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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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 #71, on the subject of Footnotes on Verse Three, Chapter One.

This is about the creation of my book Verse Three, Chapter One:  The First Multiverser Novel, now posted to the web site in serialized form.

I began a series of posts on what might be called the “behind-the-writing” tidbits, what went into those decisions, what were the inspirations and the sources of the stories, the characters, the book as a whole.  Some years after the first three books had been completed I went back through the first and created a collection of such thoughts, chapter by chapter, and started doing the same for the second book; I used that first document to do the web log posts that covered the events in question.  Then, when I was two-thirds through and had published #53:  Character Battles (the fourteenth of twenty-one installments covering six chapters each), I uncovered another document, a considerably older one that I had been writing concurrently with the fourth novel while the second was in editing.  Thereafter, beginning with #55:  Stories Winding Down, I integrated those earlier thoughts with the later ones (not always seamlessly, I would say, but I made the effort), and wondered about those materials from that earlier document that somehow did not make it into the later one.

I am here attempting to fill in the blanks, comparing what I wrote in that original history of the creation of the novels with what was published in the web log posts here, to provide the missing pieces.  This “behind the writings” look definitely contains spoilers, so you might want to read the referenced chapters before reading this look at them.  The link to the novel title will take you to the table of contents for the book; links below (the section headings) will take you to the previous behind-the-writings web log posts, where there are links directly to the referenced chapters.  There won’t be links back here in those posts, although I will endeavor to include a comment on each of them referencing this post.

I have made an effort to avoid excessive duplication, that is, including here only those insights which were not substantially covered in the previous posts.  Some of these comments are inconsistent with or even contradictory to the earlier posts, proving that my memory of events changed in some ways over a very few years.  I have not marked the contradictions as such, but preserved them simply here.  Any duplication is hopefully the minimum necessary to be able to understand this article without jumping to the earlier ones, although some might have slipped through in the copying process.  Where the memories behind a specific chapter were substantially identical in both documents, I noted that with the entry “Nothing different” rather than skipping the chapter.

This is a rather long post, and could have been divided into two or even several shorter ones.  However, response to these behind-the-writings posts has been less than enthusiastic, and although those few who wrote to say they hoped to see the second novel Old Verses New and its accompanying behind-the-writings posts were very encouraging (and included at least one Patreon supporter, which also matters), they were indeed few in number, so I don’t want to belabor this if there is not more interest than that.

We began with:

#18:  A Novel Comic Milestone, the first six chapters.

Chapter 1, Kondor 1:  Jim Denaxas thought the name was a good strong name for a comic book hero.  I made him black because I wanted to escape the all-white cast of so much fantasy, and my other two characters were going to be white for other reasons.  Joseph was my middle name, and Wade just fit.

E. R. Jones had told snippets of stories about Richard Lutz, the moral atheist who had helped create the core ideas of Multiverser when they were in the army.  I cannot now remember whether Lutz was a medic; I know he had ribbons for rifle skill.  I knew that my second character was going to be blatantly Christian, and I wanted to offset that with someone we could admire who did not hold these beliefs.  The thorough-going denial of all things supernatural offered a lot of opportunity, and the combination of combat and medicine in one man would make for a complexity of character I could use.

The army experiment gone wrong idea also came from Lutz; that was how most of the original test players started, as it was originally run on an army base, I think in Germany.

Since the first six chapters were all originally intended to be comic book stories, they are a bit longer than many of the others, all contain some kind of action, and end in some type of cliffhanger.  I particularly liked the image of the character discovering it was a space ship, not a sailing ship–one that had happened in games more than once–and so I used that as the first ending.

Chapter 2, Hastings 1:  I am not at all certain where I got the names for Lauren Elizabeth Meyers Hastings.  I do know that none of her future nicknames came to mind.  Hastings is the name of Hercule Poirot’s sidekick, and it gave her an English name.  She was actually a less powerful character than I; I found my own adventures overly complicated and a bit incredible.  This was my second world–the only world E. R. Jones ever ran me in besides NagaWorld, where he started everyone–and so I made it her second as well.

Her wagon is a rough copy of my rickshaw; I designed a cart in which I could carry my things, with two wheels and two handles.  I didn’t want to copy it exactly, so I gave her a wagon with a pivoting front axle.  Most of her things were from my equipment sheet.

My editor, Steve Darlington, thought I did not paint the vampires as sufficiently evil in the draft I sent him; he thought Lauren came off as prejudiced against them and seemed more the villain than they.  Thus I tried to harden them a bit in the first confrontation and elsewhere so that the reader would not be sympathetic with them.

On the change of the word from “alchemist” to “psionicist” I remember asking several of my sons, including my eldest, for suggestions, but it ended up being my idea.  It was often the case that I would talk to them and come up with my own solutions through the interaction; it was also often the case that they would give me ideas as well.

Mr. Jones had used Father Peter Holer of the State Street Mission, who had won the lottery and retired.  Father Holer was the creation of one of his other players, and I changed the name.  I also recognized that a Catholic priest would never win the lottery and retire–just one of the many things that he and his players did not understand about Catholicism–so I changed that.  I picked the Saint George Mission rather absent-mindedly, but when my editor objected that the dragon slayer was hardly an apt icon for a charitable mission, I went back and played up the idea of spiritual combat within it.

Slobadan Milosevic was added to the list of respected world leaders in response to the editor’s complaint that the references were all unfamiliar to him.  He was Australian, and I took that as significant.

Chapter 3, Slade 1:  Robert Slade was in part an effort to get a good comic book hero name.  I was never a fan of Elvis, but it fit well.  Jim Denaxas made some other goofy suggestions, which did not ever make it into any of the stories (the one I recall is “mom died of failed diet”; this was shortly after the FDA recall of several diet drugs, but I don’t know if he had that in mind).  Somehow, Slade evolved as the goofy character, the one who makes everyone laugh despite being completely serious about everything.

There was a lot about Slade that suggested he would have been a smoker.  I didn’t want a hero who smoked, so I made him a former smoker.  I had a lot of trouble with the match stick, and had to go back and put in a lot of references to it, because it was introduced as character color and then faded away.

I also decided that my third character would be strongly religious, but not Christian.  I might have done Jewish, as I have some training in that, but thought it best to choose a faith which I could not easily mess up.  I went for the Norse gods, influenced greatly by C. S. Lewis’ comments that it was the noblest religion.

The idea Slade expounds that he was a chosen warrior of Odin came from E. R. Jones’ Multiverser character, known as Roland of the Sar or Michael di Vars.  Jones was a soldier, or at least a cook in the army.  Giving this same idea to someone with no such background might have been part of the source of the humor, but then I did not want two characters with too similar a background so I could not have him be another soldier.

A lot of the look and feel of Slade comes from Christopher R. Jones and his manner of play.  Chris is a bit crazy as a player, and I think that’s reflected in Slade.  In appearance, I have often described Slade as “a blonde, bearded Chris”, and sometimes forget that Slade doesn’t wear Chris’ trademark cowboy hat.

Auto mechanic was chosen to connect to a certain level of society.  Lauren was moderately college educated, Kondor in the military, and Slade was to be connected to the ordinary working people.

The editor said there were too many pagan references in the early pages, and in a sense he was right–as much because he used many here as because he used fewer as the story progressed.  I stripped all that I felt I could, but some I needed.

Going up the chimney was put in to vary the journey.  I began to realize that the dungeon might make a fun game, but it tended to make a dull story.

The three men were obviously the archetypal fighter, wizard, and thief.  I knew at this point that they wanted to go in, but I don’t think I had yet figured out why.

Chapter 4, Kondor 2:  Obviously it was necessary for Kondor to join the crew in order for the story to go forward, and security gave me good opportunities for action.  This was still supposed to be combat.

When it was suggested that Kondor’s friend on the ship should also be black, this attuned me a bit more to the notion that the reverse prejudice Kondor would eventually display needed to have roots earlier in the book.

The gear and people and events all come very much from the game.

Being nearly killed by the grenade is a bit out of sorts for the game; it would be difficult for a character to end up in his condition (but not entirely impossible).  I needed a good cliffhanger here, because I was still writing comic book episodes.

Chapter 5, Hastings 2:  I must thank my wife for calling my attention to the anguish Lauren must have felt about losing her family.  A lot of game characters ignore this; real people probably wouldn’t.  The other characters also expressed this at times, but Lauren is the one who has lost the most.  I added the thoughts about family to this section to capture that.

The fight scene is of course there to give action to the comic that never was; but there was a similar fight in my game version.  No, I can’t do those things; but my imaginary self, like her, practiced and learned to do them in NagaWorld before coming here.

I had a problem with descriptions of the characters which came out strongly in Lauren’s case.  The problem was that my perspective prevented me from ever describing how any main character was seen by any other character until near the end when the three main characters come together.  Thus I had to find ways to describe them earlier, before the reader had formed too solid an image of them.

Again, the thing with Big Bill was created to be a cliffhanger.  Originally it was laced with male chauvinism in the high steel, and set up as a contest, but my editor quite rightly observed that this was too much, and so Bill became the supervisor.

Jake Williams was based on a character named Luke Sparks, created by another player in the game; but his role was stripped down significantly here.

Chapter 6, Slade 2:  The dropped tool chest crashing and the knight ordering Slade to keep his hands down seemed a good start.  I’d not heard or read anything quite like it.  I wound up with a stand-off, but the idea of asking for a beer to break the ice worked well.

It was at this point that I conceived the idea of the djinni search.  It was also at this point that I started to realize that the Slade stories were always funny, and the others weren’t.  Since it was still intended for comic book release, I let it stay that way.

I invented the names Torelle (from the name Dorelle, I think) and Filp (probably inspired by the thief Villa Reston of Blake’s 7 fame, who also inspired much of the character’s personality as I think Villa the ultimate template for a thief character).

#20:  Becoming Novel, covering chapters seven through twelve.

Chapter 7, Kondor 3:  Because this was the first section that was not written to be an episode in a comic book, that absolved me of the need to put an action scene in it.

It was at this point that I realized I was going to have to change my strategy.  When I started, I had imagined three independent story lines in perpetuity; for this to be a novel, they would eventually have to come together, to do something that would make a unified climax.  And, I realized, for that unified climax to have the feel I needed, these earlier stories would have to in some way be preparing them for that.  I thus now knew that there would be a rescue of someone, in which Kondor, Slade, and Lauren would all participate, using the skills they learned and equipment they gathered along the way.  This redefined a lot of what I was doing.

I made the decision to start moving Kondor toward medical because I didn’t think that the continued security story would stay interesting, and I no longer needed to have him constantly involved in fights.

Chapter 8, Hastings 3:  I owe something to the game company White Wolf and their World of Darkness games, particularly Vampire:  the Masquerade.  Multiverser play allowed my character to become a character in that game, and much of my background material comes to me from that, filtered through the storytelling of E. R. Jones.  The concept of faith may or may not be theirs; it is much like what I understood from play.

The idea of using scripture verses as the focus of faith came from the idea of priests using crucifixes and holy water the same way.

