A conversation elsewhere reminded me that Whisper’s raw transcriptions of dictation can be a bit…alarming, so I am showing three versions of a text chunk below. This demonstrates my dictation workflow but in reverse order. For clarity, the first thing you will see is my final-ish draft, followed by what I was working from: Claude’s cleanup of a Whisper transcription, using the commands I’ve shown in the past. The last thing you’ll see is what Claude was working from: Whisper’s transcription of an audio file I dictated.
Continue reading “Friday Fragments”Category: LLMs
State of the Author, 3Q2025
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…
Continue reading “State of the Author, 3Q2025”Midjourney Monday: Daumier and Austen Part II
There were too many to fit into last week’s post on the results of prompting Midjourney with the name of artist Honoré Daumier and various Jane Austen characters, so here’s the overflow:
Edmund Bertram and Fanny Price (Midjourney doesn’t like her nickname, so use her Christian name of Frances Price. Also there are glancing references to both characters being blonde in the book, and I had to include that in the prompt).
Continue reading “Midjourney Monday: Daumier and Austen Part II”Midjourney Monday: Meet Honoré Daumier
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor%C3%A9_Daumier
This French artist (1808-1879) is perhaps best known for his caricatures, but he was also a capable painter, and I guess he must have painted a bunch of images set in the early ninteenth century, because you can prompt Midjourney with his name and various Jane Austen characters and get something halfway plausible:
Yes, I know Austen said that Jane Bennet was the one who liked green, but these sure look like Lizzy and Darcy to me.
Continue reading “Midjourney Monday: Meet Honoré Daumier”So, Novelcrafter…
In late 2023/early 2024, well before I started writing the space regency, I was trying to brainstorm it on Sudowrite using the free starting credits, and…didn’t get really anywhere with it. This was I think my first experience with AIs other than the image generator Midjourney, and that probably had more to do with my lack of success than anything in particular about Sudowrite. So, I got curious about Novelcrafter, partly because I heard good things about its abilities to store and organize world-building notes, and partly because it could integrate with the Claude AI family, which I use fairly heavily on the free plan; mostly for dictation cleanup and sometimes brainstorming. So, I opened an account on Novelcrafter and one on Openrouter.ai, because it was one of the options for bringing an AI into Novelcrafter, bought a few credits on Openrouter to pay for the AI usage, and imported the space regency (now at 16000 words) into the free trial of Novelcrafter…
Continue reading “So, Novelcrafter…”For the People Who Complain that Claude AI is Too Much of a Sycophant
Here’s Claude’s response to the latest round of dictation cleanup I brought him, yesterday evening:
I mean, give me a break, Claude, I recorded that while driving home after an uncomfortable medical appointment (nothing serious, just uncomfortable) in excruciatingly hot weather (also known by its street name, “summer”) with the car AC going full blast.
(Please note that in this particular chat, Claude is completely turned around about Chloe Fortebat’s last name. I don’t find it to be worth the trouble of correcting him in this particular instance, it’s just a bit of find/replace when I take the text back to my word processor and do additional editing.)
Midjourney Monday: Now In Motion
Couple weeks late to the party, I know, but here’s a short Midjourney video based on the Wolf’s Trail cover.
Weird Wednesday: A Warning about Dictation Cleanup with Claude.ai
I still stand by the commands I discovered elsewhere online and outlined here, but I wanted to add a word of caution: about six weeks ago, I had to make a longish trip by car, 2 and a half hours each way, for my day job. On the way out, I manage 45 minutes of dictation, coming to about 1500 raw words, and on the way back I managed about 30 minutes of dictation, coming to not quite a thousand raw words. (For comparison, my normal dictation sessions top out at around 20-25 minutes and 600ish raw words. )
I noticed something peculiar when I tried to feed Claude the text output from those longer dictation sessions: the LLM kept trying to shorten the output, especially on the longer segment of 1500 raw words. Telling it “you are summarizing too much” seemed to help with that, but it degraded the quality of the cleanup, mostly on basic grammar corrections (wrong prepositions, words in the wrong place, things like that). The LLM continued to put in quotes and commas and so forth correctly, and it was worth it for that, but I had to do more manual cleanup than usual, which probably didn’t matter much because there was a certain amount of expanding and reworking I needed to do anyway. (After deleting repetitive bits that Claude didn’t ignore, and tweaking and expanding here and there, the equivalent part of the Hunter Healer King 3 draft stands at around 3000 words).
Anyway, just a reminder that LLMs need to be used in an intelligent way with an awareness of their limitations.
Blurbing With Claude AI: Slaying a Tyrant
(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].
Continue reading “Blurbing With Claude AI: Slaying a Tyrant”Midjourney Monday: Flavia os Winterhalter’s Sitting Room
Basically, the third book in the Hunter Healer King series has a lot of stuff going on, including the election of a new Emperor (if you’ve never heard of this being a thing, look up the Hapsburgs and how they originally became Emperors of central Europe). Flavia was one of the candidates, but after her husband and political ally is injured, she withdraws. Her brother, Prince Bertram os Carlhart, convokes a sort of informal council of himself, Flavia, series protagonists Maxim and Chloe, Maxim’s cousin Victor, and friendly rival candidate Father Feuerbach to decide what to do next. They meet in the room shown below.
Jaglion Press 