Monster hunters, spaceships and comedy of manners by indie author Mel Dunay
For more information about this project, check out the earlier posts in the category “Sense and Sensibility and Placage.” This was Claude’s first draft. I thought its handling of the Rousseau references surprisingly good, tying in with Marianne’s previous observations about the unfairness of life. I trimmed down the paragraph about Alejandro moving through the crowd.
Alejandro
Continue reading “Fanficcing with Claude: Sense and Sensibility and Placage, Scene 9” →For more information about this project, check out the earlier posts in the category “Sense and Sensibility and Placage.” Claude’s initial draft was okayish, maybe melodramatic in spots but in a way I enjoyed. I had it redraft to add references to the sisters thinking about Edward and the Colonel. I then prompted for a third draft to remove emdashes and reword some awkward sentences. Manually deleted a few establishing details I didn’t care for.
The Ball
Continue reading “Fanficcing with Claude: Sense and Sensibility and Placage, Scene 8” →https://youtube.com/shorts/6q1DghfMlt8
Sometimes the most useful superpower is being able to tell a dog to settle down. Dr. Maxim os Storm uses his animal telepathy to calm a mastiff misbehaving at a formal dinner party. From Dragon’s Teeth, Book 3 of the Hunter Healer King trilogy.
Three thousand years after Thule sank beneath the waves, its language survives in fragments.
The Stormcrows still use Thukiel in certain ceremonies. Banishing daggers carry runes in the ancient tongue. The Pledge of Arent, which binds a king to the Armor, must be spoken in Thukiel, and the speaker must mean every word.
This is the language of a civilization that built airships and tamed gravity, that imprisoned demons and fell to its own hubris. And in the world of the Hunter Healer King trilogy, Thukiel isn’t just history: it’s power.
Continue reading “Speaking Thukiel: The Lost Language of Thule | Hunter Healer King” →As best I can tell, I got the urge for this fanfic from reading about the Hallmark Mahogany version of S&S from 2024. It cast Colonel Brandon, the Dashwood sisters and their mother, plus Lucy Steele, as black, and most of the rest of the characters as white. But this version was set in a Bridgerton-esque AU Regency. It occurred to me that one could do interesting things in 1810s New Orleans with a similar idea. I wouldn’t swear that this hasn’t been done before. I feel like I might have seen it floated as a hypothetical somewhere in the fandom, in the last thirty years that I’ve drifted in and out of it.
Continue reading “Fanficcing with Claude: Sense and Sensibility and Placage, the Process Post” →For more information about this project, check out the earlier posts in the category “Sense and Sensibility and Placage.” Claude didn’t do great on the first draft of this scene, with a serious overuse of the word “particular,” and no inclusion of Marianne to speak of. For draft 2 I prompted it to address those issues along with some more minor stuff (Morin’s backstory and height, Edward joining the party later in the scene. Draft 3 was basically me wanting it to reposition a certain paragraph about Morin’s reactions to Marianne chatting up his ward, and being too lazy to do it myself.
Meeting Colonel Morin and Élise
Continue reading “Fanficcing with Claude: Sense and Sensibility and Placage, Scene 7” →For more information about this project, check out the earlier posts in the category “Sense and Sensibility and Placage.” Claude did very well on its first draft, but then I realized Edward needed to be present, so I asked for a redraft. I deleted a sentence and a half about Marianne that were not justified by her behavior in the story so far, and I deleted a sentence about Henry Dashwood’s judgment of people late in the scene. “He was a better man etc” is something I wrote to replace it.
The New Cottage
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Maxim is struck by the sight of Chloe in a green dress at the top of the staircase. A bittersweet moment, because they both believe they can’t be together. They’ve fought monsters side by side. They trust each other with their lives. But their bloodlines stand between them, and moments like this only make it harder. From Dragon’s Teeth, Book 3 of the Hunter Healer King trilogy.
For more information about this project, check out the earlier posts in the category “Sense and Sensibility and Placage.” Claude did very well on its first draft. For the redraft, I asked it to rework an incoherent description of what the Dashwoods’ mother was doing with her hands during the cart ride, and have Marianne show more emotion. My instinct is that free women of color in this time and place would not have survived long, if they showed the overwrought behavior that Marianne and her mother do in the Austen novel. But Marianne isn’t Marianne if she isn’t the most emo person in any given room. Then I realized this was the right time to introduce Edward, and that led to two more drafts. I manually removed an em-dash rather than ask for another draft.
Journey to Faubourg Marigny
Continue reading “Fanficcing with Claude: Sense and Sensibility and Placage, Scene 5” →For the origins of this project, see previous posts in “Sense and Sensibility and Placage” category. Claude’s first draft was fairly satisfactory on this one, and draft two was me asking for em-dash removal and sentence level fixes in a few places where the AI’s lack of logic became obvious. The words “with her [Frances’s] advice” are mine. I didn’t like what Claude had there but couldn’t justify mucking around with a third draft for it.
Planning the Departure
Continue reading “Fanficcing with Claude: Sense and Sensibility and Placage, Scene 4” →
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