Chapter 9, Slade 3:  Again, I was becoming more and more aware of the lack of story in the dungeon journey, so I tried to give the feel of a long trip to a single chapter.

The appearance of the efriit was a decision of the moment.  I needed something to give tension to the scene, and since my backstory had already suggested that the djinn were enemies of the efriit, it was the obvious choice.  I did not yet know how it would be resolved.

Chapter 10, Kondor 4:  I had some vague notion that Kondor was teetotal; I don’t know quite where I got the notion, but I confirmed it at this point.  I think in part it was because Slade needed to be a drinker to fit his image, and I didn’t want Lauren to be so prudish that she would not drink at all (although she winds up drinking perhaps slightly more than I), but I wanted one of my heroes to avoid alcohol.  Kondor was the logical choice.  It fit what I might term his severity.  This was where it came into expression.

I knew he was going on with the ship; I needed to make it seem reasonable.  The bit about being abducted by aliens was off the cuff.

Chapter 11:  Hastings 4:  The robe my character wore was royal blue with scarlet trim; hers is scarlet with gold.  I had just heard the idea that men were stimulated by reds which were closer to the orange spectrum while women preferred those with more blue to them.  My wife likes purple, and I borrowed that from her.

The Pit, in the original game, was called The Succubus Club.  That seemed too evidently evil.  I liked this better.  It could easily be mistaken for what it pretended to be, an ordinary charcoal grill restaurant.  The interior décor I invented at this point, as I decided it would be interesting to make it seem hellish in a way that was technically feasible.  If anyone ever copies it in a real building, I would love to see it.

I’ve heard that Spumante is classed as dry, not sweet, but it always tasted sweet to me.

The title The Book of Journeys sounded less committed to evil than it might have been, and could easily be connected to Cain.  As to connecting vampires to Cain, I know that White Wolf will take credit for the idea; however, Grendel and his mother were descendants of Cain according to Beowulf, so the idea of monsters coming from his curse is probably well within the public domain.  I like the idea better than either the Dracula or the Judas stories for the origin of vampires.

Chapter 12, Slade 4:  This was all created on the spot, pretty much as I wrote it.  The CD player accident had already been established somewhere (at least in my notes) as the way he got started.

When he calls on Thor, in my mind that was the use of magic to enable him to strike the spirit; but I left it as vague in the story as I guessed it would be in Slade’s mind.

I realized that it was futile for Slade to try to defeat the efriit in physical combat, so I turned his attention to the bottles.  This also gave me a good moment of tension on which to hold the story.  Although I did not always use cliffhangers, I had recognized that a good part of what drives a story forward is that the reader wants to know what happens next.  I first recognized it in Herbert’s Dune, but then realized I had seen it in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings–the use of characters on several stages, such that we continue reading in order to find out what is going to happen to the one we’re not reading about now.  Of course, I knew that the djinni was going to come out of this bottle, and I’d guess the reader knows it too; but it’s still anticipated.

#22:  Getting Into Characters, chapters thirteen through eighteen.

Chapter 13, Kondor 5:  I’m not certain whether to credit Richard Lutz or myself for the idea of Kondor studying medicine.  In our game version of him, he had earned several doctorates in various fields, including several in medicine, and so I was modeling Kondor on that.  But I cannot be certain whether that was true of the original player character or whether I invented it when writing the rules to the game.

Chapter 14, Hastings 5:  This was all recreating parts of the game, and so the background information is E. R. Jones and the character choices are mine.  Even the botch was a game event.

Chapter 15, Slade 5:  The wishes were mine; I had long thought of the idea of using three wishes by having the first one be for complete knowledge of wishes, and the other two for the wishes granted to someone else.

Chapter 16, Kondor 6:  As I began this section, I realized that an emotional reaction to the pirates was very likely, and very useful.  I was using the mechanics of the published world for background events, but the appearance of pirates gave me the idea for the reaction; and the appearance of pirates again at about the same point in the journey as before suggested the next step.  I recognized by this point that just going around the loop with no particular objectives, while it was building his skills in ways I wished to build them, was not going to be a particularly interesting story in the long term.  So it was time to move to something else.

My editor’s reaction was that it was too soon, that there should have been more to that story; but I was happy with it as it was.

Chapter 17, Hastings 6:  This training session is very like one I played out in my game in a later session, including the gunnels and the landing in the lake.  I, too, tossed Raiden in the lake.  Oh, it was Ed’s idea to call him Raiden, and for the reason that eventually emerges in this story as well; that’s probably the main reason I did not change the name.

There had been no talk of payment that I recall in the game; but there had been the shrine and the pages, and so the knowledge of the vampires, so I thought it worked well to prefigure that knowledge here.

Chapter 18, Slade 6:  I had once run a D&D game in which an amusement park was built inside a dungeon.  The reactions of the characters to the terrors which were intended as rides was very helpful to me here.  I realized that being swiftly carried what had been several days’ walk riding the winds would be a terrifying experience for the characters, whatever else they  had done, save for the one to whom the analogy of roller coasters would be apparent.

As I got here, I realized that I didn’t know which way the story was going to go next; but it seemed a good line to suggest that Slade didn’t know this, and might hook the reader into wondering the same thing.

#25:  Novel Changes, chapters 19 through 24.

Chapter 19, Kondor 7:  Nothing different.

Chapter 20, Hastings 7:  Nothing different.

Chapter 21, Slade7:  I was not at all certain what to do with Slade at this point, but decided to take him back to Torelle and see what I could develop.

I have long noted that there is not necessarily less love in arranged marriages than in “falling in love” types; there is sometimes more, as the couple has clearer expectations initially.  But I recognized that Slade would find the whole thing foreign, and this gave me the opportunity to play that theme.

It was quickly apparent that other than getting contacts for visiting the others, there was nothing to do at Torelle’s, and I moved on.

Chapter 22, Hastings 8:  Up to this moment I had not even considered varying the sequence of character chapters, but I was not yet certain what I was doing with Kondor.  I had dropped him in the woods thinking that it would be Sherwood, but had serious doubts as to what sort of story I could tell from that.  I thought perhaps it would keep the reader guessing a bit longer to delay that, and also give me time to think about what I wanted to do there.

The name Raoul was my idea; it was just Raal in the game.  Lauren may have been more articulate than I, but the events were much the same.

Chapter 23, Slade 8:  The trip to Omigger was primarily to give Slade a smattering of magic; but I didn’t want him to become, like Lauren, a powerful generalist.  He was to develop as a fighter who dabbled in other things.  Thus his tie to Omigger should be one of polite interest in the wizard’s activities, tinged with a resistance to the study of magic.  I also decided that Slade should get the primer; at this point, I guessed it would give him the foundation in magic I desired.  And again, it was over quickly.

Chapter 24, Kondor 8:  Obviously the gathering of gear was the first step; I wanted to make it interesting.  I decided it would help to play out the story the way it unfolds in the Sherwood Forest game setting in The First Book of Worlds, building from bramble to road in steps.

The language problem comes from my study of linguistics.  I’ve spoken a bit of thirteenth-century English, and it is barely intelligible; I thought it would add some realism to make their communication difficult, but did not have a way of settling the matter if they could not understand each other at all, so I devised that it was difficult but not impossible to understand.  The particular sentence I chose as the first words would not be too different from the modern pronunciation, so I was comfortable with that.  It became more of a fiction as the story progressed, but I knew that eventually he would learn what they meant and be better able to make himself understood, so I let that part slide.

Regarding the language barrier, I determined rather early in writing this material that no one in this era would use contractions.  I had to go back over it a couple of times to fix those I’d inadvertently let through, but ultimately keeping the contractions out of their dialogue helped them sound a bit foreign, which is what I wanted.

#27:  A Novel Continuation, chapters 25 through 30.

Chapter 25, Hastings 9:  Making Lauren female changed this scene somewhat; I had to think of how she would react to a strong and very animal female.  Otherwise, this is something of a recreation of game events.  I’m not certain how Ed described the Lilith connection, but my version owes something to George MacDonald, a story I’ve not read but heard tell of on several occasions.  The idea of the three curses was mine.

Chapter 26, Kondor 9:  Having skipped Kondor because I didn’t know what to do with him, I now skipped Slade for much the same reason.  Again, I didn’t want to bog things down with the language barrier, but merely suggest how different was their speech.  This section was primarily to create an interaction between Kondor and the Merry Men without giving him too much information; their reaction to his futuristic gear seemed simple enough, and his impatience made more sense than trying to have him explain to people who could not possibly understand what the reader already knows.

I mentioned Robin as a clue.  I didn’t know whether the reader could tell what was happening yet, but Kondor was going to need something else on which to base his conclusion when he reached Nottingham.

Chapter 27, Slade 9:  I skipped the year’s trip because I couldn’t think what to do with it; but it was obvious that nothing else was going to happen to Slade until he made the journey to see Filp, so I started it with little notion of what would happen there.

Once I grasped that Filp was a thief trying to play the part of a nobleman, it was fairly easy to work out a story there.  In Multiverser we’ve said that it’s only the modern person who can understand that some things are technology beyond our understanding and others really are magic; it is in a sense only the modern man who can understand the idea of learning to be something you are not.  Filp was locked into being a peasant thief, and no amount of riches and power could change that without the help of someone who could change both the man and the role until they came together.  This started that part of the story, and for the first time since the end of the djinni quest Slade’s story had direction.

I did not know when I introduced Wen that she would become Filp’s wife; but it did make sense that the barmaid would flirt with the customers, and perhaps that Filp would only notice that she flirted with him.

The sequence about coffee was originally longer, involving talk of grinding beans, boiling water, pouring the water over the grounds, adding sweetener and cream, and more; but my editor complained that readers know how coffee was made and I wasn’t really making it funny or interesting, so it was cut back.

When Slade said about getting a bit of fun back into Filp’s life, I was already  planning to do the thieving bit; I had not yet worked out the details.

Chapter 28, Hastings 10:  Most of this happened in play.  The aspect of Horta trying to read her mind I added.  Looking back, it’s obvious that he was trying to determine whether she was the same person as Laurelyn of Wandborough (whom he had seen die twice before), but I didn’t have that part in mind at this time.

Chapter 29, Kondor 10:  I was by this time uncertain what I was doing in Sherwood Forest; but it seemed appropriate that Kondor would go back to find Robin’s men.  I didn’t know yet how tough that was going to be, but I got him headed in the right direction.

Chapter 30, Slade 10:  When Slade and Filp rode out to hunt–a spur of the moment excuse–I still had not decided whether they were going to rob someone else’s castle or just do Filp’s.  This section and the last were shorter; I had now escaped the mental constraints of comic-book type chapters, and so could put in shorter vignettes as needed.

#30:  Novel Directions, chapters 31 through 36.

Chapter 31, Hastings 11:  The rain was my idea to get to the apartment; I don’t remember why I was there in the game.  I also don’t recall what details of the shrine were mine.  Much of the rest reconstructs game events a bit differently.

