A new page has been added to M. J. Young Net.  Some will say this has nothing to do with Multiverser; some would disagree.  The argument in favor is that anything I publish that gets people reading what I wrote gets them interested in other things I wrote, and ultimately in Multiverser–and if nothing else, there is a great deal of material under my name which tells Christians, directly and indirectly, that role playing games are not the evil tools of Satan some of their preachers have told them.  But if you don’t think it’s relevant that I write stuff that has nothing to do with role playing games, then this wasn’t relevant.

It was not that time consuming, though, so at least I can’t be said to have been wasting time in which I could have been doing something else–unless answering e-mail from confused and distressed readers is a waste of time.  This new page–actually two pages–went to the Difficult Questions section of the site, where I occasionally post slightly edited letters I have received which raise problems in connection with Christian faith, and the also edited answers I have given.  Since both the letter I received and the answer I gave were already saved in my mailboxes, it was not that difficult to copy the text into a copy of a previous page in the section, clean it up, and add a few links.  I think I did it all while I was getting dressed and waiting for the coffee to brew.

The subject at hand is tithing; for those not in the know, tithing is a technical term which means giving exactly one tenth of your income to God, or usually more specifically to your church or pastor.  I’ve been challenged before on my position, in short that this is legalism and not a Christian approach to giving at all.  This letter, Difficult Questions:  Should We Tithe or Pay Our Debts?, gave me an opportunity to express my position with some clarity, in my answer, Tithing Is Not the Point.  Anyone interested in the subject is invited to read these new pages.

–M. J. Young

I have been pressured by several people who want to know when the blog will return.  I have wondered that myself.  Can’t you, they ask, write the blog without talking about the people who don’t want their lives made public?  No, I can’t, really, because the blog makes my life public, and they are part of my life.  There’s not much I can do about that.

Well, there is, really–I can stop talking about “my life”.  The point of the Blogless Lepolt, ultimately, is to let you, the Valdron/Multiverser fanbase, know what is happening with forthcoming product.  It is incidentally to let what might be called the Mark Joseph Young fanbase know about my other creative work being produced outside the Valdron/Multiverser stable.  In all this time, it has also been a place for talking about what has been in the way of producing such work, and thus the events and distractions of my personal life.  Part of that was because I was writing this every day, and I wasn’t getting anything done every day (or sometimes even every week), so I had to say something, and I felt I had to explain why there wasn’t any time to get something done every day.  One of the comments noted that this was something of value to him, to have some understanding of the conflicts that prevented me from writing so much.  That, though, is the part that gets personal–and thus the part that has to go.  Similarly, since I’m not going to be explaining why things have not been done, I will no longer be writing the blog daily–there will be posts when there is something to post; it won’t always be much, and it won’t always be very informative, but at least it won’t be about the progress I did not make.

It will also move that last blog post off its prominent position on the front page of this site, which will make me feel a bit better.

All of this suggests that I have something to tell–and indeed I do.  As I have been typing, I have realized that there is more than one thing to tell.

The impetus for resuming is that there is a new page in the Bible Studies section of M. J. Young Net, On Sabbath.  The brief story behind it is pretty much stated on the page as an introduction.  For those curious as to how someone who has always “regarded all days the same” justifies being part of a Seventh Day Baptist church which very clearly “regards one day above another”, there’s some insight into that there.

As I was typing, though, it occurred to me that I did not mention having made progress on the Multiverser Triple Play:  Horror.  I did what I am hoping will be the last text edits (and neither Jim nor John have commented on them, so I’m feeling fairly secure in that hope).  That puts the ball in the court of our art director.  He, however, takes an extended visit to family overseas every summer, so he might not get to the artwork as soon as he would like.

There was a third thing that came to mind while I was typing, and that is that Collision, the band, now has its own MySpace site.  There’s nothing there yet–not even a picture of the band, and no music–but it’s a start.  I had been thinking it was a necessary step, but that I did not have the time to do it and we weren’t really ready for it, when Baxter asked me about it.  He and Brittany have been overseeing it (I’ve not yet even had the chance to log in to the editing page–but I’m not particularly good at maintaining MySpace sites), and it’s progressing.  What do you think–should our lyrics be posted there somewhere, somehow?

