Category: Jane Austen

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

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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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Midjourney Monday: The Longbourn Ballroom

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Longbourn’s ballroom was the site of most of the asteroid’s streaming videos, and Mrs. Bennet had insisted on giving it a more regular shape than most of Longbourne’s interior spaces. The space was an immense rectangle with gleaming white marble floors and columns that reflected the purple and gold lights. The far wall was decorated with a pattern of hexagonal screens set in gold frames, which continued across the ceiling. The main video feeds played out on the screens on the far wall, the more minor ones being relegated to a merely decorative role on the ceiling.

The Golden Age of Adaptations

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(Note: This is adapted from a comment I made elsewhere.)

A good adaptation from book to movie or tv, honors what is worthwhile about the source material, and changes the things that need to be changed for coherence in the new medium or for the audience’s comprehension. It follows therefore that you can’t make a good adaptation of a work that you believe has no merit. For instance, I would be the wrong person to adapt Frankenstein by Mary Shelley,

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Andrew Davies Strikes Back (Maybe)

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I wrote 3500 words on Hunter Healer King 3 last week along with 500 words on the space regency. Yesterday and today I wrote the opening chapter (~2500 words) of a mystery that’s been in the planning stages for several years. Where was I going to find the mental energy to do a bit of Austen blogging for Wednesday? And there goes Andrew Davies shooting his mouth off in the presence of people with microphones, aaaaand we’re off to the races.

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First Images From S&S 2026

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(Regarding the Austenian series of posts, it’s going to take some time for me to get the Elliots, Musgroves and Hayters straight in my head and write them up. In the meantime, here’s a followup on the latest Sense and Sensibility adaptation).

These are about a week old or a little more, and I was hoping to find some source other than a reddit thread, but I didn’t, so here we are. I’d been a little anxious about costume designer Grace Snell, who didn’t seem to have much in the way of period work, but I like the clothes so far, which look solidly Regency (don’t ask me to match them to a particular year) and have some cool details in terms of embroidery and lace. Wealthy Mrs. Jennings (Fiona Shaw) wears flamboyant green and gold. Elinor (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Marianne (Esme Creed-Miles) wear shades of gray/black and purple/lavender, with Elinor being the more somberly dressed of the two. I’ve seen conflicting claims about whether these were in fact “half-mourning” colors as far back as the Regency, or whether they were more of a Victorian thing, but it’s a useful visual shorthand for “our dad has been dead between six and nine months,” and it looks good on them.

A couple pictures include Ceara Coveney (Elayne in Wheel of Time, one of the brighter points of Season Two and Three), wearing a very pretty light gray outfit. Possibly our Lucy Steele? One shot has a very tall, well-dressed man in the background with a slight receding chin. He might or might not be Herbert Nordrum as Colonel Brandon. If so, cause for rejoicing, dude does have enough neck for Regency collars! The group shot of Mrs. Jennings with the Dashwood sisters also has a couple of men in the background, although it’s not really clear who they are.

All in all, good job so far. My main beef with what I’ve seen of the Netflix Pride and Prejudice costumes is that they don’t really feel like a unified aesthetic, just “here’s a bunch of clothes from about the right period, with some effort to distinguish between characters who care about their looks and those who don’t. Hope you like them!” These S&S clothes do feel like there’s more of a coherent idea behind them, if that makes sense. Unlike the P&P first look, these seem to be informal behind-the-scenes shots that aren’t meant to give a sense of the production’s cinematography. As a result, I don’t know if the final film will be as gray-toned as these images suggest. On the one hand, S&S lends itself more to that kind of somberness than P&P. On the other hand, the last BBC S&S, which is admittedly 17 or 18 years old at this point, did something similar. We shall see.