Chapter 32, Kondor 11:  The solution to Kondor’s problem played itself out as I wrote.  It was very like a game, with me figuring out what problems I would throw at the player and me figuring out how I would respond to those problems.

Chapter 33, Slade 11:  Nothing different.

Chapter 34, Hastings 12:  The idea of creating the fake pages of the Book of Journeys was one I’d had in the game, and decided to recreate here for much the same reasons.

The problem at the door was my own invention; it seemed to me that the referee in the game had let this slip past too easily, that the priest would not change the wording of his invitation and the pagan would not dishonor it by entering anyway.

I had not yet decided whether Raiden would be part of the attack on Jackson; he was  not involved in the game version, but I liked him and I’d cut out a lot of extraneous characters that the game had included.  In the end, I just forgot to include him.

Chapter 35, Kondor 12:  This was all being created on the spot; there was no plan to use this scene to re-emphasize Kondor’s attitudes to killing, but it made perfect sense in the story.

Chapter 36, Slade 12:  As mentioned, the decision to make this Filp’s castle gave me a good outcome for the events; it also gave me something to do with Slade, in terms of creating security.  I had half a mind to have them go into business showing other nobles how vulnerable they were and how to correct that, but the more I considered it the less I liked it.

The modifications to the walls particularly had been much more involved, with quite a few options and the pros and cons of each, but the editor rightly said to cut it.

It was also good to for Slade to find a real friend in Filp; and I began to consider having Filp return.  This was further encouraged by the fact that Slade was my son Adam’s favorite, and he particularly liked Filp.  Bringing Filp forward as a friend made Slade’s stay here better, although I was not yet certain what I could do with it.

I kept looking for new vignettes for Slade, and didn’t really have anything long-term going here, as I did with the other two.  But the short stories were fun, and the discontinuity not really that strong given the timeline aspect.

#33:  Novel Struggles, chapters 37 through 42.

Chapter 37, Hastings 13:  There was more shopping in the original draft; I wanted to have a positive statement of a number of objects she was to add to her equipment in the future.  It didn’t work well, and the editor said to cut it.

The fight with Jackson was probably tougher in the game, but most of the essentials are there.  I needed to beef up Jackson’s offensive abilities a bit and ignore some of the attacks he withstood, but it worked.

The use of oil and the James 5 passage was my idea in the game; I telepathically communicated it to Father James.  However, that was a situation in which the players didn’t understand the Catholicism they were portraying.  I also had suggested the use of the Requiem Mass.  I thought Father James would be sharp enough to come up with these without Lauren’s suggestion, and that it made for much better story.

Chapter 38, Kondor 13:  I was trying to keep the story from two problems.  One was the possibility that it would seem too easy to find Robin’s people; the other was the problem of boring the reader with the details of what didn’t matter.  I had not yet determined how to bring him to Robin, or what to do when he got there.

Chapter 39, Hastings 14:  This was a drastic decision in the writing process:  I let one of the characters get a chapter ahead, and another get a chapter behind.  Part of it was to allow the two slow stories to be slow; part of it was to give urgency to Lauren’s fight.  But I think part of it was that this was the one story for which at this moment I knew what to write.

The question that struck me initially about my recollections of play was that I couldn’t remember why I didn’t use the disintegrator on him immediately.  The answer had to be that I didn’t have it–but that didn’t work for her, because she must already have picked it up.  Thus a miss was the best response; Gavin was not so tough as Jackson, and would not have been able to withstand a serious hit.

The ending, where she smashes his limbs with the blaster, went down like my game, and for much the same reasons:  I was very angry at this monster.  The editor didn’t like it, and I had to rewrite it to try to bring the reader more into the evil of Gavin and the desire to see him dead.  The flying was also from the game, and pointed toward the next event, which I wanted to preserve for several reasons.

Chapter 40, Slade 13:  The wedding of Filp to Wen surprised me; I needed something for Slade to do, and this seemed a reasonable direction for that story to take.

Chapter 41, Hastings 15:  There was a scene like this in the game; but it had to be changed drastically.  I met a crazy young man named Henry, who insisted that I was Merlin; Lauren obviously couldn’t be Merlin, so I invented someone.

Bethany needed to come from somewhere in early Norman England, I thought, and she needed a name which might have been used during that time.  I had no other thoughts concerning the name.  I wanted her to be a bit loose around the edges, but not as bad as Henry had been.

Henry had been very pleased that I gave him my tattered robe; it seemed ridiculous to me then and still does.  Lauren tossed hers in the trash.

I added Bethany’s telepathy.  I couldn’t imagine that Lauren would teach her anything and not that.

Detecting magic was difficult.  In the game, I just said I was going to try to do it psionically, and I succeeded.  In the story, I needed to find a way to describe what she was doing.

Chapter 42, Kondor 14:  It was time to move forward; I decided that Robin gave up waiting for Kondor to leave, and so made contact.  I also needed a way to draw Kondor into the group, so the sick man was an obvious hook for that.  The medical stuff was rather straightforward, and I invented the hillside camp when I got there, looking for a way for them to be hidden when they were obviously a fairly large group.

In the game version, Friar Tuck has a bit of divine magic; he wouldn’t call it that, but it is part of the world in which this is set.  It didn’t make sense to involve Kondor with that, but it did make sense for Tuck to be concerned about witchcraft and such.

#35:  Quiet on the Novel Front, chapters 43 through 48.

Chapter 43, Slade 14:  Time had been passing slowly for Slade with nothing happening; I still didn’t know what was going to happen, but I thought if it passed more quickly I could find something.  The vesting ceremony had a number of advantages, including that it pushed time forward to a definable point and brought everyone back together.  That was about as far as I’d thought.

Chapter 44, Hastings 16:  The scene at the store was a recreation of a game event, although in the original Raal was not present.  I needed someone to inform Lauren of the significance of the Tezcatta; I had gotten it from the player who played the Father James character, but he wouldn’t be there.

The change in the martial arts training seemed worthwhile; I wasn’t sure how I would use it, but it was good to have it there.

The blood link connection between Gavin and Jackson had been in the game, but there hadn’t been a scene in which it was discussed–rather, the player, who was more familiar with the setting than I, gave me that information.

The discussion of the werewolf cab driver was my idea; I didn’t think the priest would accept the help of the wolves nearly as freely as he did in the game, and wanted to provide a foundation for that.

Chapter 45, Kondor 15:  The choice to build the hospital was a sudden one.  I had imagined originally that Kondor was going to learn to use the bow from Robin Hood; but now I couldn’t see him working as a bandit in Sherwood Forest.  I could see him helping the sick, and doing so in ways that would have an impact.  So I started the hospital thread, and let it have its head.

The problem with the flue came from one of James Burke’s excellent shows.  I suspect it was Connections, although it may have been The Day the Universe Changed.  He had pointed to the development of the chimney as a step in the social organization of England, and I knew that this had not yet happened as of Richard I.  Thus I knew Kondor would have trouble getting his chimney, and rather than having him invent the thing I found an alternate solution.

Salicylates, antibiotics, and disinfectants were all things I knew were not in any significant use which would revolutionize medicine when they arrived and which were relatively easy to bring into being if you knew how.  I didn’t entirely know how, but did know that the primary disinfectants were alcohol and salt, both of which were available in this age, that the first antibiotics were natural mold defenses, and that salicylates, of which aspirin is the most popular, were found in some plants (although I don’t know which).  That meant I could stock a medicine cabinet for him, and that would make it a viable concept.

I puzzled over the roof for a while myself.  The sod roof seemed a good choice, although I’m not at all certain how well it would have worked in actuality.

Chapter 46, Slade 15:  I knew perfectly well what vesting meant, but it didn’t seem like Slade would know, and didn’t seem like something for the story.

Turning the attention to Torrence, the second son, was a spot decision; and bringing Shella into it was even more unexpected.  But I think it was here that I first seriously began entertaining the notion of bringing Shella and Slade together.

Chapter 47, Hastings 17:  My character learned moving through the twilight from Raal, just as Lauren was going to.

It was obvious to me that the wolf would not be cognizant of whatever native abilities he had that humans would consider superhuman; so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to list a few, and if it were necessary to create more later, they would simply be things Raal hadn’t considered.

Chapter 48, Kondor 16:  The joke about “can’t take it with you” was a toss-in.

#37:  Character Diversity, chapters 49 through 54.

Chapter 49, Slade 16:  When I introduced the idea of Shella marrying Slade, I didn’t know whether I was going to do it.  I brought up the idea primarily as a way of making something happen in this part of the story, and of giving Slade a reason to explain himself to Torrence.  But as soon as I said it, I liked the idea, and started toying with whether or not to do it.

The death of Omigger similarly was a way of creating story events at this point.  All I knew was that it would bring my characters together again.

Chapter 50, Hastings 18:  I had done five years of Christian radio.  I didn’t have the necessary foundation for that with Lauren–but there was a woman popular at the time (might still be, don’t know) who was a sort of call-in advice person, and I thought I could give that role to Lauren’s double, remove the marriage, and keep the parts that might matter.

Again, Lauren is most like me.  Corn muffins with coffee, and eggs for breakfast are my preferences.

I ended the meeting mostly because I wasn’t sure where to go with it yet, but also because I thought it would keep the reader interested in where it was going.

Chapter 51, Kondor 17:  I had thought about having the Sheriff’s men kill Kondor now; but as I was thinking about it, it occurred to me that it would be good to have one of them come for medical treatment.  It would have to be something serious, something that would allow the soldier to overlook the fact that there were wanted men here.  A sick child was the solution, and preferably a daughter.

The idea that it would be difficult to house her parents developed in the telling.  The confrontation with Friar Tuck was another effort to keep people worried about what would happen next.

Chapter 52, Slade 17:  Nearly everything in this chapter was a surprise to me.  I had not really expected any of the companions to die while Slade was here, but the funeral moved the story forward.  I had not considered the relationships between the characters, but there was value in giving the estate to Filp, given that he had the larger family and I was starting to play with the idea of Torrence becoming Slade’s designated heir.  Giving Slade the books followed somewhat reasonably from Omigger’s perhaps incorrect assessment that Slade was actually interested in magic and led toward empowering him as a wizard–although it slowly came to mind that I did not want him to be a Norse clone of Lauren, so magic would always have to be a minor thing for him.  Getting Shella interested in magic gave her more reason to be at Slade’s manor and brought them together more–although I was still undecided about her future.

The letter was always to suggest appointing Torrence as Slade’s heir.  I decided on that as I wrote this chapter.

Chapter 53, Hastings 19:  The idea of having children in this world was the hook I needed to bring the vampires into this discussion.  I expected to put Lauren Meyers on the list of those who helped in the war against the vampires, particularly as something of a communications link, but that meant there had to be a reason to explain it to her.

The confrontation with Horta worked well.  I think it built tension and gave me an excuse not to have her keep returning to The Pit where nothing was happening.

