This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #540, on the subject of First Novel Revisited.

I was recently asked about how Verse Three, Chapter One came to be, and I wrote more than I expected, so I decided to copy it here for your appreciation.

I wrote about this in mark Joseph “young” web log post #18:  A Novel Comic Milestone, but let me outline a bit of it here.

The publication of Multiverser:  The Game was the real beginning of my writing career.  As mentioned in #279:  My Journey to Being a Writer, I had previously written a company newsletter and some satire in a local newspaper, but that was always adjunct to something else.  With the game I had books in print with my name on the cover.  Everything else sprang from that, and in fact most of it was trying to support that.

The company that put it in print, Valdron Inc, got a new president one year who I think was probably an astute businessman who knew nothing about role playing games.  He suggested we focus on creating a comic, and it fell to me to write this.  I worked a bit with our art director, Jim Denaxas, on creating the characters–I remember specifically that he suggested the surnames Kondor and Slade, and that Robert Slade’s middle name should be Elvis–and I began writing, in panel form, the text of a comic series that was going follow three characters with regular cliffhangers, Kondor and Hastings in the first edition, continue Hastings and bring in Slade in the second, continue Slade and return Kondor in the third.  Kondor was based on someone I had never met, named Richard Lutz, who had contributed to the form of the game and some of our ideas before I met Ed (Jones, who was the primary creator of the game).  He was in the army, I think he was a medic, I know he was a tech-head–Ed often commented about how he had a VCR with no buttons but was operated by knowing which wires to cross.  I made him black because I thought the characters should be distinct from each other, and on that I’m probably indebted to Kevin Deas, spelling unsure, who was at the Presbyterian music camp at Camp Lebanon in New Jersey with me several years.  Lauren was based largely on me, as I mention below.  Slade was a blend of the two Jones players, Ed who developed the game and gave the concept of turning to Norse religion when he died and didn’t land in heaven or hell, and Chris who provided much of the rest including tall with long hair, although the blond was my addition.  I wrote six issues like this, three chapters for each character, when the art department said that a comic was way beyond anything the company could produce (they said we would need a dozen artists; we had two, both part-time).  So the comic got buried.

But I liked what we had–the characters, the storylines.  After a few weeks I asked if it would be alright for me to turn the three stories into a novel, and that was greenlighted by the the directors.  I converted the panel-arranged text into story text, giving me the first six chapters, and continued each story from there.

I hadn’t gotten too far before I realized that if this was a novel, eventually the three stories were going to have to come together.  So I began thinking in terms of where it was going.  That meant a type of foreshadowing, in the sense that I had to prepare all three characters for the roles they would play when they came together.  I certainly didn’t have all the details, but I was beginning to get there.

Kondor’s first world was a world I had written for Multiverser:  The First Book of Worlds, and the world he lands in at the end is from that same world–the design of the world was intended to show that you could use the same basic story elements (in this case, a crew aboard a cargo ship) in multiple backgrounds (in this case, an early gunpowder sailing ship and an interstellar spaceship).  His second world, Sherwood Forest, also came from that book.  I went into it thinking he would learn to use a bow, but instead he sharpened his medical skills and learned tracking.  The third world, Quest for the Vorgo, was something I wrote inspired by Army of Darkness which I thought particularly appropriate for someone who doesn’t believe in magic.  It was originally published as part of a poorly-constructed stripped demo version of the game, and later expanded into a two-part story in Multiverser:  The Second Book of Worlds (if memory serves), and I used the second part in the second novel, Old Verses New.  From there he went to the “gather world”.

I’ve mentioned elsewhere that Lauren Hastings is very like me, and I don’t know whether I made her like me because I needed to have some connection to a female character or whether I made her female so she would be different from me.  Her first world borrows heavily from one of the first worlds Ed Jones ran me in during playtest, which was in turn drawn from White Wolf’s Vampires game.  My experience there went a lot longer, but I realized I needed to truncate it.  She went from there to the gather world.

I wanted to have three very different worlds for my characters at the outset.  I had Kondor on a spaceship and Lauren in a modern horror adventure, so I put Slade in a medieval.  I learned very quickly that as much fun as they could be to play, dungeon crawls were particularly boring on paper, but I pressed on and tried to keep it interesting.  I introduced Shella and made a serious mistake.  I’d actually made the mistake previously with Lauren and corrected it before going to print, but at this point I never expected to see Shella again so I never described her appearance.  (One of my problems is I’m not a terribly visual oriented person, so I don’t always think about what things look like.)  What happened with Lauren was I had always pictured her as I described when she finally meets Kondor in the gather world, but when my wife was reading the draft that scene shocked her because to her Lauren was a blonde.  I fixed it by adding the mirror scene in the vampire world, so I could describe her sooner.  But Shella returns in For Better or Verse, and because I failed to describe her in the first book I realized I couldn’t do so later without breaking what the readers already thought.  In any case, when Slade needed a new world I decided on another space adventure.  This one was largely inspired by the British sci-fi show Blake’s 7, and some of the stories within it were drawn from that.  I’d actually run two test players in a Blake’s 7 scenario which used the show for the storyline, replacing Blake with the player character.  From there, he went to the gather world.

I had some sketchy ideas about the gather world, largely because I needed to prepare the characters for it.  The bird people were drawn from a world I’d created for that aforementioned demo, but everything else was drastically changed.  I knew fairly early that Slade was ultimately going to be the hero, although I wasn’t sure how he would get there.  But I brought them together, gave them time to get to know each other, and then sprang the problem.  I needed to make the journey to rescue the girl interesting, and I also needed to strip Lauren and Joe away from Slade so he could face the final challenge alone.

I knew intuitively that Slade had to be the hero, but hadn’t really considered why.  A few years after it was published I read what is extant of Aristotle’s Poetics, and recognized that this was a sort of hero’s journey, that Slade goes from being an ordinary auto mechanic who imagines himself something more, and becomes the hero who rescues the girl.  That’s also why he isn’t in the second novel–his story had ended–although I brought him back in the third because I came up with another story for him.  For Lauren, this was the first chapter of her vampire trilogy.  She returns to that world at different periods in its history, fighting vampires in several of her worlds but also putting together the resources she will need ultimately to defeat them in the end of the third, including four people who will be allies in the fight.  As to Kondor, he moves forward from world to world without a lot of connection, although he has a few aspects that connect.  He keeps improving his medical skills and learns more physics.  His hatred of piracy and of slavery come together eventually when he lands on a pirate ship crewed by escaped slaves who are fighting the slavers.  Periodically I’ve added new viewpoint characters for various reasons, and maybe I’ll write about that sometime.

That’s more than I was going to write.  I hope it answers the question.