Category: Fantasy

State of the Author, 3Q2025

Posted on Posted in ai, Art, Editing, Fantasy, Gladiator, Health, history, Jaiya, Jane Austen, LLMs, Mel Dunay, Midjourney, Mystery, Myth, Oldblood Series, Publishing Plans, Space Opera, Star Wars, Steampunk, Weird Science, World Building, WritingTagged , , , , Leave a comment

This really should have been “State of the Author, Mid-Year,” but I was dealing with health issues for most of June (nothing serious, just distracting) and then July was kind of busy at work, so here we are…

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Minireviews of Sense and Sensibility Adaptations

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Note on Margaret Dashwood: in the book, she’s Marianne’s teenaged (but not “out”) sidekick and echo, sort of a Kitty Bennet analogue. She blabs two different secrets of her sisters (“his name begins with an F!” and “he took a lock of her hair!”), accompanies Marianne on the outing where she twists her ankle and meets Willoughby, keeps Mrs. Dashwood company after Christmas while Elinor and Marianne are in London, and by the time of Marianne’s marriage has reached an age for dancing and courting and providing fodder for the romantic speculations of Sir John Middleton and Mrs. Jennings. She is a very underdeveloped character in the book; nothing like the obnoxiously cute wittle moppets of S&S 1995, Kandukondein Kandukondein, or S&S 2008. People who whine about her being left out of the older TV versions are really just pining for the version Emma Thompson wrote for S&S 1995, and showing their ignorance of the novel in the process.

Some Jane Austen novels were popular enough to see tv adaptations very early on, which were not preserved for posterity: Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Persuasion. Some were so (comparatively) uninteresting to the TV/movie-viewing public that people only started adapting them in the 1980s (Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey). And then you have Sense and Sensibility, which was studiously ignored by the adaptors(1) until 1971, at the dawn of proper TV archiving, and then received a positive torrent of adaptations and modernizations that have continued at the rate of one or two a decade down to the present. Here are my thoughts on the ones I’m aware of. If I don’t say it’s a miniseries, assume it’s movie length (two hours ish) or tv movie length.

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Summer Book Sale Is Here!

Posted on Posted in Cheap Books, Cool Books, Fantasy, Marketing, Mystery, Space Opera, Steampunk, Weird Science, World BuildingTagged , , Leave a comment

Hans G. Schantz has put together one of his massive book sales, and has graciously agreed to include my novel Wolf’s Trail in the sale. Hans’s book sales always cover a wide range of genres and possibilities, so take a look! Happy Summer Reading!

Friday Fragments

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Chloe and Maxim originally had a lengthy conversation with and about a messenger boy they met, whom Maxim hired to help show her around. When I dropped the idea of Chloe exploring Lower Haupstadt (the “Pest” analogue, to the extent that Haupstadt is loosely based on Budapest) on foot, I aged up the messenger so he was no longer someone whose safety the characters would particularly fret about, and this part became redundant:

“Was it safe for him to be out?” I asked Maxim. “With that beast out there?”

“I don’t think he’s in any danger from the attack dog, or whatever it was,” Maxim said. “It seems pretty clear that the dead man was targeted, that people close to the Armor of Arent and people who take a professional interest in it are at risk. I sent word to the Stormcrows to be careful. And if the police know the dead man’s line of work and understand in broad terms why he was killed, they should be on the alert in that neighborhood.”
“And what about ordinary crime?” I asked. “Thieves and pickpockets and so on.”
Maxim tilted his head to one side. “What makes you think the messenger boy wasn’t one of those?”

Happy Birthday to Peter and the Duke!

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Two genre stars with very different career paths share a birthday today, and youtube happens to have two of my favorite movies(1) of theirs (Cushing’s Revenge of Frankenstein and Wayne’s Big Jake) up for free right now, so click on the titles above if you want a bit of light entertainment on Memorial Day after the weekend ceremonies and the big grilling.

(1) “favorite” does not mean “objectively best”, your mileage can and will vary, some restrictions may apply.

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.

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 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.”