Midjourney Monday: The Longbourn Ballroom

Longbourn’s ballroom was the site of most of the asteroid’s streaming videos, and Mrs. Bennet had insisted on giving it a more regular shape than most of Longbourne’s interior spaces. The space was an immense rectangle with gleaming white marble floors and columns that reflected the purple and gold lights. The far wall was decorated with a pattern of hexagonal screens set in gold frames, which continued across the ceiling. The main video feeds played out on the screens on the far wall, the more minor ones being relegated to a merely decorative role on the ceiling.

Friday Fragments

I just finished reworking a core setpiece late in Hunter Healer King 3 and am now writing the bridge from that into another pre-written scene. This part below (slightly censored for spoilers) was part of the prewritten scene, but no longer fit in for continuity reasons.

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State of the Dictator, 2025

When I was talking to another writer on Discord, I realized that I tend to be somewhat vague and off-handed when I talk about my writing process, and assume people already know what I’m talking about, so I’m going to walk through the whole process here for transparency’s sake. This process includes the use of AI software for transcription and cleanup of dictated content, but it doesn’t start or end there, so if you are interested in that part, please, bear with me until I get there.

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State of the Author, 3Q2025

This really should have been “State of the Author, Mid-Year,” but I was dealing with health issues for most of June (nothing serious, just distracting) and then July was kind of busy at work, so here we are…

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So, Novelcrafter…

In late 2023/early 2024, well before I started writing the space regency, I was trying to brainstorm it on Sudowrite using the free starting credits, and…didn’t get really anywhere with it. This was I think my first experience with AIs other than the image generator Midjourney, and that probably had more to do with my lack of success than anything in particular about Sudowrite. So, I got curious about Novelcrafter, partly because I heard good things about its abilities to store and organize world-building notes, and partly because it could integrate with the Claude AI family, which I use fairly heavily on the free plan; mostly for dictation cleanup and sometimes brainstorming. So, I opened an account on Novelcrafter and one on Openrouter.ai, because it was one of the options for bringing an AI into Novelcrafter, bought a few credits on Openrouter to pay for the AI usage, and imported the space regency (now at 16000 words) into the free trial of Novelcrafter…

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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.