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”Category: Fantasy
Friday Fragments: Chloe on Maxim’s Cousin Victor
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.
Friday Fragment: Bad News
This conversation originally took place with the two leads from the Hunter Healer King series talking in an elevator. In revisions, they’re actually having this convo on horseback, so the physical movements or “business” surrounding the conversation are different. For the record, Chloe and Maxim are not actually any kind of cousins, they just have faulty information about her family at this point.
Continue reading “Friday Fragment: Bad News”Happy Valentine’s Day…And A Book Sale!
Hans G. Schantz has graciously included Undead Flight in his quarterly book sale, covering over 200 books! Undead Flight, the second book in the Hunter Healer King series, is just 99 cents USD, like many of the books in the sale. The rest of the books in the sale are free. With so many books from so many different authors, I’m sure there’s something for everyone in there, so please be sure and check it out!
Midjourney Monday
Sometimes I use Midjourney to brainstorm what settings in my novels look like. And sometimes that works, and sometimes, as with this alleged depiction of a stable aboard a steampunk airship, it really doesn’t.
Friday Fragments: Alternate Geneaology Conversation
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”Friday Fragments: The Wounding of the Quantum Tree
When I created the Jaiya setting, I thought it best, for various reasons, to use my own religion as the inspiration for the cosmogony and beliefs of the settings, rather than messing around with other people’s religions. So, here is Afaro Viamafar, “The Wounding of the Tree of Choices”, sometimes also titled “The Wounding of the Quantum Tree.” Parts of it are quoted as chapter headings in the novel Seeking the Quantum Tree. Apparently there are other scriptural writings in the setting (you can see passing references in the text below to at least two others), but this is the only one I ever wrote out in full, and one of the first things I wrote in the setting.
Continue reading “Friday Fragments: The Wounding of the Quantum Tree”Weird Wednesday: The Sorceries of Python and AI combined
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”
Friday Fragments: Jerome os Storm on Trial
The bit below the cut is a scene I wrote about half of and then decided I didn’t need for the current work in progress. Figured I’d share it here:
Continue reading “Friday Fragments: Jerome os Storm on Trial”State of the Author, Start of 2025
My plans for the New Year are always kind of vague, because “Mann tracht un Gott lacht” (Man plans, and God laughs).
Continue reading “State of the Author, Start of 2025”
Jaglion Press 