Chapter 54, Kondor 18:  I had not considered how I was going to get out of the awkward situation I’d created with the introduction of Friar Tuck to the scene, but Kondor’s instincts worked.  The suggestion of chicken soup is good, because for a very long time people believed chicken soup particularly good for sickness and it turns out they were right–it does help fight viral infections, to a small degree.

The thought of soup reminded me that liquids were important, and I remembered sassafras tea, which I made when I was eleven or twelve.  The roots boiled in water provided a beverage that was flavorful.  The same principle could be applied to drawing the salicylates out of these roots and getting them into the girl more palatably than by having her try to digest bits of ground root, and would at the same time restore fluid levels.  I guess I was thinking a bit like a displaced doctor, but the idea worked.

The Ronald McDonald Houses came to mind as I tried to figure out where the soldier could stay.  I didn’t think they’d go back to Nottingham and leave their daughter.

#39:  Character Futures, chapters 55 through 60.

Chapter 55, Slade 18:  The culture difference between Slade and Torelle was fun to play with.  I brought Torrence into this position mostly to tie up Slade’s affairs neatly.

Chapter 56, Hastings 20:  Nothing different.

Chapter 57, Kondor 19:  The extension of one hospital to many was the logical next step in the process, although I had not imagined it until this point.

Chapter 58, Slade 19:  If Slade and Shella were to get together, she would have to be more than a helpless little girl; and it would be fairly easy for her to be the magic-user he never would be.

Putting the time in with Filp meant that Slade’s future thieving efforts seemed more realistic, as if he had actually spent time practicing them.

Chapter 59, Hastings 21:  This originally went too quickly.  I grasped what it was Gavin was doing all too easily; but my editor did not.  So I had to slow it down, giving Lauren and the reader time to understand why this “religion” could not be tolerated.

In the game, I had another player character with mine, a very powerful one; we left the scene in the cab, but were pursued and both leapt out and flew away to escape.  That wasn’t really workable here; besides, I liked the idea of Lauren learning to use the twilight.  I don’t remember the circumstances under which my character learned that, but this was a good time.  I invented the idea of zombie dogs rather abruptly.

Chapter 60, Kondor 20:  I was comfortable with Kondor’s story.  Time had progressed to the point that Richard had probably died and John taken the throne; the charges were reasonable for the era; and Kondor had changed the world and really didn’t have much more he could do here.  I picked someone from the story, and moved him on.

The Quest for the Vorgo was also published, although as part of a demonstration kit that I had never run nor seen run.  It’s a lot of fun to do it with an atheist or agnostic character, so it was perfect for Kondor.  It starts with the character arriving in the right place and time to be accepted as the answer to a prayer for a deliverer.

#43:  Novel Worlds, chapters 61 through 66.

Chapter 61, Slade 20:  Game adventures often end abruptly; Slade’s did, but not before everything was organized for him.  I leave more worlds through making mistakes on skill learning attempts than any other way, and that’s what caught Slade this time.

Chapter 62, Hastings 22:  The flat tire served two functions within the story.  One was to create the expectation that an attack might be imminent, specifically so it would be disappointed.  That is, if every time combat comes we see it coming, it loses an important element.  Sometimes it has to come unexpected, and sometimes it has to not come when anticipated, or it is not surprising.  The other function was to build the feeling that many of her psionic powers were becoming second nature to Lauren.  She seems like a powerful sorceress not so much because she does powerful things but because she does the odd bit of magic routinely  and without thinking about it.  Magic is part of her ordinary approach to life.

Chapter 63, Kondor 21:  The contrast between this world’s magical reality and Kondor’s persistent atheism was a lot of fun in many ways; but because we see all things through Kondor’s eyes it was not always easy to maintain.  Anything that happened had to be explained with his bias, and so had to be magical enough that the reader would see what Kondor was denying.  The easiest way to bring that in most of the time was by bringing forward his attitude about superstition.

The pun on the name was a sudden inspiration.  Having them get his name wrong seemed a nice touch, given their expectations.

Chapter 64, Slade 21:  The captain isn’t anyone in particular.

Chapter 65, Hastings 23:  I managed to come up with the clues at this moment.

My own second encounter with the ghoul (his name was Bob the Ghoul in the game; I made it Arnie) was when he came after another verser player character.  That character was at this point a superhero, and I knew that bringing in such a character at this point in this story would badly unbalance it.  Besides, there were several other more dangerous enemies and a lot of crazy side stories that came with him that would have bogged down the book terribly.  So I took advantage of Lauren Meyers’ existence to bring about the same situation.  Oh, in game I caught Bob at the airport; Arnie launched his attack downtown.

Chapter 66, Kondor 22:  Seeing the rather magical story through the eyes of a confirmed unbeliever gives it a lot of explanations that aren’t true.  That’s part of the character, and part of why I wanted to bring him into this one.

I knew Kondor would insist on having full information before he began, so I had to think through what details should be included.  There would be plenty of surprises that had nothing to do with Kondor’s side.

#47:  Character Routines, chapters 67 through 72.

Chapter 67, Slade 22:  Slade’s use of magic needed to feel like something he could do, but which wasn’t a big deal or a lot of power.  The darkness spell felt like that.

I grabbed a few cultural historical references I thought Slade would know.  I’ll confess that I had to ask my son Ryan about the video games that came out that year.

The idea of an evil earth-centered oppressive Federation is of course a Blake’s 7 notion.

Lewis Carroll deserves credit for the answer to “What did you say” questions.  Slade recognizes the joke, I think, but doesn’t push it.

Chapter 68, Hastings 24:  I realized that there were only two ways I could bring Lauren Meyers’ comments into my narrative without breaking my perspective.  One was to have Lauren Hastings actually listen to the show, and the other was to have someone recount it to her.  The former was impossibly difficult.  Lauren slept days and worked nights.  If the show was in the day, she couldn’t hear it until the next day, because she had to sleep.  If it was at night, she would be at work and couldn’t listen, let alone respond.  So I had Raal tell her what happened.

In some ways, Lauren was more powerful in this scene than my player character was.  In the game, the other player character used an invisibility screen to vanish, and a gravity belt to fly, and so carried the ghoul through the air while I gave instructions; and the guns were handed to me, not dropped.  I managed to save it without losing the important points, and in some ways to improve it, by using her capture rod.

I wanted her to have the guns; that’s how my character got them.  The idea that she took the guns from an enemy would eliminate any arguments about whether she should have gotten better or different weapons.  By the time she might be able to consider that, she would be good enough with these that it wouldn’t matter.

Chapter 69, Kondor 23:  Kondor is still providing “realistic” explanations for everything that happens to him.  I think it’s funny; I think it goes a long way to show how a lot of efforts to explain away miracles and magic are silly.  The reader knows that the people of this world are right, that these are undead monsters.  Only Kondor doesn’t know it, and won’t ever recognize it, because he’s already decided that it’s not a possibility.

The stalls were part of the tension here.  It was at this moment that I created the idea that Kondor was not comfortable around cemeteries, in part because I needed his nervousness to build the story tension.  Without that, it would have been a simple walk to the door; with it, the reader feels every step.

I think it was Ryan who originally suggested, back when I was writing this world for game use, that the Vorgo should be a bowling ball.  I think originally it was green, but I went with marble and mica here to make it a bit more ordinary.

And of course the awakening undead is part of the scene in the world scenario.

Chapter 70, Slade 23:  I have no idea who John Alexander is; he’s definitely a commanding personality, but I don’t think I’ve known anyone like him.  Ann Parker reminds me of someone, but I can’t think who.  Bert “Burly” Bently is Blake’s 7‘s Gan in many ways, including size and look and soft demeanor, but he’s got something of an engineer’s fix-it flavor to him.  Ishara Takamura probably comes from one of the villains in one of those movies from a video game, like Mortal Kombat.  I keep thinking of Toni Bently as very like Halle Berri, but that she’s not black (yet I keep forgetting that she isn’t).  I’m still not entirely sure what Marilyn Wells did, but she’s got long hair and dark eyes and looks good in the costume.

Chapter 71, Hastings 25:  The guns were the same as the ones I got in the game.  Mine had something called Brimstone Rounds, but not knowing what those are I did not include them here.

In the game, there were three major vampire recruiting strongholds in the city.  I took down The Succubus Club, which I’ve replaced fairly directly with The Pit (although the interior is my design), with the werewolf battle to come.  The Presemium, a high arts theatre, involved an assault unlike anything in this story.  The Coffee Shoppee in the college area, geared to appeal to young intellectuals through poetry and jazz, got the honor of the magical coin, which was sufficient to completely destroy its ambiance and drive off its clientele.  Lauren didn’t have all those targets; she used the coin to reduce the number of humans in The Pit before the attack.

Once I knew the clues, I knew what the three things did; but unfolding the discovery within the story was an important part of it.  The chapter ending cliffhanger seemed good to me; I had gotten away from cliffhangers, and needed to bring a few back to drive the story forward.

Chapter 72, Kondor 24:  The idea that Kondor’s rational explanations could not keep his feet from running appealed to my wife when she read it.  The dash for the gate was a given from the beginning; he was going to have to run this far.  The idea that they would not cross that line in daylight both gave it a magical feeling and gave Kondor and company a chance to get back to the castle.

#50:  Stories Progress, chapters 73 through 78.

Chapter 73, Slade 24:  Translating Slade from medieval to futuristic would be a trick; but I thought probably I could make what he already knew sound useful.

I hadn’t really realized that the comment that Ishara had “trouble with intimacy” was funny, I think because Slade’s stories have that light humor most of the time.

Chapter 74, Hastings 26:  Other than that I needed Lauren to wake up again, this chapter primarily is here to stall Kondor’s next step.

Chapter 75, Kondor 25:  Preparations for the battle and exposition of the function of the Vorgo were both  important, but also part of delaying the battle itself.  The pyre actually is a good idea which Kondor would not be able to recognize.

Chapter 76, Slade 25:  This settling in section asks a question that is usually not much part of a lot of stories:  what is happening when nothing is happening?

FPM stood for something when I wrote it; I may have failed to record it anywhere, but I think it may have been Federal Planetary Militia.

Chapter 77, Hastings 27:  I had by this time decided that Lauren wasn’t going to survive the raid on the Pit, although the exact details had not been decided.  This section was preparatory for that, establishing that everything was wrapping up and filling in her equipment needs.

Chapter 78, Kondor 26:  Having established the electronic eye in Kondor’s head, it was time to use it.  It would work for him, and provide information to the reader about what was happening.

I did an in-game castle siege once; but the players relied more on sending troops into the field and using magic from the walls.  This assault was to be a bit less magical and thus more historical, and that required some attention to what I knew of castle assault and defense tactics more generally.

The delay for the battering ram was in part reasonable to the scene and in part keeping the action from accelerating too rapidly.  Constant battle would become dull quickly and exhaust the reasonable resources of the keep, so it had to be broken in spurts, with tactical changes used to explain the breaks.

#53:  Character Battles, chapters 79 through 84.

Chapter 79, Slade 26  My application of matter transmission was to be limited as Blake’s 7‘s was, requiring that the individual wear something to be teleported.  I don’t recall how that show handled teleporting objects, but devised something analogous for that.

