Category: ai

Notebooks

Posted on Posted in ai, Art, bookbinding, Cool Books, Covers, Jane Austen, LLMs, Mel Dunay, Space Opera, Star Wars, Weird Science, WritingLeave a comment

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  

Posted on Posted in ai, LLMs, Uncategorized, Weird Science, Writing6 Comments

(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

Posted on Posted in ai, Weird Science, World Building, Writing3 Comments

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 finished a monster-hunting trilogy, so feel free to check that out as well.

Written by Mel Dunay, who publishes gaslamp fantasy, space opera, and Jane Austen IN SPACE at Jaglion Press. The AI posts here are working notes from someone actually using these tools to make things, rather than to write about them.

More on AI and writing: AI & Writing Tools  ·  Fanficcing with Claude  ·  The Craft of Writing

Pride & Planetoids

If you’d rather read a novel than another argument about a terms-of-service document: Pride & Planetoids is Elizabeth Bennet in the Kuiper Belt, with three years left on Albion’s lease and a warship commander she can’t get away from.

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Fanficcing With Claude.ai: Bollywood Edition 

Posted on Posted in ai, LLMs, Mystery, Weird Science3 Comments

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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Video Thursday: What’s in the Box? Edition

Posted on Posted in ai, Fantasy, history, Hunter Healer King, LLMs, Mel Dunay, Midjourney, Steampunk, videos, Weird Science, World Building, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

https://youtube.com/shorts/R4meKyRdvYU

Maxim offers Chloe a box, and asks her to keep the artifact inside safe. She holds up the necklace inside and wonders “what has he gotten me into now?” Their relationship isn’t built on grand gestures. It’s built on trust forged while fighting monsters side by side. A romantic moment from Undead Flight, Book 2 of the Hunter Healer King trilogy. Which, by the way, is on sale now as part of Hans G. Schantz’s Spring Book Sale!