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
Category: Weird Science
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”State of the Author, Spring 2026 Edition
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.
Continue reading “State of the Author, Spring 2026 Edition”Video Thursday: Sneezing Mecha Edition
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
AI as Writer’s Assistant: Marketing with AI
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 “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 “Capsule Reviews
I figured I’d better update you on things I’ve been reading lately. If the emojis are throwing you, they are addressed to authors who’ve commented here in the past.
–Tomato Wyrm by Cedar Sanderson: This is a very sweet cozy fantasy with a gardening angle, as the title implies. The heroine inherits a Stately home of England, and its guardian critter, and find love along the way, liberating her future husband from a dreary life in the city along the way. I read this when she serialized it on her substack, and bought the expanded version when that released. This is a great comfort read, Cedar! ❤
–Vanished Pearls of Orlov by Odessa Moon: Coming of age sci-fi set on a terraformed Mars with a culture that’s a little bit Napoleonic era Russia and a little bit Wild West. The lead characters are pretty nuanced but the setting steals the show. It’s a fascinating place, Odessa/Teresa. 🙂
–Theophany by Caroline Furlong: I would say the giant combat medic robot steals the show, except that’s his name in the title and his imposing form on the cover. I loved Theo, Caroline. 😉
–Advance Guards by Frank Hood: I hesitate to call this one post-apocalyptic, but it’s definitely post-civilization as we know it. A warm family saga built of interconnected stories about picking up the pieces. Well-done, Frank. 🙂
–Pearl of Fire by C. Chancy: This reminded me a bit of the Chronicles of Elantra by Michelle Sagara, in the sense that it starts as kind of a police/peacekeeper procedural in a fantasy city and escalates from there. I liked these characters better than the cast of Elantra though!
Fanficcing with Claude: Sense and Sensibility and Placage, Scene 28 (Finale)
For more information about this project, please see past posts under the “Sense and Sensibility and Placage” category. Claude managed to leave Marianne – Mari. Fricking. Anne – out of the first draft of this scene. This is the second. I cut a whole two paragraphs of blah blah at the beginning and trimmed other bits throughout. My main takeaway from this particular ai fanfic has been that I do not remotely have the patience to ride herd on a book length ai first draft and make it good enough for publication. Anyway, I hope you’ve enjoyed this fanfic. Stay tuned for The Rector’s Other Business, coming sometime in May.
Departure
Continue reading “Fanficcing with Claude: Sense and Sensibility and Placage, Scene 28 (Finale)”🎬Hang On, A #JustStabMeNowMOVIE ??? 🎬
https://youtube.com/shorts/DR8SzQQWeg0?si=Co7AlP5vNLSDQVwP
Okay, I had to laugh when watching this video, because my fondness for El Cid, Horror Express, and The Texican told me exactly where this was going the moment Jill Bearup said “Spanish film company”. But I enjoyed the Just Stab Me videos when they came out, bought the ebook when that came out and the print book as a Christmas present for someone, so congratulations Jill!
In terms of fancasting, the only actresses I can think of who fit my idea of Rosamund are Morfydd Clark (slightly young at 37), Rosamund Pike (on the high end of the age range at 47), and Emily Blunt (right age at 43, but very aggressively botoxed when I last saw her in Fall Guy). My mental image of Captain Collins somewhat resembles Clive Owen or Lloyd Owen, both Welsh men in their sixties. Luke Evans is 47, and also maybe a good fit for Collins. He showed a certain dry humor as Aramis in Three Musketeers that would work for the more absurd situations Collins finds himself on. Rosamund’s childhood friend struck me as kind of a Tom Hiddleston/JJ Feild type, for what that’s worth.
I don’t have strong visual feeling about the mundane characters, but have the impression they were in their thirties or late twenties, so I don’t know how convincing any role doubling would be.
Fanficcing with Claude: Sense and Sensibility and Placage, Scene 27
For more information about this project, please see past posts under the “Sense and Sensibility and Placage” category. Claude has the reputation of being good at writing climactic scenes and rather overwrought for everything else. This was the kind of scene at which it excels. I trimmed a little bombast before and after the duel itself, and Claude’s persistant and unlikely references to cold January weather in New Orleans.
The Duel
Continue reading “Fanficcing with Claude: Sense and Sensibility and Placage, Scene 27”
Jaglion Press 