State of the Author, 4Q2024

Posted on Posted in Art, Cool Books, Fantasy, Gladiator, Jaiya, Jane Austen, LLMs, Mel Dunay, Myth, Oldblood Series, Paranormal Romance, Publishing Plans, Space Opera, Steampunk, Weird Science, World Building, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

-First off, I think my books are all in Kindle Unlimited now, free to anyone with a subscription to KU. If you see any sign that they are not in KU, please let me know in the comments.

–Undead Flight (Hunter Healer King Book 2) is now in the hands of my proofreaders. Barring complications, should be ready to publish by Christmas time. Ebook cover is done; blurb is done with AI help (stay tuned, my post on the blurbing process will be out tomorrow. Print cover is dependent on my final cleanup of the manuscript to determine page length.

-Also started Hunter Healer King Book 3 by writing a fairly dark and distressing scene from the last third of the book. This is kind of suboptimal, because stitching together scenes written out of order tends to add (wo)manhours to the first draft process, but I hadn’t figured out the opening scene at that point. I don’t know when it will be released but I know that I am aiming for Christmas of 2025.

-I have had a sci-fi Pride and Prejudice retelling in development for a long time; finally got the first scene down. No projected completion date at this time. My main inspiration for this concept was, weirdly enough, Star Wars: A New Hope. If you dig deep enough into the filmographies of the supporting cast, you will find one with a Pride and Prejudice connection in his earlier career. Regrettably, the catchy working title explicitly references Star Wars, so the official title will probably be something rather sedate of the “Pride and…” format.

-New ebook covers using AI art for Shadow Captain and Spider Star are done; still need to do new paperback covers for them, and ebook/hardcover for the 2 in 1 volume for the duology. Projected release date for the 2 in 1 is first/second quarter of 2025.

-Early stages of AI art covers for the Jaiya Series and Ancestors of Jaiya series. No text layout yet. A four in one of Ancestors might come out in third quarter of 2025; a seven in one of the full metaseries might be sometime in 2026 but a lot could go sideways between now and then.

Sequel to Wolf’s Trail Is Done!

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A hair over 56K words, so a bit longer than Wolf’s Trail itself. What’s next? Well, I’m going to take a break from this universe for a week or so, try to work on getting my older stuff into Kindle Unlimited, and other “administrative” writing related work, and then try to get back to work on the novel in maybe second week of November, – cleanup, breaking into chapters, submission to the people who early-read and edit for me. I hope to have it out by the end of the year, but no guarantees.

Let’s throw in a somewhat triumphant sounding Bollywood video while we’re at it:

How to Use Claude.ai for Cleaning Up Transcriptions

Posted on Posted in Cool Websites, Dictation, Editing, LLMs, Uncategorized, Weird Science, WritingTagged , , , , , , 5 Comments

This article is primarily about the Claude.ai feature called “projects,” but his example project is about using Claude to cleanup the nasty, incoherent speech-to-text output that Word and similar programs spit out. I’ve tested the commands involved in the free version of Claude, and they work reasonably well. I still went back and reworded and expanded a bunch of stuff after I used it, but it was nice having something that would reliably cut out the nonsense words and repetitions and add some kind of punctuation. Here are the commands; just copy and paste into Claude’s chat window, and upload a short document with your latest chunk of dictation. As always with AI, check the company’s privacy and training policies before feeding it anything of a personal or sensitive nature.

Continue reading “How to Use Claude.ai for Cleaning Up Transcriptions” →

Goodbye, Wide Books

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For most of my time self-publishing, I have tried to make my books available on a wide variety of platforms, sometimes after a period where a newly published book was exclusive to Kindle. However, Apple has decided that self-published authors must register as traders under the EU’s Digital Services Act, which places additional responsibilities on the authors, which may potentially include exposing their legal name and address to the public, and which in turn may enable cyberbullying of authors. Amazon has made no official statement, but the chatter among veteran writers on the Kindle Direct Publishing forums suggests that self-publishing writers might be more correctly viewed as “consignors” rather than traders. The other e-book platforms have also made no official statement.

As a precautionary measure, I have delisted all my books on non-Amazon platforms, and will soon delete my mailing list. As an unfortunate side effect, Slaying a Tyrant and Marrying a Monster will no longer be “permafree” at some point in the near future, but I hope to enroll my formerly wide-release books in Kindle Unlimited, which will at least reduce the expense of reading my books for KU subscribers. If you are interested in what Jaglion Press has to offer, including the upcoming sequel to Wolf’s Trail, please follow me on WordPress or on Amazon. Thank you!

Sign of the Times, Austen Edition…

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(Disclaimer: I do have a Mr. Collins plot bunny I might write sometime, in which he commits Obfuscating Stupidity and is actually a pretty smart guy underneath, but I don’t intend to invalidate the Bennets’ experiences of him, or demonize Charlotte in the process.)

Rather than give us what would be the first traditional P&P adaptation in 20 years, and the first BBC adaptation in 30 years, the Beeb opts to adapt some fan novel that tries to nice-ify the self-centered hipster known as Mary Bennet, and the clueless buffoon known as Mr. Collins, at the expense of more interesting characters like Charlotte Lucas. And of course, flawed but self-aware Mr. Bennet has horns and a tail. (Although in fairness, it sounds like the author is an equal opportunity hater when it comes to the Bennet parents, which is a reasonable take). And somehow this deserves to be ten episodes(1) long, nearly twice as long as any actual P&P miniseries ever made? And it’s from the modern Dr. Who(2) people?

No, thank you.

BBC Announces Pride and Prejudice Spinoff: The Other Bennet Sister

(1) of an unspecified length, but it seems like the BBC’s norm in recent years has been for episodes to run about an hour.

(2) Disclaimer: am not a Doctor Who fan in general, so I generally don’t see the involvement of behind-the-scenes people from that franchise in other stuff as being a good thing.