Chapter 80, Hastings 28:  The shopping was all stuff I’d wanted her to have for future use that I had not yet acquired; I knew she was leaving.

When I started, the guy playing the priest was buying holy water–he didn’t understand that as a priest he could make his own.  Once he knew that, he was making bathtubs full, and took my advice on high-powered water guns.

Chapter 81, Kondor 27:  Making Sowan fly and drop fire bombs was an abrupt and difficult choice.  Those abilities are detailed in his description in the game world from which this is drawn, and I did not wish to ignore them; but then, Kondor would have to find a way to incorporate them into his philosophy.  Once I had an idea of how he would do this, I did it.

Chapter 82, Slade 27:  I took the opportunity to try to bring Tom’s character to the foreground here.

In this section, Slade moves from weapons practitioner to skilled warrior.  One might say that all that practice finally pays off.

I liked the idea of not explaining the life pods to Slade.  First, they saved me the trouble of figuring out the details.  Second, they saved space in the book.  Third, there was something very realistic about Tom Titus not taking time to do such exposition.

Chapter 83, Hastings 29:  The in-game battle was longer, but went very like this.  Henry, Bethany’s alter-ego in the game, complained that his Barbie doll with a hat pin didn’t become fifty feet tall as he expected, but it did run around stabbing vampire feet.

I don’t know why I brought Lauren Meyers here, except perhaps so that I could have all the indigs working together and create the idea that they would continue to work together in the future.

In game, Horta landed on the roof, made his venomous comment, and fled like a Roman candle rocket.  I thought it necessary for him to die here, although I was not yet certain of how the fight was going to go.

Chapter 84, Kondor 28:  Kondor’s explanation of Sowan’s magic as psionics was a reasonable solution for him.  This also introduces the arrogance of Kondor’s position, that his rational explanations for magic powers are better than the superstitious explanations of the people who use them.

I had to give some thought to what he actually saw, given his untuned eye.  When I realized that all visible light would be interpreted as green, it gave me something to explain.

---

From this point forward, the older version of the history had been found and incorporated into the articles.  Maybe there would have been interest in which insights were from the older and which from the more recent memories, but I didn’t want too many articles or articles that were too complicated.  Here are the rest of the behind-the-writings pieces:

• #55:  Stories Winding Down, chapters 85 through 90.
• #57:  Multiverse Variety, chapters 91 through 96.
• #59:  Verser Lives and Deaths, chapters 97 through 102.
• #61:  World Transitions, chapters 103 through 108.
• #64:  Versers Gather, chapters 109 through 114.
• #66:  Character Quest, chapters 115 through 120.
• #69:  Novel Conclusion, chapters 121 through 126.

As mentioned, there has not been much feedback concerning whether to continue the stories; not many read #70:  Writing Backwards and Forwards in which we asked for reader thoughts on what to write in the future.  Much depends on your responses; I look forward to hearing from you.

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #67, on the subject of Novel Conclusion.

This is about the creation of my book Verse Three, Chapter One:  The First Multiverser Novel, now being posted to the web site in serialized form.  This “behind the writings” look definitely contains spoilers, so you might want to read the referenced chapters before reading this look at them.  That link will take you to the table of contents for the book; links below (the section headings) will take you to the specific individual chapters, and there are (or will soon be) links on those pages to bring you back hopefully to the same point here.  There were also numerous similar previous mark Joseph “young” web log posts:

1. #18:  A Novel Comic Milestone (which provided this kind of insight into the first six chapters),
2. #20:  Becoming Novel (covering chapters seven through twelve),
3. #22:  Getting Into Characters (for chapters thirteen through eighteen),
4. #25:  Novel Changes (chapters 19 through 24),
5. #27:  A Novel Continuation (chapters 25 through 30),
6. #30:  Novel Directions (chapters 31 through 36),
7. #33:  Novel Struggles (chapters 37 through 42),
8. #35:  Quiet on the Novel Front (chapters 43 through 48),
9. #37:  Character Diversity (chapters 49 through 54),
10. #39:  Character Futures (chapters 55 through 60),
11. #43:  Novel Worlds (chapters 61 through 66),
12. #47:  Character Routines (chapters 67 through 72),
13. #50:  Stories Progress (chapters 73 through 78),
14. #53:  Character Battles (chapters 79 through 84),
15. #55:  Stories Winding Down (chapters 85 through 90),
16. #57:  Multiverse Variety (chapters 91 through 96),
17. #59:  Verser Lives and Deaths (chapters 97 through 102),
18. #61:  World Transitions (chapters 103 through 108),
19. #64:  Versers Gather (chapters 109 through 114), and
20. #66:  Character Quest (chapters 115 through 120).

This picks up from there.  These chapters bring the book through the climax to the end.

There is some essential background to the book as a whole in that first post, which I will not repeat here.

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Chapter 121, Kondor 40

I was in the mountains of New Mexico in my scouting days, and climbed one that went above the tree line.  Although for some reason I could not understand then or now we did it before daylight (we wanted to see the sun rise, but wound up mostly huddled in makeshift rock shelters trying to stay warm and out of the wind), I remember something of the terrain.  The idea of the trees thinning gave me new terrain and a new problem for Kondor; he was now out of his forest element, and needed to adapt.

As Joe hopes to see Lauren again, the possibility of heaven is automatically discounted, but the reality of being a verser creates a different possibility for which he can have some hope.  That hope is realized in the next book; that probably doesn’t spoil much.

There are several ways to mark a trail, and Kondor considers some of them.  Using rock markers is good.  The standard, though, stacks a rock on top of another rock, which is good because it doesn’t happen naturally but bad for the current purpose because it doesn’t survive over long periods of time.  The markers I use were my own invention here, the “S” shape prefiguring the destination.  Obviously, I learned making and following trails in Scouts; this particular trail marker was again to suggest the snake.

I knew that somehow Bob was going to be the one fighting the big final fight against the “big boss of the whole game”.  Joe has now delivered him to that point, and I needed something to remove Joe from that final fight—so I gave him his own battle.  I’m not sure when I thought of the idea of one of them fighting the soldiers while the other rescued the girl; but it was evident that Kondor would have to be left behind, because I needed Slade’s perspective on magic.  Slade was better at that sort of glorious one-man combat anyway.

I like to think that Kondor was inspired by Lauren’s sacrifice to take the same step himself.  That’s why he says, “It’s my turn.”

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Chapter 122, Slade 41

I skipped Lauren intentionally.  I was in suspense concerning what was going to happen to her, but at the same time I needed to move the main quest forward.  So I tackled this moment when Joe stays behind and Bob goes ahead, and then returned to deal with what happened to Lauren in the next chapter.

I couldn’t for a moment think why Slade would go on and leave Kondor to fight against such odds; but then the realization that Speckles was already on the altar gave me the reason.  I wasn’t sure it was completely sound, but it worked for the moment.

I had envisioned something akin to Stonehenge; but I wanted the ground to rise slightly to it from where they were, and the center to be hidden from view so that Slade and Kondor, while not that far from each other, could not see each other.  Thus the idea of a crater commended itself.

This is the moment when one of the birds is shown to have magic.  I was not yet certain how much magic the bird had, but providing one such bird made Bob’s task appear more difficult.

I had envisioned the wizard as part of the group transporting Speckles, the sparrow hen suspended in the air and moving slowly along the route as the wizard walked and directed her.  Because he is using magic, not psionics, he can also levitate himself (fly), which Lauren does psionically, not magically.

This might be the best combat scene in the book—although there is Lauren’s still ahead, and the final battle, but here Slade fights and defeats fourteen opponents, and the flying feathers and flashing blade come alive in the action.  I tried to envision a combat that would be compelling on the screen; then I tried to convey it sufficiently that my readers could see it.  Of course, screen combat is often compelling by the speed, the number of movements which occur in short order.  That was difficult to portray here without wasting a lot of bodies quickly–which is what I did.

I then started thinking about how they could change the nature of the fight; the ring was an idea aimed at that, and then the fake sound behind him.  Having him recognize it as a fake and then fake them into believing he was fooled seemed a fun way to do it.

The editor thought the killing of the wizard unnecessarily violent.  I thought I was in the climactic sections, and it needed to be vivid and thrilling while still just this side of credible.

I learned from reading Lord of the Rings and Dune that one way to keep tension is to maintain multiple stages.  I do that constantly throughout the book, but particularly here when Bob wonders whether Lauren had died.  I did not at that moment know the answer to that question, but knew I was going to have to write her fight next.

I liked the Sleeping Beauty reference; I thought it kept Slade humorous even in the midst of the serious battles.

Originally after the phrase “a snake that could swallow all snakes” I had included “it could swallow a cow”, but the editor quite rightly said that should go; that was less impressive than that it could swallow all snakes, and it was cut.

The missile brush trick is something I would use in the third book as a spell one of Slade’s companions knows.  I’m not certain I even remembered then that I had used it here, and there is no direct connection between the two.

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Chapter 123, Hastings 42

When Lauren leapt from the cliff, I thought that might be the end of her; but I needed to write the story to figure out what would happen next.  My first instinct was that I would no longer have her stories to break up the others.  I had at that moment no intention of attempting to recreate the battle with the beast, but only to bring it to whatever conclusion I chose off camera and then let the reader know where she was.  But there were several problems with that.  One was that I still needed Lauren’s stories to break up Slade’s thread.  One was that it was cheating the reader to set such a major battle aside and not resolve it.  In the end, the idea of multiple staging seemed to demand that this battle be fought, and that Lauren’s story come back in here, so I wrote it.

I knew it was crazy for Lauren to jump, and I needed the reader to know that she knew that.  In fact, it was in the rewrite that came up with the idea that she would grab its neck when it tried to snatch her in its jaws.  That made it much more believable.

I now needed to manage a roller coaster ride in a way that would seem terrifying yet believable; I also needed to find a way to bring down the bird, but not make it seem too easy.

The disintegrator rod was a weapon I wanted to take from her for a while anyway; she would get it back eventually, but she needed to learn not to rely on it.  She couldn’t hold on to it practically up here, and it couldn’t survive the fall without breaking, so that all came together fairly well.

I had her try several things which did not work; I had it try several things as well.  It would be dramatically very good for her to plunge toward the ground with it, but I knew she wouldn’t cause that to happen intentionally.  It had to be an accident.

I also realized that I needed some way to save her, because the more I thought about the denouement the more apparent it was that Lauren and Slade were going to have to discuss a couple of things to make them work.

The idea of breaking her fall by leaping up from the creature had been vetted with two of the smartest people I know, my good friend (now Reverend, possibly Doctor) David Oldham, and my brother Roy.  Dave didn’t like the original version in which she pushed off just before landing and rolled across the ground.  The idea, of course, is that both she and the reptile are falling at the same rate, which is not as fast as she would fall alone because it is using its good wing to slow the descent some, and if she pushes herself up from its back she will transfer at least some of her kinetic energy to it, accelerating its fall and decelerating her own.  I’d originally had her leap up and away and then come down on the dirt; David agreed that it might work if she also landed on the beast’s body, to use the body of the beast as a sort of cushion or air bag, crushing it and so absorbing some of her momentum in that impact before rolling down the slope.  The outcome was the more dramatic idea of slowing her fall with the leap and then landing back on the bird and tumbling off.  But I did not want the reader to know at this point whether that worked.  I left the chapter hanging as to that.

