Gee, Thanks, You BBC Turkeys

Not content with trying to create a miniseries about Mary Bennet, the virtue-signaling Regency hipster beloved by virtue-signaling modern-day hipsters everywhere who think that Jane Austen was soooo mean to their alter ego, the makers have cast Richard E. Grant as Mr. Bennet. I have no particular beef with Mr. Grant, although to judge by the clips I’ve seen, his take on Sir Walter Elliot in Netflix Persuasion would have benefited from a bit more of the silly fop schtick he brought to the Scarlet Pimpernel. And yes, it’s a bit disheartening to think that in The Other Bennet Sister he may once again be called upon to play a humorously absurd and irresponsible Jane Austen dad character as a generic jerk.

More importantly from my point of view, he put in an appearance as a minor baddie in Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker, which is just a teensy bit inconvenient

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Summer Book Sale Is Here!

Hans G. Schantz has put together one of his massive book sales, and has graciously agreed to include my novel Wolf’s Trail in the sale. Hans’s book sales always cover a wide range of genres and possibilities, so take a look! Happy Summer Reading!

Weird Wednesday: A Warning about Dictation Cleanup with Claude.ai

I still stand by the commands I discovered elsewhere online and outlined here, but I wanted to add a word of caution: about six weeks ago, I had to make a longish trip by car, 2 and a half hours each way, for my day job. On the way out, I manage 45 minutes of dictation, coming to about 1500 raw words, and on the way back I managed about 30 minutes of dictation, coming to not quite a thousand raw words. (For comparison, my normal dictation sessions top out at around 20-25 minutes and 600ish raw words. )

I noticed something peculiar when I tried to feed Claude the text output from those longer dictation sessions: the LLM kept trying to shorten the output, especially on the longer segment of 1500 raw words. Telling it “you are summarizing too much” seemed to help with that, but it degraded the quality of the cleanup, mostly on basic grammar corrections (wrong prepositions, words in the wrong place, things like that). The LLM continued to put in quotes and commas and so forth correctly, and it was worth it for that, but I had to do more manual cleanup than usual, which probably didn’t matter much because there was a certain amount of expanding and reworking I needed to do anyway. (After deleting repetitive bits that Claude didn’t ignore, and tweaking and expanding here and there, the equivalent part of the Hunter Healer King 3 draft stands at around 3000 words).

Anyway, just a reminder that LLMs need to be used in an intelligent way with an awareness of their limitations.

Blurbing With Claude AI: Slaying a Tyrant

(Disclaimer: some of my past “blurbing with LLMs” posts have been very TL;DR because I included a lot of unnecessary fluff that the LLMs churned up and that I didn’t use. This prompt below helps cut down on the fat, so, although this is several paragraphs long, it is much shorter than those previous posts.)

First off, I prompted Claude in this manner: You are a book marketing expert trying to help a fantasy writer. Please help her improve her blurbs. The first novel in her fantasy series is Slaying a Tyrant by Mel Dunay, which may be part of your training data, if so, please feel free to refer to your training data. The problem is that the Empire mentioned in the blurb is mostly a background issue throughout the series [then I spelled out what role the Empire plays throughout the series, and fed Claude the existing blurb for Slaying a Tyrant].

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Weird Wednesday: Discovery Writing

I feel like there’s sometimes a tendency among writing gurus to pretend that either you systematically plot everything beat by beat, or you only write the story as it spontaneously generates in your head, with no notes or thoughts about how it’s going. As it happens, I’m reading History of the Lord of the Rings right now. Tolkien is usually described as a discovery writer, and the people who say that are not wrong, but he didn’t necessarily sit around waiting for inspiration to strike either…

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