This was a collaboration with Claude.ai, but a bit different from my usual. I had a chat going covering several aspects of the final stretch of the book: dictation cleanup, brainstorming and revision thoughts (basically me feeding it my revisions and seeing if it caught anything obviously wrong like typos, awkward sentences or me losing track of the characters’ movements). The reference docs included a summary of our previous chat, covering the “darkest hour” stretch of the book. Claude’s cheerleading had been very helpful through both these stretches of story, which were difficult to write. I fed the blurbs from the past two books into this chat (which had gotten long enough in terms of total tokens to where Anthropic was throttling it every few messages for a couple of hours). Claude naturally focused way too much on the spoilery third act it knew best, so I had to summarize the earlier stages of the story for it. It then gave me a rough draft I could use, and we went through several rounds of me tweaking it, asking the AI for feedback from a book marketing POV, and me tweaking it some more. The final (for now) version is below the cut, with human text in bold. The taglines for each character are carryovers from earlier blurbs, and have been italicized.

The name’s Chloe Fortebat, and I am in trouble.

Maxim and I are engaged to be married, but there’s a problem: my mother may be too closely related to his late mother. We need answers about my mother’s past, but she abandoned me as a child, and we’re not sure where she is now. Meanwhile, a candidate for Emperor got attacked by a vicious beast, and Maxim’s friend the Prime Minister is trying to push him forward as a replacement candidate. I think Maxim would be a good Emperor, but a rival candidate is trying to smear him as a madman who sees monsters under the bed. Maxim’s not crazy: the monsters are real, even if they’re not what we expected…

My name is Dr. Maxim os Storm, and I hunt the beasts that haunt the night.

I want to marry Chloe Fortebat more than anything, but first we must find her mother, who vanished years ago under suspicious circumstances. As we investigate, the questions multiply. What kind of creature killed one man and injured another near the city’s Beast Garden? What is the meaning of a certain signet ring, marked with a face that is half woman, half dragon? Why does my friend the Prime Minister want to make me a target by thrusting the Imperial Crown onto my head? But Chloe’s courage never wavers, no matter what ancient horrors await us. We will find the answers we seek…and confront the darkness together.