I think if this were done as film/video, the entire section of these few chapters would bounce between Joe fighting the bird honor guard, Lauren fighting the flying reptile, and Bob rescuing Speckles.  I’m not sure how to integrate it, but then, I’ve never done video.

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Chapter 118, Slade 42

Kondor is now gone.  The last chapter is his, because it is the beginning of the next book, but his chapter that would have fallen here has been skipped because his part in this book has ended.

This battle went through a couple of rewrites. The version that went to the editor was too short, but it took a lot of thought and effort to lengthen it and keep it interesting.  The entire section of the snake circling Slade and closing for the crush was added; yet it was a good add, and brought back Slade’s first “magic”, the reference to Thor.

The talking was always part of it.  Part of it was plot exposition, part was Slade’s style, his way of “not being afraid”.

Slade confronts a “primitive” religion, the sort of “original” religion that atheists think are the origin of modern beliefs.  He sees the flaws in it.  He starts out with a rather typical twentieth century derision of primitive religious beliefs and practices; but even as he started to deride the idea that the snake was a god, Kondor’s attitude toward his own beliefs came to mind, and he recognized that there could very well be a spirit of the mountains of whom the snake was a servant.

The battle has a feeling of “flourish, then consider”, which worked well and contrasted with a lot of the fights elsewhere, such as Lauren’s battle with the flying beast, which were continuous action until they ended.  Slade often had these pauses in battle; they seem in retrospect to characterize his style to some degree.

This is the climactic victory of the whole book, and for Slade it is much more than that he just saved the girl and won the battle.  I didn’t realize it for quite a while, but I knew that Bob’s story had ended here.  Some years later I was reading something on Aristotle’s Poetics and realized that this book really ultimately was Bob’s story.  He was an ordinary auto mechanic who fancied himself a warrior of Odin, and now he is a warrior of Odin, having defeated a giant, albeit a minor one.  His victory yell is the call of that success; the rest is denouement.

In the original I had included the phrase “beaten the big boss of the whole game”, which I thought fit well with Slade’s character; but the editor thought it a mistake to make it seem like a video game battle, and I conceded and cut it.  But he agreed that the yell should stay, and I kept the “it wasn’t game over” line.

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Chapter 125, Hastings 43

Denouement.  It is here that we discover that Lauren survived her crazy stunt, and then spent some time finding her way out of the mountain valleys back to the nest, and pick up the idea that the parakeet people migrate.  My editor thought it was so patently obvious that Lauren was an idiot not to have realized it sooner; but I don’t know that anyone else had that impression.  I haven’t gotten any other responses suggesting that it was blatantly obvious to the readers.

I wanted to give the impression that Lauren was exhausted, so I stacked her first words to suggest a breath, “‘What about,’ she asked, ‘Joe?’”  I figured that would convey the feeling of breathlessness.  I probably did this many times.  I notice it here:  I break the sentence in an awkward point to insert the label.  I thought it created a pause, here specifically to give the impression of panting, as if she was breathing heavily as she spoke, although elsewhere it expressed uncertainty or thought or hesitation.

I was at this moment uncertain how I was going to get either Lauren or Slade out of this world; so I did not commit to whether they were going to follow the parakeet people.

Again, Lauren is like me.  I wear a sweat suit to bed.

The idea that warriors of Odin would brag about their victories had really just come to me when I was writing this section.  It fit, to a significant degree.  They were to be courageous, fearless in battle, and by bragging of their exploits they would encourage each other to greater feats so that they would have more about which to boast.  I have no idea whether it’s true; the only other Odinite I ever knew was also a game player character who (player and character) knew about as much as Slade about that religion.

The editor thought that Lauren’s words about God giving what we need when we need it were the right “moral of the story” as it were, a good place to wrap it up.  It was, in a sense, the end of this book; the Kondor chapter which follows was in many ways a way of saying, “To be continued.”  The moral for Slade at this point is that what matters is whether you will do what needs to be done when the time comes.

I should probably credit Corrie Ten Boom’s father with the lesson about God giving us what we need when we need it.  I’m sure I’ve heard others say it, but his example of holding onto his daughter’s train ticket until they board the train in the context of whether she would be brave enough to face martyrdom at the hands of the NAZIs is memorable.

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Chapter 126, Kondor 41

Almost as soon as I’d decided it was a novel and not a comic book series, I decided that Kondor would end on “the other Mary Piper“.  The world in the game book has both the space ship and the sailing ship versions, and often they are played in parallel.  I didn’t want to play them in parallel–I thought that would be dull and predictable here (although it is exciting in play, because the players keep wondering whether what happened to the other guy is going to happen to them).

Joe’s ending is really more like the beginning of the next book—but in a sense it has to be here, because we have to know what happened to him when he fought the sparrows.

The weakening of the flashlight beam was a nuance, kind of a “referee’s call” for a tech device not working as well in a low-tech universe.  It’s not something Joe would expect, because he hasn’t really worked with the idea of technology not working in some worlds, so when it doesn’t work he seeks more practical explanations.

The deja-vu expression, “We have been here again, we will be here before,” is something of a Multiverser gag for time travel worlds.  That’s not what this is—this is a parallel scenario, the same names and situations in a different kind of universe—but it fits pretty well.  I had written it for an entirely different scenario.  I had done in play a series of adventures which were built around C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, and included the fun of running them chronologically backwards, such that each adventure took place before the previous one.  This meant that from the first adventure the player characters were recognized by those around them as being heroes from an earlier time.  When they could no longer discount this as mistaken identity, Aslan explains it with those words:  “You have been here again, you will be here before.”  There it was rather obvious in meaning:  in their future they would return in Narnia’s past.  However, I thought the phrase was one of my better bits, and I was not certain whether the second novel would ever be done–and I knew I could not use the Narnia adventures in a published work–so I placed it here, in a position that would have something of a different meaning.

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I hope these “behind the writings” posts have been of interest, and perhaps some value, to those of you who have been reading the novel.  There is another–two more complete, actually, and another two started–but there are some complications which I will discuss in the next web log post, probably tomorrow..  Feedback is always welcome, of course.  Your Patreon support will make a difference.

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #66, on the subject of Character Quest.

This is about the creation of my book Verse Three, Chapter One:  The First Multiverser Novel, now being posted to the web site in serialized form.  This “behind the writings” look definitely contains spoilers, so you might want to read the referenced chapters before reading this look at them.  That link will take you to the table of contents for the book; links below (the section headings) will take you to the specific individual chapters, and there are (or will soon be) links on those pages to bring you back hopefully to the same point here.  There were also numerous similar previous mark Joseph “young” web log posts:

1. #18:  A Novel Comic Milestone (which provided this kind of insight into the first six chapters),
2. #20:  Becoming Novel (covering chapters seven through twelve),
3. #22:  Getting Into Characters (for chapters thirteen through eighteen),
4. #25:  Novel Changes (chapters 19 through 24),
5. #27:  A Novel Continuation (chapters 25 through 30),
6. #30:  Novel Directions (chapters 31 through 36),
7. #33:  Novel Struggles (chapters 37 through 42),
8. #35:  Quiet on the Novel Front (chapters 43 through 48),
9. #37:  Character Diversity (chapters 49 through 54),
10. #39:  Character Futures (chapters 55 through 60),
11. #43:  Novel Worlds (chapters 61 through 66),
12. #47:  Character Routines (chapters 67 through 72),
13. #50:  Stories Progress (chapters 73 through 78),
14. #53:  Character Battles (chapters 79 through 84),
15. #55:  Stories Winding Down (chapters 85 through 90),
16. #57:  Multiverse Variety (chapters 91 through 96),
17. #59:  Verser Lives and Deaths (chapters 97 through 102),
18. #61:  World Transitions (chapters 103 through 108), and
19. #64:  Versers Gather (chapters 109 through 114).

This picks up from there.  In these chapters the three main characters begin a joint rescue mission.

There is some essential background to the book as a whole in that first post, which I will not repeat here.

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Chapter 115, Kondor 38

I think the hints of the first signs of autumn were drawn from my writing journal—the notebooks in which during and for some time after college I attempted to practice writing in scraps, descriptions, character sketches, plot ideas.  At one point I found it worthwhile to attempt to describe seasonal appearances which might be useful for future background.

The hibernation suggestion is a diversion, to help the reader miss the other possibility.

Joe’s attitude toward Bob has a lot of amusement in it; he thinks of Bob as something of a clown, and doesn’t take his “warrior of Odin” notion seriously.

It seemed like time to trigger the problem, even though I was not certain how it was going to work.  This introduces the big event for which I brought them together.  The choice to make it Speckles who was kidnapped was made late in the process, but I long knew that one of the parakeet people would be taken, and it made sense for Lauren to be emotionally invested in the one taken.  It gave extra impetus to the quest.

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Chapter 116, Hastings 40

As mentioned, “Lauren was not ready” picked up from the end of her previous chapter, where she expected to be ready.  It is perhaps a comment on our inability to be ready for the unexpected.  The juxtaposition between the end of Hastings 39, “Lauren was ready”, and the opening here, “Lauren was not ready”, was intentional.

Joe’s rationality comes through in calmly approaching the situation—but Joe has no emotional investment here.

The distintegrator rod is Lauren’s most potent weapon, and I needed to take it from her so that she would not begin to rely on it.  Thus I knew that she would lose the disintegrator, which is why she took it.

The decision not to wear the robes was obvious:  they’re a psychological weapon that would be useless against the sparrows, who don’t understand clothing at all.

As I mentioned, I gave Lauren the rifle so that she could give Joe the bullets.

There is also the aspect here that Joe might be an atheist but he has integrity, and Lauren can recognize and respect that even though he is not a Christian.

Slade’s comment about “something more” did as much to bring forward his idea of this as training for Ragnorak as it did Lauren’s idea that they were there for a reason.  Kondor’s “religion thing” was a recognition on my part that this fit with his ideas.  Joe blames war on religion.  That of course is a very narrow view and not really defensible—in some places one could as easily blame religion on war.  But it is the way he sees it.

I had intended for Joe’s Sherwood Forest tracking to come into play here; but it naturally flowed from that and from their personalities that he would be the leader on this expedition.

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Chapter 117, Slade 39

Most of this was to bring to the fore Kondor’s tracking ability.  I still hadn’t worked out how this was coming together.  I knew that Slade’s alliance with the wind was still supposed to play a part, and had some image of that in my mind.  I knew that I wanted Lauren to sacrifice herself to let the others continue, and had envisioned some sort of leap into a chasm or something.  But I needed to break the tracking passage, so I created the cave entrance.  At that moment, I didn’t know where the cave went or how the other things fit.

