Friday Fragments

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From the space regency: this is a catchy line, but I decided it didn’t really work for the flow of the conversation or Elizabeth’s character:

“I’m not really very good at reels,” Elizabeth said. “Or at least I play them better than I dance them.”

From the Hunter Healer King book; something like this is in the current draft, but the information flows differently:

“There’s a whole cluster of pictures of them,” Carl said. He pointed to a group which mostly showed They came in various sizes, from low-slung and barely six inches tall to very good-sized examples. Many of them were black with tan masks and tan feet. The centerpiece was a portrait of Countess von Altenberg, whom I had met the night before. She wore a long white dress and at her feet held two standing dogs on a sort of split leash.

Summer Book Sale Is Here!

Posted on Posted in Cheap Books, Cool Books, Fantasy, Marketing, Mystery, Space Opera, Steampunk, Weird Science, World BuildingTagged , , Leave a comment

Hans G. Schantz has put together one of his massive book sales, and has graciously agreed to include my novel Wolf’s Trail in the sale. Hans’s book sales always cover a wide range of genres and possibilities, so take a look! Happy Summer Reading!

Friday Fragments

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Chloe and Maxim originally had a lengthy conversation with and about a messenger boy they met, whom Maxim hired to help show her around. When I dropped the idea of Chloe exploring Lower Haupstadt (the “Pest” analogue, to the extent that Haupstadt is loosely based on Budapest) on foot, I aged up the messenger so he was no longer someone whose safety the characters would particularly fret about, and this part became redundant:

“Was it safe for him to be out?” I asked Maxim. “With that beast out there?”

“I don’t think he’s in any danger from the attack dog, or whatever it was,” Maxim said. “It seems pretty clear that the dead man was targeted, that people close to the Armor of Arent and people who take a professional interest in it are at risk. I sent word to the Stormcrows to be careful. And if the police know the dead man’s line of work and understand in broad terms why he was killed, they should be on the alert in that neighborhood.”
“And what about ordinary crime?” I asked. “Thieves and pickpockets and so on.”
Maxim tilted his head to one side. “What makes you think the messenger boy wasn’t one of those?”

Happy Birthday to Peter and the Duke!

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Two genre stars with very different career paths share a birthday today, and youtube happens to have two of my favorite movies(1) of theirs (Cushing’s Revenge of Frankenstein and Wayne’s Big Jake) up for free right now, so click on the titles above if you want a bit of light entertainment on Memorial Day after the weekend ceremonies and the big grilling.

(1) “favorite” does not mean “objectively best”, your mileage can and will vary, some restrictions may apply.

Friday Fragment: Dealing With The Dog

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This is not what most people would think of as an action sequence, but it involved a surprising amount of choreography (or maybe what the theater people call “blocking”, I don’t know). Basically, the characters’ movements ended up being somewhat different in the final scene relative to what we see below:

Bertram jumped to his feet, turned and snatched his chair, holding it out between him and the dog as if he were a lion-tamer. His secretary, Julius Muller, stood up abruptly a moment later. The dog was barking furiously and jumping up and down in place.
I discreetly hitched up my skirt and started to pull my knife out of the sheath I wore on my thigh, but Maxim stopped me with a hand on my arm.
“Stay calm, everyone,” he said to the room at large.
I understood what he meant now that I was watching the dog more closely. With his bouncing movements and lashing tail, the mastiff didn’t seem angry, just excited. Maxim rose to his feet and moved toward the animal.

Friday Fragment: Talking to a Journalist

Posted on Posted in Dictation, Editing, Steampunk, WritingTagged , Leave a comment

So, Maxim got ambushed by intrepid reporter Carl Visser, who’s sort of a homage to a certain Darren McGavin character. This bit got cut out when I was doing final (meaning human) dictation cleanup, because the conversation went in another direction:

I eyed Carl in the same way Bertram had. “As you may have gathered from last night, I know the Prime Minister somewhat well. Any ideas I have about why the Weapons Committee would take an interest in the Beast Garden District, I would not be able to share with you.”

“But there is some kind of reason for their interest?” he asked.

“I have theories,” I said. “I don’t have anything I can prove. And if you attempt to quote me on any of this, I will deny it and sue you.”

Carl cracked a half-smile. “What, you don’t want your friend the Prime Minister to get upset?”

“I don’t think you want Bertram upset with you either,” I told him mildly. “I suggest you focus on finding out who in the Beast Garden District has a trained attack dog of the appropriate size, weight, and muzzle shape.”

Weird Wednesday: A Warning about Dictation Cleanup with Claude.ai

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I still stand by the commands I discovered elsewhere online and outlined here, but I wanted to add a word of caution: about six weeks ago, I had to make a longish trip by car, 2 and a half hours each way, for my day job. On the way out, I manage 45 minutes of dictation, coming to about 1500 raw words, and on the way back I managed about 30 minutes of dictation, coming to not quite a thousand raw words. (For comparison, my normal dictation sessions top out at around 20-25 minutes and 600ish raw words. )

I noticed something peculiar when I tried to feed Claude the text output from those longer dictation sessions: the LLM kept trying to shorten the output, especially on the longer segment of 1500 raw words. Telling it “you are summarizing too much” seemed to help with that, but it degraded the quality of the cleanup, mostly on basic grammar corrections (wrong prepositions, words in the wrong place, things like that). The LLM continued to put in quotes and commas and so forth correctly, and it was worth it for that, but I had to do more manual cleanup than usual, which probably didn’t matter much because there was a certain amount of expanding and reworking I needed to do anyway. (After deleting repetitive bits that Claude didn’t ignore, and tweaking and expanding here and there, the equivalent part of the Hunter Healer King 3 draft stands at around 3000 words).

Anyway, just a reminder that LLMs need to be used in an intelligent way with an awareness of their limitations.

Blurbing With Claude AI: Slaying a Tyrant

Posted on Posted in Cool Websites, Editing, Fantasy, Gladiator, LLMs, Marketing, Mel Dunay, Oldblood Series, Weird ScienceTagged , , , , , , Leave a comment

(Disclaimer: some of my past “blurbing with LLMs” posts have been very TL;DR because I included a lot of unnecessary fluff that the LLMs churned up and that I didn’t use. This prompt below helps cut down on the fat, so, although this is several paragraphs long, it is much shorter than those previous posts.)

First off, I prompted Claude in this manner: You are a book marketing expert trying to help a fantasy writer. Please help her improve her blurbs. The first novel in her fantasy series is Slaying a Tyrant by Mel Dunay, which may be part of your training data, if so, please feel free to refer to your training data. The problem is that the Empire mentioned in the blurb is mostly a background issue throughout the series [then I spelled out what role the Empire plays throughout the series, and fed Claude the existing blurb for Slaying a Tyrant].

Continue reading “Blurbing With Claude AI: Slaying a Tyrant” →