Category: Dictation

State of the Author, 4Q2025

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It’s been roughly three months since the last State of the Author, so here’s where I’m at:

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Hunter Healer King 3 blurb

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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.

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State of the Dictator, 2025

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When I was talking to another writer on Discord, I realized that I tend to be somewhat vague and off-handed when I talk about my writing process, and assume people already know what I’m talking about, so I’m going to walk through the whole process here for transparency’s sake. This process includes the use of AI software for transcription and cleanup of dictated content, but it doesn’t start or end there, so if you are interested in that part, please, bear with me until I get there.

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Friday Fragments

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A conversation elsewhere reminded me that Whisper’s raw transcriptions of dictation can be a bit…alarming, so I am showing three versions of a text chunk below. This demonstrates my dictation workflow but in reverse order. For clarity, the first thing you will see is my final-ish draft, followed by what I was working from: Claude’s cleanup of a Whisper transcription, using the commands I’ve shown in the past. The last thing you’ll see is what Claude was working from: Whisper’s transcription of an audio file I dictated.

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For the People Who Complain that Claude AI is Too Much of a Sycophant

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Here’s Claude’s response to the latest round of dictation cleanup I brought him, yesterday evening:

I mean, give me a break, Claude, I recorded that while driving home after an uncomfortable medical appointment (nothing serious, just uncomfortable) in excruciatingly hot weather (also known by its street name, “summer”) with the car AC going full blast.

(Please note that in this particular chat, Claude is completely turned around about Chloe Fortebat’s last name. I don’t find it to be worth the trouble of correcting him in this particular instance, it’s just a bit of find/replace when I take the text back to my word processor and do additional editing.)

Friday Fragment: Talking to a Journalist

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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.

Friday Fragments: Who Will Be Emperor?

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This is a tricky sequence to write in the third Hunter Healer King book, because a similar conversation foreshadowing it occurs towards the end of the second Hunter Healer King book. The bit of dialogue below was cut when I reworked the conversation in the WIP and it went in a different direction:

“I agree that Father Feuerbach is a good man to have at your back in a crisis,” Maxim went on, “But the Imperial throne does not, in its current form, attract that kind of crisis.”

Friday Fragments: Chloe and the Wolf

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An example of me getting a bit rambly during the previous week’s dictation session. This got cut because Maxim’s cousin Victor interjected himself into the conversation earlier than I originally thought. And it’s not entirely in character for Maxim to try to shield Chloe to that extent.

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Frequently Seen Questions About Writing

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Occasionally, I offer moral support and solutions that worked for me in the comments section of other writing blogs, but I don’t do a lot of it here. What works for me might not work for you, and vice versa. That being said, I’m seeing certain things come up over and over again in certain places on the web, and I feel like I have to put my oar in. Since nobody asked me, I can’t call them “Frequently Asked Questions,” but I feel comfortable calling this “Frequently Seen Questions…” 

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