Perhaps it’s a learn by doing thing.  I remember George Lucas commenting that it was very difficult to get any excitement out of spaceships fighting each other in space, because there was no real background; space ships fighting inside the space station, or speeder cycles rushing through the forest, could be made much more thrilling by the background zipping past.  In something of the same way, perhaps, I realized that having Kondor track their quarry for hours would be dull, unless something interrupted it.  At this moment, I had no idea what was in the cave; I thought in terms of a long path to somewhere, but it was very vague.  But I needed to get away from Kondor following the trail long enough to break the monotony.

In a lot of this I used an observer narrative technique.  Rather than attempt to follow Joe’s ability to follow the trail and have to get too many details into it, I let Bob observe that Joe did it extremely well.  I did the same with other moments in this part of the story, avoiding becoming too directly involved with the characters performing many of the actions but instead focusing on how they are perceived by their companions.

It was not out of character for Kondor to bring everything; and I already knew that he was going to die on this, and go to the other Mary Piper, so I wanted his gear close to him.  I think by this point I knew Lauren was going to survive her leap and have a chat with Slade toward the end, although the details were still unclear, so having her travel light made sense (particularly as her wagon would have been too much for the journey).  I never thought much about what Slade left behind, although I imagine his magic books and treasure chest did not go with him here.

I had set myself another challenge which I realized now.  The events leading to the sacrifice had to be drawn out long enough that my trio could reach the hen in time.  My first thought was that I had to make the trail long enough and assume that the captors moved along it slowly, such that it would take them quite a few hours to get to the end but the faster moving trackers could close the gap in that time.

The editor was confused by the shift in name usage; it is consistent with the person whose story is being told.  Lauren, who is almost always called Lauren in her own stories, calls her companions Joe and Bob.  Slade is always Slade to himself, and he consistently refers to his companions as Lauren and Kondor.  Kondor is again always Kondor in his own stories; he once or twice refers to Lauren as Mrs. Hastings before relaxing into Lauren, but although aloud he comes to call him Bob, Slade is almost always Bob Slade in his narrative, reflecting a bit of distance, some lesser connection, there.  I think that I got this idea of using the full name from The Great Gatsby, in which my high school English teacher pointed out that one of the characters is consistently distanced from the crowd by using his full name.

I brought them to the cave mouth and was not certain what I would do next.  I recognized almost immediately that what I needed was an obstacle that would slow the captors some, possibly as a place where some ritual was performed in advance of reaching the sacrificial location, but I was not sure how I was doing it.  At first I thought this could be the place, but then I realized that I needed to accomplish a lot more, and this could only be a landmark along the path.  I had considered an underground passage—I had played in a Star Frontiers game in which a ritual trek included a trip through caverns—but decided to make it shorter than that.

The other aspect of this was that the interruption, and the several subsequent interruptions, made the journey seem longer.  This seemingly longer journey was necessary, because it had to appear at least reasonably credible that the threesome caught up with a group that had left the night before; they could perhaps move two or three times as fast, but they could not really move ten times as fast, so this had to seem like it spread over several hours.  No matter how much tracking Kondor did, it would never have that feel, unless it were broken up by something else.  The cave was just such a thing.

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Chapter 118, Kondor 39

The perspective of having the characters observe each other hits again here, as Joe watches Lauren recite the scripture that calls the light.  Light is one of those magicks that works in most worlds.  It also gives us Joe’s viewpoint, that her magic is really psionic and she doesn’t know it.  Kondor applies the same reasoning now that he applied to Sowan the Mage:  it can’t be magic, so it must be psychic.

It is sometimes the case that versers teach each other, and that’s encouraged in some situations; but I didn’t want these people to be too much the same, so they always think of it (and isn’t that just like life) at inopportune times.  Joe will not have the chance in this world to ask Lauren for a lesson, and by the time he does have the chance there will be other problems.

The image of the cave was the moment I decided there was a snake god at the end.  I was going to need something to fight in the big climax, and a giant snake seemed a good choice.  I had not, at this time, read Rowling at all; I subsequently discovered that she used a battle with a snake-like creature in one of her books.  This seemed different enough in retrospect, and I couldn’t see an effective way to change it, so it stayed.

The roof exit was a sudden inspiration; it would provide another value to Slade’s preparations and, to a lesser degree, Lauren’s acrobatics.  I think it was probably at this point that I decided one of the sparrow people was a wizard–more precisely, an evil cleric with clerical magic.  That was the explanation that would ultimately come out for how they carried Speckles along; it would also give me some suggestion that the procession was not a rapid flight with a prisoner, but a ritual march to the place of sacrifice–another piece that made catching up credible.

Lauren’s question about carrying Speckles up the wall is the first clue to their situation, and I decided that the way they were transporting her limited their speed.

Joe’s pride is challenged by the fact that the others made this climb easily.  It shouldn’t be, really—he is the most heavily encumbered here, as he brought all his gear and the others brought only what they thought they would clearly need.  But he’s also the only one who went through boot camp, and couldn’t let himself be outdone by the others.

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Chapter 119, Hastings 41

Lauren thinks about how her use of holy magic might impact Joe even as she uses it to solve their present problems.  Again, I’m letting the characters describe each other, rather than showing what they do from their own perspectives.

I climbed a hill as steep as this at Camp Lebanon in the summer as a boy.  That is the memory.  Much of this was again to make the journey seem longer; providing Lauren’s feelings would help reach that objective.

I managed to get Slade’s pagan god references back into the story without actually thinking of any, by having Lauren reference them.

The wind at the gap was intended as a magical protection left by the sparrow’s wizard-priest.  That’s why it rises when Joe attempts to cross, but not otherwise.

I had envisioned the bridge long before.  I had long debated from whose perspective this scene should be presented.  Doing it from Slade’s perspective would mean that I had to provide both sides of the supernatural dialogue, and that would make it more difficult to understand why Kondor was not convinced of the supernatural after hearing the voices.  I had resolved to do it from Kondor’s angle, so that I could focus more on his reaction.  In the end, it was more the fact that I was in Lauren’s perspective when the moment came that decided it; but this allowed me to present Kondor’s negative attitude and Slade’s side of the discussion without prejudice.  But first we had to deal with crossing–or rather, not crossing–the bridge, in a way that would not cost the life of a character.

Having Joe fall into exactly the same position as Big Bill in the earliest chapters would, I thought, seem credible.  In fact, I’d had trouble with the original version of the Big Bill story and had to entirely rewrite it (it was originally a chauvinistic challenge to Lauren’s right to work the steel, and my editor said it did not work at all), but I had to save the critical moment there because it had to be echoed here.  We know how Lauren will save him almost immediately; it is still tense as she does so.  When Lauren saved Big Bill, I did not realize I was going to do this again.  Yet I wanted this scene so I could use Bob’s connection to the Caliph of the West Wind, and it was a perfect situation to repeat the same rescue this time of Joe.

It is a Multiverser bias point that levitation—telekinetically lifting yourself—is more difficult than other forms of telekinesis—lifting other objects, such as other people.  Thus it makes sense that Lauren can lift Joe easily but cannot lift herself; it’s a different skill.

Lauren’s anthropomorphizing of the wind is in keeping with her supernatural view of the universe; it also sparks Slade to recognize how it fits with him.  Kondor, of course, won’t accept it.  Joe looks for the naturalist explanation for the wind, but is willing to accept the mental powers explanation for Lauren’s ability, as long as it’s not magic.

Having Lauren describe Bob’s confrontation with the wind enabled me to avoid what kind of voice the wind might have had while at the same time avoiding having Joe’s complete invalidation of it.  Having Joe talk whenever Bob stopped talking gave me his skepticism and got me out of committing to the voice of the wind.

I have no idea how Kondor knew the trail ahead would be rougher; of course the air would be thinner as they went higher, and that would be a problem.  But a break seemed to be in order at this moment.

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Chapter 120, Slade 40

The points about how far they had traveled and how difficult it was to negotiate the ledge were both intended to help explain how the trio managed to catch up with their quarry.  I brought back the matter of how they moved Speckles, because I wanted the reader to wonder as well; that way the revelation that there was a wizard would drop the other shoe, and they would get it.

At this moment it came to me that the world through which they were traveling was still beautiful; their attention had been drawn away from that by their focus on the problem.  The sudden opening of the view is a spot of light in the story.

The flying reptile idea had come to me considerably earlier, and I knew that Lauren was going to end her part of the quest here; I had not decided yet how she would survive it.

It was now time for Lauren to sacrifice herself.  I struggled with the pterodactyl, trying to present it in a way that would make it able to hold them at bay and threaten their lives without their weapons putting an end to it.  There had to be a reason why Lauren would jump for it; that reason could only be that it continued to threaten and delay them, and they could not effectively counter it.

I envision the beast using the cliff face for cover and maneuvering in and out of view rapidly as it attempts to snatch one of them for food.  I don’t expect they would make a terribly good meal, but it doesn’t know that.

Guns do jam in Multiverser, on botch rolls sometimes.  I needed Joe’s rifle to jam, because I needed him to have bullets for the confrontation ahead but I couldn’t have him stop trying to kill the beast at this point.

Re-reading this, it occurs to me that Lauren’s talent includes organizing effective teams that continue without her.  That matters eventually.

I have elsewhere told the tale of running Skinner’s Falls in a canoe during the flood.  The short version is that when we reached the four-foot swells at the head of the rapids, I froze and stared, and barely heard my father shouting for me to paddle.  It was something of this feeling that I imagined for Slade at this moment; Lauren jumped off a cliff aiming for a flying lizard.  Whether she made it or not, she was probably dead.  He was stunned.

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Interest in these “behind the writings” continues, so I’m still thinking they’re worth producing.  Feedback is always welcome, of course.  Your Patreon support is also needed to maintain this.

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #64, on the subject of Versers Gather.

This is about the creation of my book Verse Three, Chapter One:  The First Multiverser Novel, now being posted to the web site in serialized form.  This “behind the writings” look definitely contains spoilers, so you might want to read the referenced chapters before reading this look at them.  That link will take you to the table of contents for the book; links below (the section headings) will take you to the specific individual chapters, and there are (or will soon be) links on those pages to bring you back hopefully to the same point here.  There were also numerous similar previous mark Joseph “young” web log posts:

1. #18:  A Novel Comic Milestone (which provided this kind of insight into the first six chapters),
2. #20:  Becoming Novel (covering chapters seven through twelve),
3. #22:  Getting Into Characters (for chapters thirteen through eighteen),
4. #25:  Novel Changes (chapters 19 through 24),
5. #27:  A Novel Continuation (chapters 25 through 30),
6. #30:  Novel Directions (chapters 31 through 36),
7. #33:  Novel Struggles (chapters 37 through 42),
8. #35:  Quiet on the Novel Front (chapters 43 through 48),
9. #37:  Character Diversity (chapters 49 through 56),
10. #39:  Character Futures (chapters 57 through 60),
11. #43:  Novel Worlds (chapters 61 through 66),
12. #47:  Character Routines (chapters 67 through 72),
13. #50:  Stories Progress (chapters 73 through 78),
14. #53:  Character Battles (chapters 79 through 84),
15. #55:  Stories Winding Down (chapters 85 through 90),
16. #57:  Multiverse Variety (chapters 91 through 96),
17. #59:  Verser Lives and Deaths (chapters 97 through 102), and
18. #61:  World Transitions (chapters 103 through 108).

