Category: Jane Austen

Fanficcing with Claude: Sense and Sensibility and Placage, Scene 6

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For more information about this project, check out the earlier posts in the category “Sense and Sensibility and Placage.” Claude did very well on its first draft, but then I realized Edward needed to be present, so I asked for a redraft. I deleted a sentence and a half about Marianne that were not justified by her behavior in the story so far, and I deleted a sentence about Henry Dashwood’s judgment of people late in the scene. “He was a better man etc” is something I wrote to replace it.

The New Cottage

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Fanficcing with Claude: Sense and Sensibility and Placage, Scene 5

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For more information about this project, check out the earlier posts in the category “Sense and Sensibility and Placage.” Claude did very well on its first draft. For the redraft, I asked it to rework an incoherent description of what the Dashwoods’ mother was doing with her hands during the cart ride, and have Marianne show more emotion. My instinct is that free women of color in this time and place would not have survived long, if they showed the overwrought behavior that Marianne and her mother do in the Austen novel. But Marianne isn’t Marianne if she isn’t the most emo person in any given room. Then I realized this was the right time to introduce Edward, and that led to two more drafts. I manually removed an em-dash rather than ask for another draft.

Journey to Faubourg Marigny

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Fanficcing with Claude: Sense and Sensibility and Placage, Scene 4

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For the origins of this project, see previous posts in “Sense and Sensibility and Placage” category. Claude’s first draft was fairly satisfactory on this one, and draft two was me asking for em-dash removal and sentence level fixes in a few places where the AI’s lack of logic became obvious. The words “with her [Frances’s] advice” are mine. I didn’t like what Claude had there but couldn’t justify mucking around with a third draft for it.

Planning the Departure

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Fanficcing with Claude: Sense and Sensibility and Placage, Scene 3

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For more information about this project, please see past posts under the “Sense and Sensibility and Placage” category. Claude, amazingly, got through draft 1 with no em-dashes! I asked for a rephrase of one sentence that felt anachronistic to me, and to break down a loooong sentence that ended this scene in draft 1. Otherwise draft 2, which you see here, is much what draft 1 was. I did realize at the last minute that this needed to come before the first Marianne POV, even though the latter was written first, and adjusted the scheduling accordingly. I haven’t had much reason to quarrel with these early setup scenes, but we will see how Claude does once the romance arcs start.

Letter from Mrs. Jennings

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Fanficcing with Claude: Sense and Sensibility and Placage, Scene 2

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For more information on this fanfic project and why I outsourced the drafting of it to Claude, see the previous post in the “Sense and Sensibility and Placage” category. Claude completed this scene in five and a fraction drafts. It started out with a confused approach to the will, which draft two corrected after I set it on the right path. It also had John Dashwood offering a cottage (supposed to be the property of Mrs. Jennings) to his half-sisters. I got it to correct that and the em-dashes in draft three. The last fractional draft was to address a particular bit where John Dashwood talks around how much money he’s going to give his stepmother/half-sisters per annum. I sympathized with Claude’s desire not to specify an amount in currency, but I thought there was a better way of not committing ourselves, and asked for a redraft. Then I realized that Celeste Dashwood, the heroines’ mother really needed to be present and at least somewhat active for this scene. And then I caught a couple of other minor things I wanted to correct, so then came draft five. Eleonore’s last line in the scene is my rewording of Claude, and minor edits by me were also made for continuity with later scenes.

The Promise and Its Breaking

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Fanficcing with Claude: Sense and Sensibility and Placage, Scene 1

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Up til now, the only writing projects I have let Claude draft are fanfics that I wanted to read but don’t care enough to write myself. This one is a retelling of S&S set in New Orleans in 1813-1814 with the female leads as placées. In this case, I did so partly because I felt uncomfortable with trying to recreate the often downbeat tone of the source novel. Another reason I undertook this was to get a better feel for Claude’s project feature. I will probably do a process post either at the end of this experiment or maybe the midway point. Below the cut is Claude’s third draft of the first. Its first draft elided any discussion of the heroines’ ethnicity and social status, which is pretty important to this retelling. After I had it fix that, I told it to eliminate the em-dashes (which it tried to argue with me about) and rework a labored metaphor about Henry Dashwood’s illness. The result is below the cut.

The Death of Henry Dashwood

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Notebooks

Posted on Posted in ai, Art, bookbinding, Cool Books, Covers, Jane Austen, LLMs, Mel Dunay, Space Opera, Star Wars, Weird Science, WritingLeave a comment

Having gone on at great length about my AI secretaries, I guess I should show you the…more analogue side of my writing process: notebooks. (Disclaimer: I do not use fountain pens and cannot vouch for whether any of these are good for fountain pens.)

I don’t generally “journal” in the conventional sense of writing about my day or my feelings or whatever. (Although this year I’m trying to do gratitude journaling as a Lenten resolution.) I do write up todos to myself, when I am really concerned, or notes after doctor’s visit, or notes when comparison shopping for major purposes. But mostly, I take notes on stories I’m thinking about writing. I collect a lot of cool notebooks, and I also make my own, with varying degrees of success. Below the cut, a couple of examples, with excerpts from the writing process that produced Pride & Planetoids.

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Pride and Planetoids: First Draft Complete

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This is the official title of the space regency, first draft just completed at 58,000 words. I had the basic idea for this a long time ago. I skimmed down a list of lost Jane Austen tv adaptations. I spotted a name I knew very well, from a couple of non-Austen contexts, in the cast for the 1952 Pride and Prejudice. And I thought to myself: “What if Mr. Darcy went around exploding planets?” But I only started brainstorming the idea somewhere in the past three years or so. I started writing it sometime in late 2024, around the time I wrapped up Undead Flight. It continued as a background project in 2025, while I was writing Dragon’s Teeth. It picked up speed when I finished that book.

Pride and Planetoids has been a guinea pig for many of my experiments in using AI, including playing with the trial periods of Sudowrite and Novelcrafter. It will soon be a guinea pig for some automations I built to help with revisions. The actual prose and storyline are human creations, as with my other works.

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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