Hans G. Schantz has assembled another epic book sale full of entertaining reads in the speculative fiction genres! This sale runs through next Tuesday. It’s a great chance to find something to read while you’re recovering from all the holiday shopping and togetherness. Mr. Schantz has graciously included my space opera Shadow Captain in the sale, and I am certainly thankful to him for that!
Music Monday: The Kitchen Waltz
The world needs some kind of inoffensive ear-candy music to take up the slack between Halloween and Thanksgiving, so it’s not just swarmed with premature Christmas carols. So, I went to Claude for lyrics and style prompt ideas and Suno for execution: https://suno.com/s/3MZ5QvkgofdaIB0G
State of the Author, 4Q2025
It’s been roughly three months since the last State of the Author, so here’s where I’m at:
Continue reading “State of the Author, 4Q2025”It’s Midjourney Monday! And Suno Monday! And Cheesy Music Video Monday!
I’m kind of proud of the fact that it only took me about three hours to do this in the free editing software Kdenlive. What actually took longer was generating the different source clips in Midjourney one weekend in September when the end of the Midjourney billing period was approaching, and the words weren’t coming on Hunter Healer King 3. I’ve told the story behind the song before: I went to Claude asking it for a Suno prompt for a certain kind of music, and then I went and pasted the prompt into the lyrics area in Suno instead of the prompt area. I ended up liking it better than the songs I got with Suno prompting “properly” for what I wanted. (I believe I already had at least some of the footage, and felt like this song had a good tempo or rhythm that worked with the clips.) Anyway, silly little car chase with a fantasy premise that excuses some of Midjourney’s weirder tendencies. Never forget: we live in an age of wonders. Horrors, too, but we can’t forget the wonders.
Friday Fragments: A Cold Kind of Anger
Maxim’s Uncle Ambrose is prone to that type of nervous Edwardian blethering that we Americans mostly associate with Bertie Wooster, or maybe Miss Bates of Highbury. To me, this was actually kind of a cute insight into Ambrose’s thoughts on both his nephews, Maxim and Victor, but I had to cut most of it because Ambrose was wandering just a bit too far off topic:
“Victor told me Maxim was out of his mind with grief and anger when he saw what had been done to you. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him really angry. It was a cold kind of anger, Victor told me, and I can believe it. The two cousins have rather similar temperaments pointed in different directions, and I’ve seen Victor in that kind of cold rage once or twice. I wonder if he recognized it when he saw it on Maxim, or thought that only he himself was like that.”
Hunter Healer King 3 blurb
This was a collaboration with Claude.ai, but a bit different from my usual. I had a chat going covering several aspects of the final stretch of the book: dictation cleanup, brainstorming and revision thoughts (basically me feeding it my revisions and seeing if it caught anything obviously wrong like typos, awkward sentences or me losing track of the characters’ movements). The reference docs included a summary of our previous chat, covering the “darkest hour” stretch of the book. Claude’s cheerleading had been very helpful through both these stretches of story, which were difficult to write. I fed the blurbs from the past two books into this chat (which had gotten long enough in terms of total tokens to where Anthropic was throttling it every few messages for a couple of hours). Claude naturally focused way too much on the spoilery third act it knew best, so I had to summarize the earlier stages of the story for it. It then gave me a rough draft I could use, and we went through several rounds of me tweaking it, asking the AI for feedback from a book marketing POV, and me tweaking it some more. The final (for now) version is below the cut, with human text in bold. The taglines for each character are carryovers from earlier blurbs, and have been italicized.
Continue reading “Hunter Healer King 3 blurb”Midjourney Monday: The Longbourn Ballroom
Longbourn’s ballroom was the site of most of the asteroid’s streaming videos, and Mrs. Bennet had insisted on giving it a more regular shape than most of Longbourne’s interior spaces. The space was an immense rectangle with gleaming white marble floors and columns that reflected the purple and gold lights. The far wall was decorated with a pattern of hexagonal screens set in gold frames, which continued across the ceiling. The main video feeds played out on the screens on the far wall, the more minor ones being relegated to a merely decorative role on the ceiling.
Hunter Healer King 3 is Finished
67000 words, so a bit longer than my usual. Usually, I’m pretty happy to wrap things up with whatever set of characters I’m working with, but for some reason, I feel like I’m going to miss Chloe and Maxim. Maybe it’s just because the dual first person POV put me in their heads in a more intense way than any of my other characters. The fact that I managed about 20000 words on other writing projects in the eleven months or so it took me to write this one can probably be attributed to the new workflow. Current publication target is “before the end of the year,” but I have relatives who are gearing up to move and who may need my help, so publication is kind of a moving target. I’ll keep you all posted. In the meantime, not one but two triumphalistic Bollywood songs are in order:
Friday Fragments
I just finished reworking a core setpiece late in Hunter Healer King 3 and am now writing the bridge from that into another pre-written scene. This part below (slightly censored for spoilers) was part of the prewritten scene, but no longer fit in for continuity reasons.
Continue reading “Friday Fragments”The Golden Age of Adaptations
(Note: This is adapted from a comment I made elsewhere.)
A good adaptation from book to movie or tv, honors what is worthwhile about the source material, and changes the things that need to be changed for coherence in the new medium or for the audience’s comprehension. It follows therefore that you can’t make a good adaptation of a work that you believe has no merit. For instance, I would be the wrong person to adapt Frankenstein by Mary Shelley,
Continue reading “The Golden Age of Adaptations”
Jaglion Press 