This picks up from there.  These chapters have all three main characters coming together.

There is some essential background to the book as a whole in that first post, which I will not repeat here.

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Chapter 109, Slade 36

With Joe and Lauren in the same world, their story had slowed significantly; I thus skipped Joe this time and came back to Bob to keep the story moving.

I really like the imagery of Slade’s action hero movement here.  He is holding his blaster in his right hand, but he has to cross-draw his sword from that side, so he tosses the blaster in the air and catches it with his left hand while simultaneously drawing the sword with his now free right hand and striking the enemy.  I don’t think it’s that tough a trick, really, as I often toss my keys in the air with one hand and catch them with the other while transferring whatever was in the other hand to the first hand, for any of several reasons (usually to have my keys in the other hand, since I need them to the right to start the car but keep them in my left pocket).  Holstering the blaster wrong-handed is more difficult, but not impossible if given a moment, and he gives himself the moment by terrorizing them.

The distinction between ranged and close combat was needed to explain how Slade could defeat thirty trained guards; the emotive violence would also be a factor.  The notion that blaster-wielding troops would be incommoded by close combat doesn’t seem that alien.

I also like the chaotic impression of not being able to tell which soldiers are trying to fight and which looking for an escape route.

Somehow my editor didn’t get that Ishara drew his blaster to shoot at the person shooting at Slade, and felt I had left unanswered the question of why Ishara suddenly shot Slade.  I don’t remember what I changed, but I hope that the version that went to print is clear that Ishara did not shoot Slade, one of the Federation guards did.

There was a typo in the printed version.  In the last paragraph a sentence begins “But abruptly, and he dropped it….”  I corrected it for the online version to “Abruptly he dropped it….”  I am not certain what the original was supposed to say.

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Chapter 110, Hastings 38

I realized as I said that Joe took to tending the sick parakeets that I had not previously mentioned them, but it was simple enough to suggest that sick birds stayed out of sight.

This is my first mention of “the journey”.  Lauren never worked out what that meant, but my editor did.  I don’t know whether he was smart or Lauren was stupid; I don’t know whether other readers realize what it means before the reveal.

This was one of the theological discussions that enabled me to put forward ideas about life and heaven.  I tried to keep them “fair”—neither Lauren nor Joe generally won, although when Bob was added that created more complications, because he brought a different viewpoint to it.

The argument this time was to show that they still disagreed even though they were becoming friends, to explore some of the ideas about time, give a bit more backstory to Scriff–and to give Slade a stage on which to enter.

The new voice is, of course, Bob Slade.  I did not want it to be too obvious that he was arriving to join them, although my editor seemed to think that once the two of them were together it was pretty obvious that the third was going to arrive at any moment.  I was so irked by that problem that in the next book I made a point of bringing two characters together early and then separating them before bringing all three together in a different world.

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Chapter 111, Slade 37

Having brought Slade onto the stage, I needed to fill in the gaps before the story escaped him.  Mostly, though, this was just an attempt to create the feeling of meeting them for the first time, and I wanted it to have the natural feel you get when you’re in a foreign country and meet someone from home.

I specifically had Bob ignore the fact that Joe is black.  It is Joe’s self-perception of his blackness that is his racism problem.  Neither Lauren nor Bob ever take note of it unless he mentions it.

This chapter let me fill in the gap from Bob’s departure from Destiny to his appearance here in the valley.  I placed him at a greater distance from the others to start, but in something of the same direction, and said he took two days to make the trip afoot.

There is something about their common experience that draws them together despite their differences.  There’s also the fact that for this first “gather” I put them in a world in which they are the only humans, so they naturally would have more in common with each other than with the birdmen of the world.

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Chapter 112, Kondor 37

This is a peculiar chapter, because it is told from Joe’s perspective but focuses on a conversation between Lauren and Bob which continues for quite a while before Joe is drawn into it.  It thus gives the naturalist’s observations of arguments between supernaturalists.

Bob is completely different from Joe.  Joe is a trained soldier who prefers to be involved in healing, Bob a trained repairman who views himself a fighter.  Joe is serious about everything he does, Bob is not serious even about the things that most matter to him.  They have very little to connect them.

Bob has fair reason to think that there should be a fight.  He was killed in NagaWorld by artillery while stripping parts off a war machine.  In the Djinni Quest, he had to face efreet, and learned of his own inadequacy which he spent decades remedying.  On Destiny, he was part of a rebel pirate crew, and he was one of the key combatants.  Whether there actually was a plan for him to be a fighter or whether he is simply reading the events to fit his expectations, the evidence supports his belief.  Thus his incredulity that there would not be any use for his fighting skills here—and his ultimate validation when there is.

I don’t know what’s available in terms of Norse scriptures either, but in recent years there seems to be a growing number of what might be called fad pagans.  They’ve learned about pagan religions from various sources, and knowing almost nothing about these have decided to declare themselves devotees of these faiths.  Connecting Slade’s beliefs to a series of fantasy novels fit well with who he was.  My knowledge of Norse religion is all second-hand from multiple sources, and so Lauren’s and Bob’s also are all second-hand—but from different sources.  Thus Lauren surprises him with the notion that the giants beat the gods in the end.

The C. S. Lewis quote is one I read decades ago; I could not tell you in which book he wrote it.  I have since heard that J. R. R. Tolkien opined that Lewis romanticized Norse religion.

Years after the book was published, and even well after I had finished the third novel (in which Slade begins learning a few things about his faith) a reader from Finland opined that he hoped in the future I would draw more from the Eddas, and give Bob’s religion more real substance.  I have not done so.  That’s partly because the point is that Bob does not know much about such things—as with magic, he is not really all that interested in the details, and his interest in all things intellectual is shallow at best.  It’s also because I wanted room to play with what Bob believed, and to create things that fit my story needs.  I make no claims that anything Bob believes is genuinely Norse religion, and I make that clear up front with his source:  a series of fantasy adventure novels.

The Viking Raiders series and their author James Thompson are completely fictional inventions of mine.  It is perhaps ironic that I have since met someone named James Thompson who is very into fantasy (mostly Star Wars and Harry Potter, I think), but I did not know him then.

The outbreak when Lauren finds it incredible that Bob got his religion from a set of fantasy adventure books draws Joe into the argument.  He expresses the populist view that the Bible is a collection of myths and legends, against Lauren’s educated view that it is collected history.

Joe’s argument is the typical circular argument that because we have no proof of anything magical or supernatural, we can discount any claims that there is such proof.  Of course, this puts him against both of the other disputants, each of whom is certain that he has encountered the supernatural personally.

Lauren quite rightly accepts that Bob’s magic is as real as hers, and that in the question of whether or not there is a supernatural, Pagans and Christians are allies against naturalists and atheists.  She might be leery of the source of Bob’s powers, but she’s much more concerned about the denial of any such powers than about the specifics of the source in this discussion.

Joe moves to the typical argument that there are scientific explanations we don’t yet know, and that he can accept mental/psionic powers which might be confused for magic.  Lauren is ready with an answer, specifically because she is familiar with both and knows them to be different.

This of course spilled over into the argument about religion, dragging Kondor into it.  The challenge at this point was to keep everyone credible and in character, and find a way out of the argument without anyone conceding anything.

Having Joe tell the story of the debate enabled me to end it unfinished.  Whatever Lauren and Bob said after this probably wasn’t even on subject anymore.  Joe has in essence lost the debate without surrendering his position:  he knows he can’t win, so he stops trying.

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Chapter 113, Hastings 39

I had some notion in mind that the parakeets spent the summers here, but was only hinting it.  My editor thought it incredibly obvious, and thought Lauren really should have realized it sooner, but I’m not convinced even now.  They were not interested in nest construction or maintenance at this point because they were leaving soon.

I knew the action was going to have to resume soon; this was a calm before the storm, and although I was still working out the details of the storm, the calm needed to draw to an end.  Thus Lauren returned to her practice.

The idea that Lauren has been lulled into relaxing and that Bob’s diligence shocks her back to practice seemed sensible.  After all, she’s been thinking that the reason she is here is to help create the basics of civilization, and now she has two companions—one always dressed in the garb of a soldier, the other constantly practicing his combat skills.  If her theory is correct, there must be a need for fighters in whatever is to come, and she needs to put herself back on track for that.

Bob’s practice includes changing the power cell in the weapon because he noticed previously that that was a time-consuming part of fighting, and it would be to his advantage to recognize when he was firing his last shot and to be able to change the power cell quickly.

There are more hints of what is to come in this chapter, but not of the part that matters to the story.  In a sense, the journey is a distraction:  it will come, and it will change the situation, but while the reader is expecting that something entirely different is coming that the reader is not expecting.

The statement at the end of this chapter that Lauren would soon be ready sets up her next chapter, where she realizes she is not.

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Chapter 114, Slade 38

From the first chapters, it had always been assumed that all three characters had started in NagaWorld; but because that world is used as the starting point for players and is supposed to be a mystery to be explored, I tried to keep the amount of detail about it in the book limited.  But at this moment, it seemed sensible to bring out that they were all in that world originally, because it supported the view that they were connected, and that would help the story move forward.

Bob spent years in the relatively quiet position of lord of a castle, but most recently had been in the rather action-packed adventures of a rebel space pirate.  The quiet of the parakeet meadow is a bit of a come-down from that.

In a later book, Lauren and Bob communicate briefly in parakeet, merely because they can.  It becomes a shared experience.  He never becomes particularly fluent in it, though.

It struck me that one aspect of the religion of Odin, as I understood it, was that it valued strong fighters and did not value much else.  Thus for Bob the docile and relatively weak parakeet people were not candidates for his religion, and he didn’t care what they chose to believe.  That also suggests that the gods of this particular faith don’t care about people except in relation to what they are able to do.  Lauren’s faith is entirely different from that.

Lauren broaches the notion that there can be a scientific explanation for how something happens that does not negate the theological purpose of why it happens.  Joe challenges that, thinking that either God did it or science did it, and if there is a materialist scientific explanation for how something happened, asking why is redundant.

I liked the idea of the odds of drawing the two of spades from a pinochle deck (which, of course, has no such card) well enough to use it again, this time to have Joe say it in response to the question of the probability that they would all land in the same world at the same time twice.  It reflected the growing impression Kondor had that random chance could not account for his experiences.  He would of course seek scientific explanations; but he was starting to move away from pure coincidence as an explanation for it all.

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Interest in these “behind the writings” continues, so I’m still thinking they’re worth producing.  Feedback is always welcome, of course.  Your Patreon support is also needed to maintain this.

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