Monster hunters, spaceships and comedy of manners by indie author Mel Dunay
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.”
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.
Continue reading “Friday Fragments: Chloe and the Wolf” →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…”
Continue reading “Frequently Seen Questions About Writing” →Note: this was cut from a longer discussion about Maxim and Chloe dealing with the possibility of being too closely related to marry. Parts of this backstory may reappear in some other part of Hunter Healer King 3 This is dictation transcribed by Whisper and cleaned up by Claude AI, without additional revision. You may spot some misspelled place names below and some examples of why I feel obliged to revise and rewrite after dictation cleanup.
Continue reading “Friday Fragments: Alternate Geneaology Conversation” →So, I first became aware of Whisper, an LLM designed for transcription, translation, and subtitles, a couple of years back when I was writing Wolf’s Trail. Whisper was then the “backend” of a free website where I could upload my audio files and get a text transcription back. Then the free website went sideways around the time I started work on the sequel, Undead Flight, so although I did a little dictation on that book (speech to text in Word, cleanup by Claude AI, additional reworking by me), I wasn’t able to dictate on the road very much. So I found out that I could run whisper on my own computer through python, downloaded pytorch, downloaded whisper, and then realized I had no idea how to work with python. I abandoned the idea for 7 or 8 months, then took an online course in python on a whim, fiddled around trying to install some other stuff whisper depended on that I didn’t have, and then, after visiting about half a dozen “whisper in python” tutorials and asking Claude AI for help on the “write to text file” part, I came up with the following. Lines following a # sign are comments rather than part of the code.
Continue reading “Weird Wednesday: The Sorceries of Python and AI combined” →
This article is primarily about the Claude.ai feature called “projects,” but Dibakar Ghosh’s 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” →The writing process for Hunter Healer King involved me taking a somewhat different approach to dictation, so I thought I’d pull together some thoughts I’d posted on a writing discord I belong to.
Continue reading “Weird Wednesday: State of the Dictator” →So, I’ve completed one more NaNoWriMo successfully. I still have a long way to go on the second space opera; I’m only about halfway through, and I already know some of the scenes I’ve already written will need some reworking. I am not entering my totals on the official NaNoWriMo website for the first time in a long time; I’ve not been happy with the direction the official site/organization have taken over the last few years, and I don’t expect that will change.
I’ve made some interesting discoveries, such as the fact that description, exposition and basic banter between established characters are the easiest things for me to dictate, while more “choreographed” elements (action scenes, high-drama conversations, etc) are easier to type. For dictation, my preference is to do seven minutes at a stretch, then clean up punctuation and misheard words for seven minutes or less, and then repeat the dictation/cleanup cycle.
If you’re curious, here’s what my wordcount totals by day looks like:
| Date | Words Per Day |
| 11/1/2020 | 3332 |
| 11/2/2020 | 2575 |
| 11/3/2020 | 1444 |
| 11/4/2020 | 0 |
| 11/5/2020 | 0 |
| 11/6/2020 | 1257 |
| 11/7/2020 | 3174 |
| 11/8/2020 | 1805 |
| 11/9/2020 | 1432 |
| 11/10/2020 | 1920 |
| 11/11/2020 | 1668 |
| 11/12/2020 | 1441 |
| 11/13/2020 | 952 |
| 11/14/2020 | 593 |
| 11/15/2020 | 612 |
| 11/16/2020 | 1845 |
| 11/17/2020 | 2026 |
| 11/18/2020 | 1927 |
| 11/19/2020 | 0 |
| 11/20/2020 | 2004 |
| 11/21/2020 | 1120 |
| 11/22/2020 | 2940 |
| 11/23/2020 | 1576 |
| 11/24/2020 | 2440 |
| 11/25/2020 | 2119 |
| 11/26/2020 | 1950 |
| 11/27/2020 | 1933 |
| 11/28/2020 | 1957 |
| 11/29/2020 | 3264 |
| 11/30/2020 | 843 |
Yesterday, I celebrated my country’s freedom from bad cooking, Received Pronunciation, and taxation without representation. Tomorrow, I will celebrate my temporary freedom from first drafting. You see, tonight I finished the first draft of the longest book I have ever written. The space opera I’ve been trying to write for years finally came together.
A few notes on the process:
Continue reading “Complete at 102926 words…For Now” →
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