This was a collaboration with Claude.ai, but a bit different from my usual. I had a chat going covering several aspects of the final stretch of the book: dictation cleanup, brainstorming and revision thoughts (basically me feeding it my revisions and seeing if it caught anything obviously wrong like typos, awkward sentences or me losing track of the characters’ movements). The reference docs included a summary of our previous chat, covering the “darkest hour” stretch of the book. Claude’s cheerleading had been very helpful through both these stretches of story, which were difficult to write. I fed the blurbs from the past two books into this chat (which had gotten long enough in terms of total tokens to where Anthropic was throttling it every few messages for a couple of hours). Claude naturally focused way too much on the spoilery third act it knew best, so I had to summarize the earlier stages of the story for it. It then gave me a rough draft I could use, and we went through several rounds of me tweaking it, asking the AI for feedback from a book marketing POV, and me tweaking it some more. The final (for now) version is below the cut, with human text in bold. The taglines for each character are carryovers from earlier blurbs, and have been italicized.
Continue reading “Hunter Healer King 3 blurb”Category: One Weird Trick
Frequently Seen Questions About Writing
Occasionally, I offer moral support and solutions that worked for me in the comments section of other writing blogs, but I don’t do a lot of it here. What works for me might not work for you, and vice versa. That being said, I’m seeing certain things come up over and over again in certain places on the web, and I feel like I have to put my oar in. Since nobody asked me, I can’t call them “Frequently Asked Questions,” but I feel comfortable calling this “Frequently Seen Questions…”
Continue reading “Frequently Seen Questions About Writing”Midjourney Monday: Spot the Difference
I had to use “Vary Region” on this image. Vary Region is a Midjourney tool which keeps most of the image intact and only changes one area in it. The first image below is the revised image, the second one below is the original. Can you see what was changed?
Continue reading “Midjourney Monday: Spot the Difference”State of the Author, Start of 2025
My plans for the New Year are always kind of vague, because “Mann tracht un Gott lacht” (Man plans, and God laughs).
Continue reading “State of the Author, Start of 2025”The Novels of Marie Belloc Lowndes: The Ones That End Where Agatha Christie Begins
(Note: As previously indicated, the Lowndes books I have read are mostly available on Gutenberg and/or Amazon. In past reviews of early 20th century books, I have not made any effort to offer content warnings, on the assumption that anybody reading these reviews knows better than to expect present-day attitudes on certain topics from books of this timeframe. I am continuing with that assumption here.)
Alot of Agatha Christie’s novels feel like we’re on the outside of some messy domestic situation, looking in at the situation shortly before and after it turns violent. If you ever wondered what seeing the inside of those situations would be like, you’re in luck! Marie Belloc Lowndes wrote lots of those. The characterization is a mile wide and an inch deep, and the situations tend to repeat themselves, but to me, there’s something insistent and weirdly compelling about the way Lowndes shows the reader every component in these emotional powder kegs. As a bonus, you get a good look at the kind of expectations authors like Agatha Christie set out to subvert, because the whodunnit components of these mysteries tend to be pretty banal.
Continue reading “The Novels of Marie Belloc Lowndes: The Ones That End Where Agatha Christie Begins”Weird Wednesday: Reviews of Old Mysteries
Golden Age Mysteries are one of my default things to read when I don’t know what I want to read. I thought I’d share thoughts on a few of the less famous mystery writers to cross my radar:
-Victor Luhrs: responsible for The Longbow Murders, a fairly bonkers historical mystery where ruthless, brawling warrior-king Richard the Lion-Hearted solves a series of murders with the help of a twerpy scribe/narrator/Watson wannabe and some brief forensic work on ballistics from Robin of Locksley (yes that Robin of Locksley, and no he’s not in this very much). I enjoyed this old-school take on Richard I, portrayed here as a brash and hot-tempered man, but not a stupid one. The narrator, who’s kind of useless and spends a lot of time thinking patronizing thoughts about his “poor, fat” wife, is a less appealing character. The book does sell that combination of deep-seated respect for religious subjects, with a comparatively casual attitude towards the clergy, that you see in actual medieval works.
Mystery parts are kind of shaky; the author tries to pull off a “least likely person” twist but hasn’t developed the character well enough to sell the twist. Heck, the author doesn’t even seem to realize that some of the goofier aspects of the mystery (murderer using a long bow at close range and leaving taunting notes around) could be an attempt by the murderer to build up an image of themselves very different from the actuality, to deceive the investigators. Still, I found it more entertaining than alot of works by more respected mystery writers. If you like Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy stories, this has a fair amount of Garrett-style flippancy, and feels a bit like a Lord Darcy prequel set in Richard’s time (when they haven’t discovered the magic/psionic stuff yet). If you get your ideas about the Plantagenets from Becket, Lion in Winter, or Robin and Marian, stay away – this book will annoy you because it’s operating from a completely different set of preconceptions about what the Plantagenets were and what historical fiction should be.
Continue reading “Weird Wednesday: Reviews of Old Mysteries”Adapting Jane Austen: Sense and Sensibility, the Story in Sussex
S&S has more plot and arguably more appealing characters than Mansfield Park, but has a similar tendency to view character and plot developments from a thousand foot view, and also tends to focus a certain amount of attention on “alternate histories” that don’t come to pass, although it’s not as aggressive about it as Mansfield Park. Our hypothetical adaptation of S&S is a miniseries of four to six episodes of one hour+ apiece, on one of the major streaming services, with a hefty budget and a level of stylization similar to the 2020 Emma, although with a different color palette and “vibe.” I am breaking the story out roughly by location, to make these posts a more manageable size.
Continue reading “Adapting Jane Austen: Sense and Sensibility, the Story in Sussex”Weird Wednesday: Adventures in Bookbinding, Part 3
So, here’s my final review on the bookbinding kit that I bought:
Continue reading “Weird Wednesday: Adventures in Bookbinding, Part 3”Happy Centedecenary, Mr. Cushing
Weird Wednesday: We Can Imagine It For You Wholesale
Still trying out wacky prompts in Midjourney, and developing a fresh, if wary, respect for AI-based images. I have actually pretty good versions of my heroines from the Ancestors of Jaiya series, and some more space art for Star Master. I will probably share those at some point, after some more clean-up.
In the meantime, here’s some completely random Midjourney fan art: the main characters from The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly as pirates. General note: for more old-school actors with conventionally handsome features, Midjourney sometimes struggles to create a likeness humans can recognize (see the Clint Eastwood image below), whereas celebrities with quirkier, more distinctive features fare a bit better (see the Van Cleef and Wallach images below).
Continue reading “Weird Wednesday: We Can Imagine It For You Wholesale”
Jaglion Press 