I was asked to run a band I called it “TerraNova”.  In 1987 there was a television series, Wiseguy, whose lead character was a Vinnie Terranova, that we liked at the time, but I had been using the name previously.  When I was creating a space habitat, the name seemed quite appropriate, so I used it.

I had early established Derek’s preference for inside over outside.  His recent foray in the previous world was unusual, and demonstrated some kind of maturation through which he was willing to undergo a trek outside for a purpose, but he is back to thinking in terms of comfort, and inside is usually the more comfortable choice.

---

Chapter 108, Kondor 78

I think they still make disposable cameras with strobe flashes, but I’m not sure.  In any case, they made them when I wrote this.

The idea of ray guns replacing bullets completely is probably as insensible as Kondor suggests.  The amount of focused energy required is remarkable.

I’m not sure whether the detailed description Joe gives of the controls is found in the world description.  Some of what is stated is at least extrapolated from the known facts about the gun (including that it has three power levels).

Equating kinetic with gravitic energy does make sense apart from the fact that, as Joe muses, they are both invisible and he does not understand either.  Yet that is a significant point:  they are unlike electricity, which is usually invisible (save when it sparks), or magnetism, also invisible.  It is perhaps to some degree like the wind, which you cannot see despite seeing the effects, because that is an expression of kinetic force but transmitted via matter.

Joe’s touch of paranoia about what kind of world it is and whether by introducing alien weapon technology he is altering it for better or worse, is something I think he had not previously considered, but a significant question in the circumstances.

---

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 #113, on the subject of Character Movements.

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 those for the previous novel, 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)–although it sometimes raises ideas that were never pursued.  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),
3. #82:  Novel Developments (which continued with coverage of chapters 19 through 27),
4. #86:  Novel Conflicts (which continued with coverage of chapters 28 through 36),
5. #89:  Novel Confrontations (which continued with coverage of chapters 37 through 45),
6. #91:  Novel Mysteries (which continued with coverage of chapters 46 through 54),
7. #94:  Novel Meetings (which continued with coverage of chapters 55 through 63),
8. #100:  Novel Settling (which continued with coverage of chapters 64 through 72),
9. #104:  Novel Learning (which continued with coverage of chapters 73 through 81),
10. #110:  Character Redirects (which continued with coverage of chapters 82 through 90).

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 91, Hastings 73

The early obstacles to teaching Bethany may illustrate the principle that the more clearly God indicates His intended direction for you, the more problems you are likely to encounter along the way. Lauren is pretty sure that she is here to teach Bethany—she even told Pack Mother Ferenna as much—and so she realizes that she is ill-equipped for the task, Bethany’s father is resistant, and Bethany knows very little initially.

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Chapter 92, Brown 31

I wanted Derek to leave the compound, but I had no idea where he was going to go.

Meesha was, I think, based on a character of that name (or one very like it) played by Margaret Morano in the Gamma World game from which Starson and Qualick originated. It was with Meesha that we learned the limitations of the game’s version of telepathy—she could not “speak” to us without being “heard” by anyone within range, but if we sent her ahead to scout she could not call to us once out of range.

I got the name Holger from someone who wrote to me about time travel theory in the early days of the temporal anomalies web site. The character was invented. We had had the practice in those early games that humans always had given names and surnames, but mutants, whether human mutants or animal mutants, had single names.

The name “Cavalier” was probably because we played a Gamma World adventure in which we sought, found, and captured a compound known as “Samurai”. It, though, was partly under water, and the name was a pseudo-acronym for something I no longer remember.

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Chapter 93, Kondor 73

I found my next step for Kondor: his raygun got attention, and he was being investigated. It was a hook to move him forward into something else, which still needed some detail.

I think I had some vague notion that “N.I.B.” stood for something like “National Investigations Bureau”. The thing is that FBI agents never identify themselves as “Federal Bureau of Investigation”, so all I really needed was the letters that the agents would use assuming that anyone would know what they meant.

