I’ve told before of how I used Google’s AI, then called Bard, to brainstorm a blurb for Wolf’s Trail, so it seems only fitting to talk about my use of AI for the blurb to Undead Flight, the upcoming sequel to Wolf’s Trail
Continue reading “Weird Wednesday: Using AIs to Write Blurbs”Category: LLMs
State of the Author, 4Q2024
-First off, I think my books are all in Kindle Unlimited now, free to anyone with a subscription to KU. If you see any sign that they are not in KU, please let me know in the comments.
–Undead Flight (Hunter Healer King Book 2) is now in the hands of my proofreaders. Barring complications, should be ready to publish by Christmas time. Ebook cover is done; blurb is done with AI help (stay tuned, my post on the blurbing process will be out tomorrow. Print cover is dependent on my final cleanup of the manuscript to determine page length.
-Also started Hunter Healer King Book 3 by writing a fairly dark and distressing scene from the last third of the book. This is kind of suboptimal, because stitching together scenes written out of order tends to add (wo)manhours to the first draft process, but I hadn’t figured out the opening scene at that point. I don’t know when it will be released but I know that I am aiming for Christmas of 2025.
-I have had a sci-fi Pride and Prejudice retelling in development for a long time; finally got the first scene down. No projected completion date at this time. My main inspiration for this concept was, weirdly enough, Star Wars: A New Hope. If you dig deep enough into the filmographies of the supporting cast, you will find one with a Pride and Prejudice connection in his earlier career. Regrettably, the catchy working title explicitly references Star Wars, so the official title will probably be something rather sedate of the “Pride and…” format.
-New ebook covers using AI art for Shadow Captain and Spider Star are done; still need to do new paperback covers for them, and ebook/hardcover for the 2 in 1 volume for the duology. Projected release date for the 2 in 1 is first/second quarter of 2025.
-Early stages of AI art covers for the Jaiya Series and Ancestors of Jaiya series. No text layout yet. A four in one of Ancestors might come out in third quarter of 2025; a seven in one of the full metaseries might be sometime in 2026 but a lot could go sideways between now and then.
Monday Music by Suno: Thou Shalt Not Kill
By G. K. Chesterton, collected in The Wild Knight. (Note: contains dark humor about murder and suicide.)
How to Use Claude.ai for Cleaning Up Transcriptions
This article is primarily about the Claude.ai feature called “projects,” but his example project is about using Claude to cleanup the nasty, incoherent speech-to-text output that Word and similar programs spit out. I’ve tested the commands involved in the free version of Claude, and they work reasonably well. I still went back and reworded and expanded a bunch of stuff after I used it, but it was nice having something that would reliably cut out the nonsense words and repetitions and add some kind of punctuation. Here are the commands; just copy and paste into Claude’s chat window, and upload a short document with your latest chunk of dictation. As always with AI, check the company’s privacy and training policies before feeding it anything of a personal or sensitive nature.
Continue reading “How to Use Claude.ai for Cleaning Up Transcriptions”Monday Music by Suno: Boot and Saddle
Based on the poem by Robert Browning.
I strongly advise anyone signing up for Suno to use their Discord accounts, if they have one. This allows them to bypass Suno’s rather intrusive demands for personal information.
Monday Music by Suno: The Quest (1896) by Kipling
Monday Music by Suno: Lepanto (Chesterton)
Severely abridged version of this famous poem:
Music by Suno Monday: Rikki Tikki Tavi
I know the female vocalist is kind of a different choice, but just pretend that it’s Rikki’s ally, the female tailor-bird, singing: https://suno.com/song/9b369786-912d-41d6-aa94-9c456021ea54
Also none of the male versions that Suno generated really captured the menacing agility of Rikki the mongoose and Nag the cobra.
If you’re not familiar with the story, the Chuck Jones adaptation is pretty faithful, with word for word narration by Orson Welles, and can be viewed here: https://archive.org/details/rikkitikkitavi_201701
Music by Suno Monday: Gods of the Copybook Headings
https://suno.com/song/b9544b42-9186-4039-a749-493aeea897b8
For those concerned about the misuses of LLMs, aka AIs, it’s worth noting that Suno will literally block you from using artists names in prompts, and this Kipling poem is to the best of my knowledge in the public domain.
Jaglion Press 