Anyway, that’s the situation.  I will post again when I have something to tell.

–M. J. Young

I got a question in my e-mail that I answer so frequently that I was surprised the writer did not already know the answer: why do I use M. Joseph Young on the covers of my books when my name is Mark? Do I not like the name Mark? Why, too, he might have asked, do I use my initials on my e-mails and forum posts, rather than my name? Well, therein lies more than one tale, but hopefully the telling will resolve the matter for more than just the one person. I’ll mention that I dislike answering questions by e-mail for exactly this reason, that I wind up having to answer them again for someone else eventually; but perhaps this will reach enough people that next time someone else asks, someone else will answer.

It’s pretty obvious that the name Young is a common one. I won’t say that it is as common as Smith or Jones, but I’m not certain it isn’t. It’s a bit difficult figuring out which really are the most common surnames in America. I remember a trivia question some decades back asking what the most common surname was in the Manhattan telephone directory. Care to guess? As the original answer said, “Wrong. It’s Wong.” I don’t know how Young compares to Wong on that basis, but it’s a rather ordinary name.

My mother, knowing that this was an ordinary surname, tried to give me an unusual first name. She failed. Not being much of a soap opera fan she was unaware that there was a character named Mark in a popular daytime television show–popular enough that for the first year after I was born people asked if that was where she got the name. She had only known one person named Mark in her entire life, an elderly man who had spoken up for her when she was not well during the pregnancy and her boss was pushing her too hard. I was named for him; he probably never knew it. However, as with many parents looking for unusual names for their children, she failed. I believe of the maybe ninety children attending kindergarten at the same time and place as I, six or seven had the name Mark, although one spelled it with a C.

My siblings fared somewhat better. I have encountered few Roys or Annettes in my life, and not many more Neils. It is perhaps unfortunate for him that one of those few is a rather famous individual who shares his last name as well, but that’s how things happen sometimes.

Because of how common my names were individually, my mother told me that I should always use my middle initial. Thus I sign my checks Mark J. Young–which is what appears on most of my legal paperwork, from diplomas and degrees to checking accounts and tax forms to drivers licenses and credit cards. She was right about it being common, though. When I was at the radio station I picked up an ASCAP list of members, and there was a Mark J. Young listed in it already. It was rather depressing at the time.

Still, anyone who has visited my web site has probably noticed that the song lyrics are all listed as written by Mark J. Young, and it’s listed as Mark Young’s Dungeons & Dragons™ materials. In college the J was such a familiar part of my name that some people used to call me Mark J. Musician, although there were quite a few less flattering surnames sometimes attached to that.

I went on the radio in 1979 as Mark Young, and was known by a fair chunk of the Christian community in the Lower Delaware Valley by that name until 1984.

It was during this time that I started writing–sort of. I had started a radio station newsletter, for which I did most of the writing and all of the editing. The station had worked out a trade agreement by which a local newspaper printed our newsletter in exchange for free advertising on the air. I worked with one of the executives there, the associate editor who happened also to be the owner’s son, and at some point our conversation turned to the possibility of me writing something for the paper. I had two or three pieces of political satire published on the editorials page there. However, since I was known already in the area as one of the personalities on the air at the local radio station, we agreed that I would use a pen name, and I suggested M. Joseph Young, which he liked and I thought sounded pretty good, very authorial. Thus I began my writing career under that name in the early eighties.

In the early nineties I began working on Multiverser. I had already written Confessions of a Dungeons & Dragons™ Addict, which I was hoping to have published, and I kept the name M. Joseph Young as the name under which I published my first books. In fact, I think that the first article I ever published here at Gaming Outpost (which is also the first article I published on a web site that was not mine), Morality and Consequences: Overlooked Gaming Essentials, bore the name M. Joseph Young.

