In late 2023/early 2024, well before I started writing the space regency, I was trying to brainstorm it on Sudowrite using the free starting credits, and…didn’t get really anywhere with it. This was I think my first experience with AIs other than the image generator Midjourney, and that probably had more to do with my lack of success than anything in particular about Sudowrite. So, I got curious about Novelcrafter, partly because I heard good things about its abilities to store and organize world-building notes, and partly because it could integrate with the Claude AI family, which I use fairly heavily on the free plan; mostly for dictation cleanup and sometimes brainstorming. So, I opened an account on Novelcrafter and one on Openrouter.ai, because it was one of the options for bringing an AI into Novelcrafter, bought a few credits on Openrouter to pay for the AI usage, and imported the space regency (now at 16000 words) into the free trial of Novelcrafter…
Continue reading “So, Novelcrafter…”Friday Fragments: Lizzie is Embarrassed
After writing this, I decided it was more appropriate for Elizabeth to be angry at Darcy for mentioning her parents’ foulup (in not formally inviting his people to a ball already) at this particular point than for her to be angry at her parents’ for committing it, so I cut it.
Elizabeth felt her cheeks grow hot at her parents’ negligence in not sending messages to the Marcher before now. Her father at least had the excuse of his geophysical work, which could not be fully delegated to software programs and drones, but Longbourn’s social calendar was her mother’s responsibility and this was possibly the best chance the four and twenty families of Longbourn would ever have to meet potential spouses from elsewhere.
For the People Who Complain that Claude AI is Too Much of a Sycophant
Here’s Claude’s response to the latest round of dictation cleanup I brought him, yesterday evening:
I mean, give me a break, Claude, I recorded that while driving home after an uncomfortable medical appointment (nothing serious, just uncomfortable) in excruciatingly hot weather (also known by its street name, “summer”) with the car AC going full blast.
(Please note that in this particular chat, Claude is completely turned around about Chloe Fortebat’s last name. I don’t find it to be worth the trouble of correcting him in this particular instance, it’s just a bit of find/replace when I take the text back to my word processor and do additional editing.)
Austenian: the Bennets and Related Families; or, Longbourn, The Early Years
(Right now, I incline to the view that P&P must take place when billeting a company of soldiers or militia upon a town was still common practice, ie, before 1796, and the date of Mr. Collins’s initial visit to Longbourn – Monday, November 18 – implies that the story starts somewhere in autumn of 1793. When I talk about certain events happening 23-25 years before P&P, that means a timeframe around 1768-1770.)
Continue reading “Austenian: the Bennets and Related Families; or, Longbourn, The Early Years”Midjourney Monday: Now In Motion
Couple weeks late to the party, I know, but here’s a short Midjourney video based on the Wolf’s Trail cover.
Happy Independence Day
You know what, it’s June 29th as I write this, I had a nice feel-good patriotic song all queued up for the Fourth of July, but then I ran across some of those online people who absolutely cannot shut up about the historical failings of a certain movie which came out a quarter of a century ago to very mediocre box office returns and has largely been forgotten since then. Solely out of spite for these screed writers, I’m going to link to a clip from the film they hate, which is one I usually ignore. This, too, is the American Way.
Austenian: The Introduction
For a while, some family members and I were watching Dickensian, a murder mystery/soap opera which bills itself as a sort of joint prequel to Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist, Bleak House, and Great Expectations, with some characters from Our Mutual Friend, Old Curiosity Shop, and a couple of other novels putting in appearances. We persevered (with a bit of fast-forward) through the creepiness of the (soon to murdered) Jacob Marley,(1) a random nude scene with Compeyson,(2), a random bedroom scene with Compeyson and a woman claiming to be his wife, aaaaand, a random dog-killing, also committed by Compeyson. It was at this point that the second season of Andor started and we dropped Dickensian. There was an awkward moment where we were talking about Andor and calling Anton Lesser “Commander Fagin” because we could not for the life of us remember his Star Wars name, and didn’t care enough to look it up.
At any rate, one of the things which struck me strongly about Dickensian
Continue reading “Austenian: The Introduction”Sense and Sensibility 2026? Wut?
(Note: a previous version of this post assumed screenwriter Diana Reid was the TV director from Handmaid’s Tale. It appears screenwriter Diana Reid is instead the novelist of that name. This post has been revised accordingly.)
Daisy Edgar-Jones, whom some people were hyping as a potential Lizzie Bennet in the Netflix Pride and Prejudice before Emma Corrin got the role, has been cast as Elinor in a new S&S adaptation.
Continue reading “Sense and Sensibility 2026? Wut?”Minireviews of Sense and Sensibility Adaptations
Note on Margaret Dashwood: in the book, she’s Marianne’s teenaged (but not “out”) sidekick and echo, sort of a Kitty Bennet analogue. She blabs two different secrets of her sisters (“his name begins with an F!” and “he took a lock of her hair!”), accompanies Marianne on the outing where she twists her ankle and meets Willoughby, keeps Mrs. Dashwood company after Christmas while Elinor and Marianne are in London, and by the time of Marianne’s marriage has reached an age for dancing and courting and providing fodder for the romantic speculations of Sir John Middleton and Mrs. Jennings. She is a very underdeveloped character in the book; nothing like the obnoxiously cute wittle moppets of S&S 1995, Kandukondein Kandukondein, or S&S 2008. People who whine about her being left out of the older TV versions are really just pining for the version Emma Thompson wrote for S&S 1995, and showing their ignorance of the novel in the process.
Some Jane Austen novels were popular enough to see tv adaptations very early on, which were not preserved for posterity: Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Persuasion. Some were so (comparatively) uninteresting to the TV/movie-viewing public that people only started adapting them in the 1980s (Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey). And then you have Sense and Sensibility, which was studiously ignored by the adaptors(1) until 1971, at the dawn of proper TV archiving, and then received a positive torrent of adaptations and modernizations that have continued at the rate of one or two a decade down to the present. Here are my thoughts on the ones I’m aware of. If I don’t say it’s a miniseries, assume it’s movie length (two hours ish) or tv movie length.
Continue reading “Minireviews of Sense and Sensibility Adaptations”Gee, Thanks, You BBC Turkeys
Not content with trying to create a miniseries about Mary Bennet, the virtue-signaling Regency hipster beloved by virtue-signaling modern-day hipsters everywhere who think that Jane Austen was soooo mean to their alter ego, the makers have cast Richard E. Grant as Mr. Bennet. I have no particular beef with Mr. Grant, although to judge by the clips I’ve seen, his take on Sir Walter Elliot in Netflix Persuasion would have benefited from a bit more of the silly fop schtick he brought to the Scarlet Pimpernel. And yes, it’s a bit disheartening to think that in The Other Bennet Sister he may once again be called upon to play a humorously absurd and irresponsible Jane Austen dad character as a generic jerk.
More importantly from my point of view, he put in an appearance as a minor baddie in Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker, which is just a teensy bit inconvenient
Continue reading “Gee, Thanks, You BBC Turkeys”
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