The Three Mysterious Metals of Thule: the Secret Technology of Hunter Healer King

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What if Atlantis fell…but left behind liquid metal that could heal any wound, steel that defies gravity, and an energy source that could power engines for millennia?

Three thousand years ago, when Thule sank beneath the waves, the Stormcrows escaped with more than just their lives. They carried the secrets of three mysterious metals, created during the first Immortal War before mortals walked the earth. These metals, known as floatsteel, quicksteel, and burnsteel, are the backbone of this world’s technology.

Airships fly because of floatsteel. Dr. Maxim os Storm heals the wounded with quicksteel. And burnsteel powers steam engines that can run for centuries without fuel.

This is the lost technology of Thule, and it’s everywhere in the Hunter Healer King trilogy…once you know where to look.

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Notebooks

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Having gone on at great length about my AI secretaries, I guess I should show you the…more analogue side of my writing process: notebooks. (Disclaimer: I do not use fountain pens and cannot vouch for whether any of these are good for fountain pens.)

I don’t generally “journal” in the conventional sense of writing about my day or my feelings or whatever. (Although this year I’m trying to do gratitude journaling as a Lenten resolution.) I do write up todos to myself, when I am really concerned, or notes after doctor’s visit, or notes when comparison shopping for major purposes. But mostly, I take notes on stories I’m thinking about writing. I collect a lot of cool notebooks, and I also make my own, with varying degrees of success. Below the cut, a couple of examples, with excerpts from the writing process that produced Pride & Planetoids.

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AI as Writer’s Assistant: the Automation Edition  

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(Please note: this post was written and scheduled before the big blowup about the changes to Perplexity’s terms of service, and the automation work described here entirely predates the implementation of those TOS changes on 1/23/2026. I can no longer suggest Perplexity as a support tool for this kind of work, but am mentioning my use of it for transparency’s sake.)

After making  Claude.ai my virtual secretary, genre cheerleader, and typo spotter, the next logical step was automating the repetitive bits. The main reason to go to automations in the first place for certain forms of work is that the AI chatbots cannot hold a 50K manuscript (the length I mostly write to) in its memory. I conducted a few early experiments on Make.com. One of these automations analyzed public domain mysteries from the Golden Age to get a feel for the plot structure. Another was designed to give Amazon genre and SEO advice for my own books. Others helped me pinpoint quotes from the Hunter Healer King trilogy to share on social media, and scenes from the books which might lend themselves to book videos.  

By January 2026, I was burning through Make.com’s free account limits far too fast. Through the Nerdy Novelist on Youtube, I heard about n8n, an open-source automation tool which can be self-hosted on the user’s computer. The only cost for running the automations would be the API credits  spent on the ai models of my choice at OpenRouter.ai. 

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AI as Writer’s Assistant: the Chatbot Edition 

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A lot of the discourse surrounding AI in the writing sphere seems to focus on people whose ambition is to become a sort of digital James Patterson (or Edward Stratemeyer or Auguste Maquet, depending on their education level) with the LLMs as their ghost-writers. I’ve found the videos put out by this faction of AI-friendly writers somewhat helpful. But I am a writer who usually starts with a couple of lead characters and an endpoint and a starting point nailed down, maybe a few milestones in between dimly visible in the mist. The exhaustive outlining, character sheets, and editing recommended by this AI-friendly faction mostly looks, well, exhausting, even when the AI generates most of it, and the human just checks and polishes. In some cases, the outlines for this approach look more like a “zero draft” and involve a lot of human input, which is why I don’t think  it’s fair to level “you didn’t write that” complaints at this faction. 

My own process for the current WIPs goes something like this: dictate in mp3 format, have a local instance of whisper transcribe the result, take it to my free-tier Claude account to have the ai cleanup the result, add punctuation, and so forth. It helps to have prompting instructions that specifically ask the chatbot to maintain the writer’s voice. You can see the ones I use here. 

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Perplexity Just Nuked Alot of Goodwill

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They apparently very discreetly pushed a Terms of Service update back on 1/23/2026 stating that you couldn’t use its output for commercial purposes on the Free or Pro plans, and any stuff you uploaded to it “are belong to us.” the Nerdy Novelist has a good summary here. (If you don’t have time for a 12-minute video, the meat of the discussion starts around 1:30-1:40, and goes for maybe 3-4 minutes beyond that. A lot of the second half is him reflecting on his previously good experiences with this tool.)

This is a bummer for me because if Claude is my secretary and alpha reader, and sometimes my pet fanfic writer, Perplexity is (soon to be was) my research assistant and tech support. At least I don’t use AI for first draft fiction work, so there is that.

Greetings, insta-people and other visitors! I recent-ishly published the third book in a trilogy, so feel free to check that out as well.

Fanficcing With Claude.ai: Bollywood Edition 

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Digging around on my cloud accounts, I found a couple of fanfics that had survived the Great Purge mentioned in a previous post. Both of them were a bit longer and more carefully executed than the quick-hit  fanfic I discussed in that post, and both were for a heist movie from India which I saw about twelve or thirteen years ago, and was briefly obsessed with.  

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Necromancers and Their Wights: The Walking Dead in Hunter Healer King

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The dead don’t rest easy in the Old World.

Necromancers summon evil spirits from the underworld and bind them into corpses, creating shambling servants called wights. And if a wight bites you? You might join their ranks.

They are a type of algomancer: feeding on pain and fear like other dark sorcerers. They bring their own particular horror to the world of the Hunter Healer King trilogy.

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