Category: Editing

Friday Fragment: Dealing With The Dog

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This is not what most people would think of as an action sequence, but it involved a surprising amount of choreography (or maybe what the theater people call “blocking”, I don’t know). Basically, the characters’ movements ended up being somewhat different in the final scene relative to what we see below:

Bertram jumped to his feet, turned and snatched his chair, holding it out between him and the dog as if he were a lion-tamer. His secretary, Julius Muller, stood up abruptly a moment later. The dog was barking furiously and jumping up and down in place.
I discreetly hitched up my skirt and started to pull my knife out of the sheath I wore on my thigh, but Maxim stopped me with a hand on my arm.
“Stay calm, everyone,” he said to the room at large.
I understood what he meant now that I was watching the dog more closely. With his bouncing movements and lashing tail, the mastiff didn’t seem angry, just excited. Maxim rose to his feet and moved toward the animal.

Friday Fragment: Talking to a Journalist

Posted on Posted in Dictation, Editing, Steampunk, WritingTagged , Leave a comment

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.”

Blurbing With Claude AI: Slaying a Tyrant

Posted on Posted in Cool Websites, Editing, Fantasy, Gladiator, LLMs, Marketing, Mel Dunay, Oldblood Series, Weird ScienceTagged , , , , , , Leave a comment

(Disclaimer: some of my past “blurbing with LLMs” posts have been very TL;DR because I included a lot of unnecessary fluff that the LLMs churned up and that I didn’t use. This prompt below helps cut down on the fat, so, although this is several paragraphs long, it is much shorter than those previous posts.)

First off, I prompted Claude in this manner: You are a book marketing expert trying to help a fantasy writer. Please help her improve her blurbs. The first novel in her fantasy series is Slaying a Tyrant by Mel Dunay, which may be part of your training data, if so, please feel free to refer to your training data. The problem is that the Empire mentioned in the blurb is mostly a background issue throughout the series [then I spelled out what role the Empire plays throughout the series, and fed Claude the existing blurb for Slaying a Tyrant].

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Friday Fixes

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Last November, I thought I had gotten Undead Flight into pretty decent shape, and looking ahead to a logistically complicated Thanksgiving, thought, “Gee, I might as well push it out the door now.” From a certain point of view: this was the correct move. My grandmother fell terminally ill in early December, I traveled out there once to see her before she passed, and once again for the funeral. It was only around Christmas time that my mother bought a copy of Undead Flight and brought me the bad news: I hadn’t made all the changes she and my father had advised. So, a week or so back, I sat down with a copy of the book loaded on kindle and my trusty notebook, made notes of what needed to be fixed, and made the fixes last weekend. Then Amazon randomly threw a hissy fit about the print cover, so I had to adjust that. (There was a violent stomach bug in between Amazon fussing about my print cover and me feeling well enough to do something about it.) Anyway, by the time you read this on Friday, Undead Flight should be…not perfect, but but improved. I apologize for any inconvenience.

Friday Fragments: Chloe on Maxim’s Cousin Victor

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I cut this bit during the dictation cleanup process because it’s kind of rambly, and it’s not literally true that all Chloe knows about Maxim’s cousin is his parentage. Back in Wolf’s Trail, she also had to look up stuff in a book Victor wrote.

I’d heard references once or twice to Victor. Maxim and the other Storm Crows seemed to respect him, while the Continentals—the ordinary people of Noricum with no ancient knowledge or long lifespan—seemed to fear him. The only thing I knew for certain of him was that he was Jerome’s son, and Jerome I had no particular use for.

Frequently Seen Questions About Writing

Posted on Posted in Covers, Dictation, Editing, humor, LLMs, Mel Dunay, Midjourney, Mystery, One Weird Trick, Paranormal Romance, Publishing Plans, Space Opera, Weird Science, WritingTagged , , , , , Leave a comment

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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State of the Author, Start of 2025

Posted on Posted in bookbinding, Covers, Editing, Fantasy, Jaiya, Jane Austen, LLMs, Marketing, Marrying A Monster, Mel Dunay, Midjourney, Mystery, Myth, One Weird Trick, Publishing Plans, Python, Rings of Power, Space Opera, Steampunk, Uncategorized, Weird Science, World Building, WritingTagged , , , Leave a comment

My plans for the New Year are always kind of vague, because “Mann tracht un Gott lacht” (Man plans, and God laughs).

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How to Use Claude.ai for Cleaning Up Transcriptions

Posted on Posted in Cool Websites, Dictation, Editing, LLMs, Uncategorized, Weird Science, WritingTagged , , , , , , 5 Comments

This article is primarily about the Claude.ai feature called “projects,” but his 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.

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Rings of Power: Impressions of ep 208 and the Series to Date

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Okay, let’s get the big important news out of the way: the official renewal of the series for season 3 is expected any day now, the show runners have pretty strongly shot down the suggestion that the Dark Wizard of Rhun (Ciaran Hinds’s character) is Saruman, and the writer’s room for season 3 is acquiring writers from The Crown and Coronation Street. The first is welcome news to anyone with half a brain, because it makes no sense for Saruman – who in LOTR had been seen for a long time as a helpful but perhaps flawed ally – to be Obviously Evil when Gandalf first encounters him. The second is promising news because one of the show’s most crippling weaknesses in these first two seasons was the writers’ inability to mimic Britspeak, especially the dignified idiom Tolkien used for the Elves and Dunedain. I hope the new writers help with that.

Anyway, on with the usual disjointed thoughts and spoilers for all kinds of things:

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State of the Author, Late 2024

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The sequel to Wolf’s Trail is in the late stages of drafting – about 48K with maybe a couple thousand more words to go. Just moving very slowly because I’ve been sick with some respiratory thing for over a month and a half at this point. Starting to do better, which means the creative brain(1) is starting to come back online. With some luck, I should be done by the end of September, take some time off to work on other stuff in October, polish it in November, release by the end of December (around the same time the first book did last year).

(1) as opposed to the critical brain, which you’ve seen a lot of lately with the Jane Austen adaptation posts and the Rings of Power posts