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Chapter 94, Hastings 74

I had a side problem. In the first book, Bethany implies that she and Lauren had fought vampires in the past, and now I was in that past and had to make that a reality—but Bethany at this point is the teen daughter of a widowed father who wants to see her live an ordinary life, and Lauren doesn’t know where the vampires are. I did not see them attacking Wandborough—apart from the fact that I would be repeating a scenario I’d already run, there was no logic to the raid deep into werewolf country, and less with rumors of the famed sorceress in the area. I also had to stage an encounter that Bethany would survive, even if Lauren were killed. So I was exploring options, trying to work out for myself where the vampires were and how to make this happen.

The comment on the verse about the fool is another of those that I included because people get it wrong. The psalmist did not mean that all fools are atheists or that all atheists are fools. Rather, some people are foolish enough to act like there is no God because they don’t really believe that there is a God, or that God matters, or at least that’s what they think. Thus they do things God would condemn, because they don’t really think He knows.

I knew by now what was going to happen with Merlin, in the broadest sense. I did not know when, where, or how it was going to happen, but I knew the major pieces.

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Chapter 95, Brown 32

None of the creatures in the encountered group came from anything I remembered. Gamma World had a multi-legged horse, which is the nearest thing to a source for the six-legged bull. The “porcuperson” was my own idea here.

Again, as I did with the magic coin in the first book, I buried the one item that mattered in a batch of others—this time the porcuperson. The others are all mutants, but I gave them very little thought, using them primarily to fill the group.

I might have ended Derek’s time in this world here, but it would have felt like an abrupt interruption and I wanted to resolve this part of the story, not merely make it feel as if I’d moved him out of the school so I could kill him.

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Chapter 96, Kondor 74

The “blue card” was based on a “green card”, which I assume has a different name but is generally just known by its color. I figured they would have something like it in this world, but that it would defy the odds for it to be the same color.

Federal investigators pursuing a claim by a military surplus store manager that someone showed him a ray gun was a bit of a stretch, perhaps, but I tried to accept that it seemed unlikely and give it some plausibility.

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Chapter 97, Hastings 75

There were a number of things that were in the first novel as things Bethany learned from Lauren, or things Bethany knew that she must have learned from Lauren, and now I had to find a way for Lauren to pass them to Bethany. The anti-aging spell is first.

This is also when Lauren tells Bethany to meet her in Philadelphia. It’s a predestination paradox, but it works.

If memory serves, the part about Lauren blocking memories was back-written. In a later chapter Lauren causes someone to forget she had entered a room, and she does it casually and easily; I needed to lay the groundwork for that, so I found a reason for her to learn and use that ability.

The road trip was created to give me some action in this story, and to move Bethany to the Camelot area for the longer story arc concerning Merlin.

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Chapter 98, Brown 33

I had thrown some new characters into the story, and I needed to characterize them. I decided that Holger, the crack shot with the laser rifle, would be the kind of person who objects to attributing something to luck that was the result of good planning and skill.

Gamma World had sects of various kinds with their own philosophies about the world. I don’t remember the names, and invented this name, “progressivists”, to fit the philosophy of those who think mutation is the path to the future.  I was not writing political articles at the time, and did not see a connection to the “progressives”, the liberal wing of the modern Democratic party; I leave it to the reader as to whether such a connection might be made.

When I gave Derek the darts, I wanted him to have another weapon for the final scenario; I did not realize how significant the darts would become in the third novel.

Derek was also going to need tools, and a compact futuristic toolkit was just the thing.

I think this is the first time I’ve mentioned Derek using the tent and sleeping bag he got from Bill; it suggests that he used it regularly on this trip, though, and this really is the first chance he’s had to do so.

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Chapter 99, Kondor 75

Kondor’s simple explanation for having gotten the gun on a spaceship and then wound up here omitted the part where he was the one who picked up the vorgo all those centuries ago; that was a complication he had not considered when he went for the short and simple version.

It might be stretching the concept, but it seemed not unreasonable for a government agency sending a team to investigate the possibility that someone had a ray gun to include on the team someone who might be able to recognize such a device if he saw it.

I decided to give Einstein’s work in this universe to my artist friend Jim Denaxas (who did the cover of the first novel) because I needed an uncommon name. The names “Sabrins” and “Cordikans” were created to sound like nationalities.

If the government really believed someone had been in contact with technologically advanced aliens, that would be a security concern and they would be at least sequestered until some determination could be made of what they knew. Thus I think it reasonable that they would take Joe into custody here.

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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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