Category: Pride & Planetoids

Thursday Videos: Fire When Ready

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https://youtube.com/shorts/6oPYHShn3AQ

A rogue asteroid is on a collision course with the Lucas settlement. William Darcy doesn’t wait for permission. He teleports the Last Repose alongside it and opens fire. From Pride & Planetoids, a sci-fi retelling of Pride and Prejudice set in the Kuiper Belt. Low heat should not equal low drama. đź“š READ PRIDE & PLANETOIDS NOW! #PrideAndPlanetoids #SciFiRomance #SpaceOpera #PrideAndPrejudiceInSpace #JaneAustenRetelling #spaceaction #asteroidbelt #marchership #scifiaction #competentheroes 🎬 ABOUT THESE VIDEOS: These videos feature AI-generated visuals (Midjourney) and music (Suno). The stories themselves are 100% human-written.

The Last Repose and Mr. Darcy: A Profile of Albion’s Most Private Marcher 

Posted on Posted in ai, Jane Austen, LLMs, Lore Drop, Mel Dunay, Pride & Planetoids, science-fiction, Space Opera, Star Wars, The Stars By Degrees, Weird Science, World BuildingTagged , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

The Albion Courier, Features Desk 

[William Darcy, Marcher of the Last Repose, declined multiple requests for interview. This profile was assembled from public records, Parliamentary testimony, and conversations with crew members who asked not to be named.] 

There is a moment, when the Last Repose comes into view, when you understand why people find William Darcy difficult to ignore. 

The ship is enormous. That much you know from the figures. At somewhere north of thirty kilometers in diameter, this is the largest marcher-ship in active service in Albion Space, and one of the oldest. What the figures do not prepare you for is the Repose’s shape. Where every other marcher-ship in the family wears its asteroid origins plainly, that characteristic lumpen potato silhouette, the Last Repose is a sphere. Not by design: the original asteroid was simply, and unusually, spherical, a geological accident that the first Darcy to claim her evidently considered worth keeping. Generations of maintenance have preserved that shape, pitted and scarred and dark with age, but unmistakably round. 

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On this May the Fourth, Spot the References in Pride & Planetoids 

Posted on Posted in humor, Jane Austen, Pride & Planetoids, Space Opera, Star Wars, The Stars By Degrees, Uncategorized, Weird Science, World Building, WritingLeave a comment

I’ve previously told the story of how one man’s peculiar career choices led to me asking the question: “What if Darcy went around destroying planets?” and writing a whole book about the answer. But somewhere along the way, I realized that this gentleman was not the only actor to jump from Jane Austen to Star Wars (or vice versa) in a professional capacity. Reader, I set out to include nods to them all. This proved to be tricky because there were two Jane Austen adaptations and one Austen spinoff (The Other Bennet Sister) which went into production while I was writing Pride & Planetoids. Why are Mrs. Jennings, Mrs. Catherine DeBourgh and what seems to be Frederick Wentworth’s dad all related in Pride & Planetoids? Blame a certain lady who played Sophie Wentworth Croft in the 1995 Persuasion, the title character’s foster mother in Andor, Lady Catherine in Netflix P&P, and Mrs. Jennings in S&S2026. Why is Mr. Bennet some kind of relative of Walter Elliot in my novel, and why does he make snarky remarks about a hypothetical “General Pride”? Blame the Scarlet Pimpernel, for taking roles in Rise of Skywalker, Persuasion 2022, and The Other Bennet Sister. Why is Mr. Collins mixed up in a digital impersonation plot, and somehow related to the Knightley family? And so on. If you know your Austen adaptations, and you know your Star Wars, you’ll probably spot the lawyer-friendly in-jokes. Check out Pride & Planetoids at Amazon today! 

Where Did That Come From? The Rest of the Cast from Pride & Planetoids 

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For plot-related reasons, I needed Wickham to be more competent than the short-sighted grifter who wreaked so much havoc in the original novel. Even so, he ends up working too many angles at once and having things blow up in his face. I can’t tell you more than that without spoilers.

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Where Did That Come From? The Space Bennets 

Posted on Posted in Jane Austen, Mel Dunay, Pride & Planetoids, Space Opera, Star Wars, The Stars By Degrees, Weird Science, World Building, WritingTagged , , , 2 Comments

When I first came up with the idea for Pride & Planetoids, I decided that Elizabeth Bennet needed to be some kind of Parliamentary backbencher. Spending time in the remote work/zoom conference culture of the early 2020s made it more believable to me that she could live at Longbourn and still participate in the Parliament of Albion the Commonwealth, without having to travel to Albion, the asteroid which gave its name to the Commonwealth. There were a whole horde of supporting characters who were also believable as minor politicians in a large Parliament, which meant that Mr. Collins, Mr. Hurst, etc were all accounted for. I still had to figure out where the Bennet family sat in this society, and that meant figuring out the society itself. 

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Video Thursday: All The Notebooks Edition

Posted on Posted in ai, Cool Books, Jane Austen, Music, Pride & Planetoids, The Stars By Degrees, videos, Weird Science, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

A tour of the notebooks I used while writing Pride & Planetoids, the first book in my Jane Austen space opera trilogy, The Stars By Degrees. Some were storebought. Many were handmade or hand-cased. All of them contain the slightly chaotic evidence of a novel being figured out one page at a time.https://youtube.com/shorts/FNEsweKdckQ?feature=share
Music composed with Suno.
Pride & Planetoids is available for preorder here:
Learn more about the world of The Stars By Degrees

Where Did That Come From? Mr. Darcy, Destroyer of Worlds

Posted on Posted in Jane Austen, Mel Dunay, Pride & Planetoids, Space Opera, Star Wars, The Stars By Degrees, Weird Science, World Building, WritingTagged , , , , 4 Comments

(Thank you, unknown internet person, for creating this meme. It makes the job of explaining the origins of my latest novel so much easier.)

Well, let’s start with the fact that I am a GenXer, who grew up with a limited selection of movies available to me, and more often than not the only thing my siblings and I all felt like watching was the 1977 Star Wars. For some reason, I was very amused to discover that Grand Moff Tarkin had once been an energetic middle-aged man who killed the Hound of the Baskervilles twice and Count Dracula over and over again. It tickled me even more to discover that he had once played Mr. Darcy in a now-lost BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, roughly a quarter of a century before Star Wars. I asked myself: “What if Darcy went around destroying planets?” And a surprising amount of Pride & Planetoids grew out of that single question. 

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State of the Author, Spring 2026 Edition

Posted on Posted in Dictation, Jane Austen, Mel Dunay, Mystery, Pride & Planetoids, Publishing Plans, Weird Science, WritingTagged 2 Comments

The State of the Author is…complicated. On April 9, 2026, I finished the first draft of a murder mystery, ran my DevEditor automation on it, and discovered that it really needed more physical evidence pointing towards the murderer, and more clues in general. The early chapters mostly just needed fairly modest rewrites for tone and emotional content, so I got to work on those right away, figuring that the subconscious would work on the complicated stuff next time I pivoted to one of the WIPs, either Space & Sensibility or HHK0.

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AI as Writer’s Assistant: Revising with AI 

Posted on Posted in ai, Editing, Jane Austen, LLMs, Mel Dunay, Pride & Planetoids, Star Wars, The Stars By Degrees, Weird Science, WritingTagged , , , , 4 Comments

So, having gotten Pride & Planetoids revised, formatted, and up for preorder, I thought I’d share a few thoughts on the use of AI in the revision process, both the automations (see here for the original post on this topic) and the chatbot(s). 

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