Monster hunters, spaceships and comedy of manners by indie author Mel Dunay
The Albion Courier, Features Desk
[During our video conference with Elizabeth Bennet, Member of the House of Resources for Longbourn Mining Company, she offered to show us around. What follows is an edited account of that tour, with images drawn from Longbourn’s public broadcast archive.]
The first thing you see when Elizabeth Bennet turns the camera toward Longbourn’s Great Hall is the mural above the staircase, except it is not a mural, but a curved screen showing a color enhanced view of deep space, relayed from a telescope on the asteroid’s surface. The effect, at the scale of a room that could comfortably hold a hundred people, is somewhere between sublime and vertiginous. The stars move too slowly to perceive.
Continue reading “Inside Longbourn: A Visual Tour” →
(Note: this is me rewriting a Claude draft post about this development. I had Claude do the initial draft inside the same chat where most of this python coding had been done).
After I wrote about my n8n automations back in February, my computer died in April, and was replaced by something newer and pinker. I resolved to do something different this time around: without API costs, without cloud dependencies, and without the kind of platform risk that bit me with Perplexity. The goal was to run my automations locally: local models, local inference, local Python scripts. No subscription fees beyond what I was already paying for Claude Pro, no data leaving my machine, no terms of service surprises. I have studied Python, but the actual coding was mostly done by Claude Sonnet 4.6. I’m not including the code itself, because your use cases may be different and your pet chatbot is probably just as good at writing python scripts as mine.
What follows is a report from the other side of that transition. TL;DR version: you can get an AI chatbot to write and troubleshoot python scripts which talk to LM Studio and do various useful support tasks for writers. Once those python scripts are finalized, you will be that much less dependent on the chatbots living out there on other people’s servers. Your “Skynet Secretary” will be living at home with you, instead of out there online. I also include some asides on how to do something similar with just a chatbot and without the python scripts and LM Studio, for people who care more about keeping things simple than keeping them local.
Continue reading “AI as Writer’s Assistant: the Local Edition” →https://youtube.com/shorts/jfVDPU8g8P0
William Darcy, reclusive commander of the marcher-ship Last Repose, is doing research on Longbourn Mining Company. Somehow he keeps returning to an interview with Elizabeth Bennet. He finds his parasocial interest in her to be most improper. From Pride & Planetoids, a sci-fi retelling of Pride and Prejudice set in the Kuiper Belt.
📚 READ PRIDE & PLANETOIDS NOW
#PrideAndPlanetoids #SciFiRomance #SpaceOpera #PrideAndPrejudiceInSpace #JaneAustenRetelling #slowburn #enemies2lovers #scifiromance #Darcy #firstimpressions
🎬 ABOUT THESE VIDEOS: These videos feature AI-generated visuals (Midjourney) and music (Suno). The stories themselves are 100% human-written.
Even legendary war machines have bad days. 🤧 The Armor of Arent has waited centuries for a worthy pilot, survived countless battles, and intimidated monsters across three books. It was not, however, prepared for that sneeze. (The pauldrons came back. They always come back.)
https://youtube.com/shorts/eq4rsXCFqkI?feature=share
🎬 Created with Midjourney + Suno
📚 The Armor of Arent guest stars in the Hunter Healer King gaslamp fantasy trilogy by Mel Dunay: steampunk monster hunting, slow-burn romance, and a little dry humor that does not actually involve sneezing robots.
🎬 More chaos in the outtakes: Maxim blames a bee and Maxim’s horse Scrimshaw orders an espresso
📚 READ THE TRILOGY:
Book 1 – Wolf’s Trail
Book 2 – Undead Flight
Book 3 – Dragon’s Teeth
To the extent that I have a philosophy of AI use, it comes to this: I want AI to handle the tasks I don’t enjoy. Falling in love with a set of characters, following them through their adventures, figuring out how the world around them works…to me, those are the fun parts. If I care enough about a story to want to see it on Amazon with a proper cover and a nonzero chance of someone besides me reading it and caring about it, I want to draft it myself. Hunting for typos and logic fails and things I did wrong? Not the fun parts, which is why I have been using AI more in the revision process. Writing a fanfic nobody but me wants to read? Fun but not as fun as it might be, plus it takes mental energy away from writing things that I might be able to sell. Hence, the Fanficcing with Claude label that turns up in this blog. And then there’s marketing.
Marketing does not come easily to some writers, and I am one of them. When I’m happy with my writing, my opinion of it sounds too egotistical to share. When I’m unhappy with it, my opinion is too depressing for words. As for keywords, blurbs, covers, search engine optimization, noun phrase optimization, my brain tends to lock up or go down unhelpful rabbit holes. So, I turned to AI, first for cover art and blurb help and then for other marketing tasks. So, a quick rundown on what I’ve done:
Continue reading “AI as Writer’s Assistant: Marketing with AI “ →I put a short story with a lousy cover up on Amazon. A couple of months later, I took it down again. It was October of that year before I published my first novel. and now, well…
I would lying if I said I’d found fame or fortune doing this. But it’s been a fun adventure and I plan to keep on with it.
Jaglion Press