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.
Continue reading “Where Did That Come From? The Space Bennets “Category: The Stars By Degrees
Video Thursday: All The Notebooks Edition
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:
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Where Did That Come From? Mr. Darcy, Destroyer of Worlds
(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.
Continue reading “Where Did That Come From? Mr. Darcy, Destroyer of Worlds”AI as Writer’s Assistant: Revising with AI
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).
Continue reading “AI as Writer’s Assistant: Revising with AI “
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