This has been a stressful couple of months, for reasons that I’ve alluded to here and here. The real life stuff mentioned in the second post are still ongoing, so prayers are welcome. In the meantime, here’s what’s happened on the writing front in the meantime:

Three Ladies in Black: done at ~46000 words, except possibly for minor tweaks before formatting, publishing et al. This is the first in a planned series of Ruritanian cozy mysteries with an alt-history angle. Why Ruritanian cozy mysteries with an alt-history angle? Well, if you held a gun to my head, I probably could write something that didn’t sit across three different genres like a disgruntled hippopotamus, but where would be the fun in that? Anyway, the plan is to start a new pen name (possibly implied to be a pseudonym of the femme fatale narrator) and publish the first three together sometime in 2027-2028, then assess how well they do. 

Phantom Queen: a hair under 27000 words, up about 10,000 and change since my Spring 2026 post on this subject. This is the prequel to the Hunter Healer King books, featuring Maxim’s parents, uncles and to some extent aunts. It has a vague “winter holiday” angle and I will either try to get it out this November or sit on it until November 2027. 

Other Hunter Healer King Stuff: Periodic brainstorming on a loosely connected (looser than Ancestors of Jaiya) side-series. I would feature a Book 0 about Maxim’s ancestor Elegast, a Book 1 about Maxim’s cousin Victor (mostly prior to the main HHK series although the third act might be after/around the same time as Dragon’s Teeth), a book about Maxim’s other cousin Harold, fifteen or twenty years after Dragon’s Teeth, and maybe another HHK prequel about Maxim’s early adventures with Betram’s family. This is all very tentative, and none of it may happen. 

Space & Sensibility: up to ~6000 words, was around ~3000 at our last check-in. This is the immediate sequel to Pride & Planetoids.

Emma & Exoplanets: third and final book in The Stars By Degrees series, some brainstorming done. The Star Wars/Jane Austen casting in-joke angle gets rough here, because somehow “Jedi Frank Churchill” is much harder to get my head around than “Death Star Darcy. “

Red Knave’s Crown: Second Ruritanian cozy, about 4500 words in. Bit of a stalled moment right now. 

AI wrangling: so much AI wrangling. 

AI Images/Video: July 15, 2026 will be the end of my subscription to Midjourney. Needed to cut back on spending somewhere, and I now have a faint clue of what I am doing in ComfyUI. Laboriously generating footage for one last Pride & Planetoids video, no ETA on finished product. 

AI Secretary Stuff: Claude has setup python+LM Studio scripts for most of the stuff I used to do with n8n automations, plus some deterministic python scripts for formatting, like the one that finally made the Ancestors of Jaiya Series Collection a thing, seven years after the release of the individual volumes. I am working with Claude on vibe-coding a central interface for the python scripts + LM Studio stuff. Will definitely show you when it’s done. 

AI fanficcing: my latest Jane Austen crossover idea has a murder mystery angle and is first person Elizabeth (possibly alternating with first person Bingley). It is excruciatingly long and complicated and is mostly being done in CoWork with Opus 4.8, although Fable 5 was a better writer for the day or two I had access to it. (Yes, it is back, no, I haven’t gotten a chance to mess with it.) If there is interest about the workflow process, I will try to write it up. It involved an initial project brief (and other guidance documents) generated in a brainstorming session in Claude chat (Sonnet 4.6), individual scene briefs generated the same way, and then the whole thing dropped into a folder for Fable/Opus to look at when writing in CoWork. Also I test-drove the new Sonnet 5, with a gothic horror film inspired Christmas short fic. About on par with Opus 4.8 when it came to drafting, a little worse about actually revising to order, although it had at least one pretty good idea I wouldn’t have thought of without it, and offered more honest feedback than the earlier Sonnets.

If you would like me to post more about any of these topics, please let me know. Usually open to new ideas for blog posts.