I then made a rather fateful decision. I had already posted a substantial amount of my Dungeons & Dragons™ material on my web site under the name Mark J. Young; however, I had used the name M. Joseph Young for all my Multiverser stuff and for this article. I was registering for a Gaming Outpost forum account so that I could interact with whatever comments my article garnered, and I did not know what name to use. If I used Mark Young or Mark J. Young, it would be dissociated from Multiverser and my Internet writing here; but if I used M. Joseph Young it would be dissociated from my Dungeons & Dragons™ pages. Besides, I had occasionally gotten letters in which the writer called me Joseph or even Joe, and I hope that no one of that name will be offended if I say quite honestly that it always bothered me. (This might be because I had a babysitter when I was very young who called me Mighty Joe Young, which I found intriguing until I learned that it was the name of a gorilla.) Yet Mark Joseph Young was entirely too long a name for an Internet forum. I briefly considered using the name of one of my most beloved game characters, but Tiras Arioch Kittim, Zemar of the House of Tsakataros was not shorter; besides, I was not seeking anonymity but identity–I was here so that people would know who I was, and would look for my books. Thus I decided to use M. J. Young, thinking that this would reduce the confusion.

It did not reduce the confusion. Rather than make the connection between Mark Young and M. Joseph Young, the initials name became a new name. People on the Internet, and thereby around the world, know me as M. J. In fact, on one forum some poor girl tried to introduce herself as MJ, and was almost rebuffed by regulars for whom that had become so completely identified with me that they thought she would have trouble establishing an identity under that name. Many who know me as M. J. do not know for what the initials stand, or that they are supposed to connect to my writings under different names. So it has been less successful than I’d hoped.

So now you know. If anyone asks, please explain it to them. People who know me in person generally call me Mark–except for those who have known me for so long, from their perspective, that they still feel compelled to call me Mister Young, and the many who call me Dad, no matter how tenuous their connection to our family.

I’ve done a bit more work on the music, in particular coming to grips with an arrangement of the song Brittany chose for her final Collision solo which rounds out our repertoire. I also did the usual Monday stuff, like taking my mother-in-law shopping, and managed to get a birthday present for the boy who celebrated last night. I’m up late, but I’m making progress.

–M. J. Young

Yesterday was Sunday. You knew that. At the time, I knew it. I was behind on everything, but pressing toward completion, and then I was, I thought, finished. The problem is, my Sunday workload includes file backup and system maintenance, and I’d retired to my room without doing either.

I remembered the file backup when I returned to my office to prepare for bed. Yes, home offices are strange. I get dressed in mine every day, so that’s where I leave my slippers and pajamas (actually a really cool Multiverser long sleeved T-shirt from our Cafe Press store, and a pair of sweat pants). So I started the file backup while I was getting changed, and then this afternoon when I got to the office I did a bit of drive cleanup in anticipation of the system maintenance, which I will have to do tonight. What irks me most isn’t that I forgot, but that I forgot last week, too.

I slept in today, and then rushed around a bit because I needed to do laundry before I could make the trip to take my mother-in-law shopping. I made dinner and carved through a substantial amount of e-mail at the same time, but then left orders for people to finish certain tasks and go to bed while I did the big errand. I was going to stop at the bank on the way home, but forgot that, too, so I’ll have to run out tomorrow.

There was one interesting piece in the e-mail: Someone in New York, I think a film school student, wants to do a documentary on Dungeons & Dragons. He wanted to find out whether I lived close enough for him to come film one of my game sessions. I apologized that I rarely have game sessions at home anymore, and even more rarely run Dungeons & Dragons (because of the demand for Multiverser, and my interest in a stack of other games I never get to run). However, I indicated that I was eager to help him, and suggested that he might be able to get a lot of what he needed at Ubercon–which apparently is going to be held in April or May this time around, but no date has been announced. We’ll see how that goes.

On that note, I think I’d better tend to the forums, or I’ll never bet to ged.

–M. J. Young

I did a fair bit of printing last night, covering the last maybe three hundred of the nearly nine hundred pages that comprise my Romans notes. When I do two-sided printing, the printer program ties up the screen for long periods, and I can’t really do anything else on the computer (a definite design flaw–it’s telling me to turn over pages that the computer thinks have finished printing but the printer hasn’t yet done). Thus while I babysat the printing process I also continued the editing process.

