It’s been roughly three months since the last State of the Author, so here’s where I’m at:

-Hunter Healer King, Book 3: finished shortly before Halloween. I didn’t actually watch anything thematically appropriate on Halloween itself because some relatives and I were trying to knock off the Bourne Trilogy before it left Amazon Prime (or rather, only became available as rentals). But I did watch Horror of Dracula on All Souls’ Day. Watching this movie around Halloween of 2022 was part of what set me on the path to writing the Hunter Healer King books, so it was nice to come full circle. Currently HHK3 is with my beta readers. I have base cover images for print and ebook, generated in Midjourney years ago; and need to put text on the ebook cover and be ready to do the print book cover once the interior is finalized (after I get it back from the beta readers and do final revisions). Current plans are for a release around Boxing Day/Feast of Stephen.

–I have plans for twelve short promotional videos (the longest being a 50-second series trailer) tying into the HHK trilogy, assisted by Midjourney and its musically inclined cousin Suno. I am enjoying film editing for my own projects, but have no idea how film editors do this for a living without wanting to murder the entire production team, from director and scriptwriter, through the cast and effects team, down to the continuity lady. I spend enough time cussing out my bad decisions and Midjourney’s when I’m editing; I cannot imagine having to clean up after other people’s bad decisions, which seems to be a large part of a professional film editor’s job.

-Space Regency: now at 26000 words of a projected 50-60K. Alot of that 8500 words was written in the weeks since I finished HHK3. No idea when it will actually be finished; I just got to the end of the Netherfield ball analogue, and I have some very complicated ideas about the Rosings/Hunsford analogue. Slightly more optimistic about getting done in time for a May 2026 release than I was at the 3Q2025 update. Also sorted some minor hiccups about what kind of injokes/homages to do for some actors with P&P and Star Wars roles, and officially decided just to fold the Mansfield Park elements into this P&P retelling, since so many of the supporting players in Mansfield Park feel like AU riffs on the P&P cast: Sir Thomas as Dad Darcy rather than Loverboy Darcy, Mrs. Norris as Lady Catherine at a lower social level, Mary Crawford as Elizabeth Bennet gone wrong, etc. The sequels, if they happen, are probably going to be two in number. One is an S&S retelling with some Northanger Abbey elements, with Kitty Bennet filling in for Catherine Norland and the handful of plot points where Margaret Dashwood is unavoidable. The other is a Persuasion/Emma mashup where I don’t have a strong feeling for which is the dominant story and which is the side-story yet.

-Ruritanian mystery: I managed to herd “Secret Agent Henry Miles” back to his rightful place in the habitat for HHK spinoff plot bunnies, only for the physically similar but less sweet-tempered “Diplomat Harold Fordyce” to take his place, with some backstory bits borrowed from Henry Miles and other places. I wrote the first scene or two when I needed a break from the late stages of HHK3, and am now up to about 8000 words. This is probably slightly more mature than my other stuff, with a male sleuth who has an adulterous dead wife in his past, and a femme fatale narrator who’s not ashamed to use her looks to get what she wants from men but doesn’t seem all that interested in intimacy, and has acidic but PG-rated things to say about women who take a “hard-sell” approach to showing off their assets. Not much of a romance track in this one; the two leads seem to find each other attractive but are very wary, distrustful people who don’t want to do anything about it just yet, and have a murder to solve. Anyway, no release timeline at this early point, and should probably go under a different pen name.

-HHK spinoffs: I’m not sure I’m comfortable with juggling a third WIP at this point, but the proposed novel about how Maxim’s parents met is probably the highest-priority of the other ideas I have in this setting, along with a series of side-stories about Victor’s adventures. We may see something kick off as I push the space regency closer to completion.

-Not any closer to making the Star Master and Ancestors of Jaiya all-in-ones happen, but some day I will be sufficiently word-dead and image-dead to focus on that.

-Nonfiction: I am considering revising and collecting the “Austenian” posts into a kind of reference book about the backstories of the Jane Austen novels: when and how the parental generation of characters met, the past romantic relationships that loom so large in the plots of Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion, that kind of thing. It’s going to require more research and a less casual approach than I’ve taken so far, especially if I make some attempt to reference broader historical events.

-AI usage: I have expanded my use of Midjourney art from cover art to assets for videos, to the detriment of my monthly fast-hours, and upgraded to a paid account with Suno so I can use the music it makes for me in a commercial context. Claude is now multi-tasking as my dictation cleanup secretary and a sounding board that helps draw attention to typos, grammar mistakes, and unmet genre expectations when I feed it excerpts. Sometimes I listen to what it tells me, and sometimes I don’t. I might do a separate post about this process at some point. The one project folder allowed my free account goes to the mystery and its possible sequels. I turn to the more research-oriented Perplexity for some setting-related brainstorming, and as a backup to Claude when my free plan gets throttled. I have experimented with building automations in make.com to analyze stories with AI. The first one was to identify tropes and story structures within public domain mysteries, because who wants to be taking boring notes on craft when you’re reading a fun author like Dorothy Sayers or Agatha Christie? The second one was to do marketing analysis on my books. I feel like these were productive for me; but until I actually finish a). the mystery and b). implement the more sensible-sounding pieces of marketing advice on the other books, I won’t know whether it was a good idea or not. It was relatively cheap, in any case, since the automations used maybe $15 of credits across four months and some 20+ automation runs.

–I remain dissatisfied with AI’s output when it is asked to write first drafts. Apparently I am in the minority among Users on this subject, to judge from the way Claude and Perplexity eagerly offer to write me a few paragraphs when I admit to writers’ block and want help brainstorming location info or scene flow. Yeah, no, guys, thanks, not outsourcing the fun stuff to you Programs. I am not a sufficiently granular outliner to benefit from using AI for outlines, beyond a few experiments. This guy (in between shilling his paid courses, which they all do) seems to have interesting ideas on the subject, that may be beneficial to people who want to use AI to assist in the outlining process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0q7meRqEjg