I also had to take someone to court tonight; it did not go well, and I’ve started working on paperwork for an appeal, but my wife has decided to bring in an attorney on this. That means my schedule tomorrow has gotten more complicated. However, I did more editing in the courtroom while waiting for the case to be called.

I posted the new character generation thread for our Multiverser forum game; I also called the mechanic, who told me that the truck would be ready late this afternoon, but that was too late for me to pick it up and be at court on schedule, so I’ll have to get it in the morning.

In other news, there is something of an unofficial announcement that there will be at least one more and possibly three more Terminator movies; here’s hoping they just go for the neat high-tech war stuff and stay out of time travel as much as possible, since (as I say in my Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines analysis) they’ve managed to resolve everything temporally, and anything more is likely to bring the entire story crashing down. Otherwise, I might have to add a rather scathing commentary to the Temporal Anomalies site.

I’ve more paperwork to do tonight; really, I’m trying to get my brain to relax a bit, so I’m doing this as filler. But I have to do this, too, so I’ll be bouncing back and forth for a while, I expect.

–M. J. Young

I got in late from my anniversary dinner to find a message from one of the ushers at our wedding. I’d like to say he remembered our anniversary, but the truth is he recently found my web pages (through the songs, I think–he was drummer in The Last Psalm back in the early seventies) and has called a couple times, and when he got someone else here he was told that we were out celebrating the wedding he attended thirty-one years ago. I returned his call, because he has emphasized that he is always up late, and indeed he was up and chatted with me for quite a while. Eventually he was asking about the books and the Multiverser game, and I have promised him that today I will set up the character generation thread for him, and he has promised that he will call me around ten tonight to walk him through it–he knows so little about role playing games that he thought Dungeons & Dragons™ was originally a card game. So I’ve a bit of extra work on my plate, but a new gamer on the way. I’m toying with running him in a world I’ve never even thought of running before, but it’s going to take me a bit of scrambling to put it together. Anyone know anything about the history of Bourbon Street Jazz?

Meanwhile, the car is back, brakes repaired; the truck will be another day, hopefully not more than that.

–M. J. Young

I’ve got a batch of things still on my plate for today, including a trip to take my mother-in-law to the store (she’s probably freaking that she hasn’t yet heard from me). I’ve done a bit of this and that, including re-approve my book About the Fruit for distribution, and again attempt to address problems in the distribution chain of our Multiverser books.

I think that’s most of it, and I’d better get back to making supper before I burn something.

–M. J. Young

Some months back, when Ubercon IX was announced, I started looking at the problems and seeking solutions. There was a transportation problem even then, as the Caravan was already off the road and not coming back, but with several months I at least hoped that something would be resolved in that time, and there was plenty of talk to that end. The other big problem was that the convention had moved south a good distance, from Secaucus to Edison. We do not make enough money at Ubercon to justify funding a hotel room and restaurants (and dealers have commented that it is a small convention with slim return on investment), but it has always been perhaps forty minutes south of my parent’s home, and I’ve stayed with them each time, covering room and board through a family visit. This move makes that drive ninety minutes, so I knew I was going to have to find another place to stay.

Where that was doesn’t matter; suffice it that someone said tentatively yes, if roommates agreed, and the roommates voiced agreement to me, so I thought that was settled. It was only a couch with a roof over my head, but that would be sufficient, considering how little “free” time I have at these events. Then, last night when I called to firm up details, it all fell through.

I have been assured that we will be able to manage this, that alternative housing is already being arranged. It was just quite shocking and not a little disruptive, given that today is devoted to finalizing the transportation arrangements (a long drive to the end of the world) and I got shorted on sleep last night in preparation. However, I have not yet given up my expectation of being there, even if I do not yet have my sermon for Sunday morning’s Christian Gamers Guild sponsored worship service which is not yet on the schedule.

In other news, over the past few days I have been poking a stick at a review of a book, Evil Star. I think I will post it today, if I have time. It’s not a very good review, perhaps, but then, I’m not certain it was worth doing, and as the inverted saying goes, anything not worth doing is not worth doing well.

In brighter news, as I was digging through all the papers and piles here yesterday evening, trying to find everything I needed for the convention (I did find it all, although I had already started printing replacements for some of it before I got that far), I came upon a stack of papers which looks very like the lost edits for The Third Book of Worlds. I’ve stuffed them in a place where I do not think I can lose them–between the glass and the screen of the window behind my desk–and hope to examine them upon my return next week.

–M. J. Young

The next book in my independently-published Christian book series is tentatively entitled Do You Trust Me?. I had started it in parallel with the current Quick Word radio show series on faith, but the two lines had diverged significantly–the episodic examination of examples of faith from Hebrews 11 is working extremely well for the radio series, but was starting to create a rather disjointed book text, which needed to cover some points in more detail and others not at all. I had reached the point at which I knew two conflicting facts: one, that there was no point in writing much more about examples of faith in the Old Testament, and two, that the book was not finished, but needed to say something more.

Over the past week, that something more started playing in my mind. It came to the fore in a discussion with my wife, and pushed itself a bit more solidly into shape in the days since. As of yesterday, the final chapter was drafted, a piece about the Big Picture, looking at creation not as a project derailed by man’s sin, but as a perfect plan unfolding perfectly, in which suffering is a needed tool toard the desired outcome, the perfection of eternal sons and daughters of God. Well, that’s the synopsis; whether that says too much or not enough I won’t guess.

What I did not do which I should perhaps have done is work on Multiverser projects, particularly the second edition of the rules. I am hoping that I can tackle this later tonight. I’ve been feeding draft sections to insiders via that private development forum previously mentioned, and I’ve just posted the last section of the last chapter I’d finished drafting, so I have to get the next chapter organized (it is partly written) so I can post pieces of it for comment. Not that I’m getting much in the way of comment, but we’ve started talking a bit about the artwork, which is a positive thing.

–M. J. Young

I just got off the phone with our printer. It seems that recently Multiverser has been showing up as “out of print” on book dealer web sites. At first I thought it was the standard industry nonsense–if your friendly local gaming store owner tells you that a game is “out of print”, he might mean that he does not know whether he can get it and does not want to extend himself to find out, when he really wants you to buy something he has on the shelves so he can move his inventory. Many companies have complained about this. We still have copies in stock that we can ship for the specified list price of $49.95. We’re not out of print.

However, when collectors started attempting to unload their copies at exorbitant prices, I started looking for the problem in the pipeline. Getting hold of our printer, I learned that at some point a bill was overlooked and when we failed to contact them to pay it, they stopped printing our books. Annoying, that is. The good news, though, is that it will cost a pittance–really, less money than I spend to take my family out to dinner–to resolve the matter, and some paperwork is being e-mailed to the mailing address I use for these matters, so by the end of the week the books should all once more become available through standard channels–that is, unless someone raises a ruckus about this, but if he does he’ll probably have his head handed to him without a valuable silver platter by our easily angered president who already does not like this particular individual and his antics. So I think I’m pretty safe.

That’s really all I’ve accomplished since yesterday. O.K., I feel silly saying that, but I feel silly either way. Once I had established the problem, it took maybe a ten minute phone call to resolve the situation, so it seems like I did almost nothing. On the other hand, it is a major matter to have resolved, and I am breathing easier because of it.

Besides, I was up late last night finishing everything, and it’s still relatively early this afternoon, so it’s surprising I accomplished anything at all in that time.

I am wanting to get into the pool today, just because it happens that I do not have to drive anywhere so I could get directly into my bathing suit and not mess with clothes. It’s a bit chilly, though, which annoys me because it is the first day in over a month that I’ve been able to free up the time to swim (and even that is stretching the concept “free”), and the first day in weeks that is not really good for swimming. Thus I’m trying to decide whether stubbornly to get in the pool or wisely pass up the opportunity.

The day has passed its hot point, though, so if I am to swim, now would be the time.

–M. J. Young