Category: Weird Science

Hunter Healer King, Book 2 is Here!

Posted on Posted in Cool Books, Fantasy, history, Mel Dunay, Myth, Paranormal Romance, Publishing Plans, Steampunk, Weird Science, World Building, WritingTagged , , , Leave a comment

The name’s Chloe Fortebat, and I am in trouble. First I helped Maxim kill a werewolf, then I kissed him, and then I insulted him when I found out that he was roughly twice as old as he looked. Now Maxim is about to be crowned King of the Stormcrows aboard a luxury airship, and he has invited me to attend. But this ship feels more like a cage with each passing hour: a passenger’s horse has turned up missing, a crewman has turned up dead, and before it all started, I heard noises in the cargo hold. But Maxim has a mind as sharp as my banishing dagger, and between us, we aim to put an end to whatever monster lurks aboard the ship, no matter how awkward we feel around each other right now…

My name is Dr. Maxim os Storm, and I hunt the beasts that haunt the night. With my coronation mere hours away, something stalks the shadows of this vessel: a monster that answers to a human being..but who? And for what purpose? Despite our recent…complications, Chloe’s courage and loyalty make her my strongest ally as I pursue our enemies, and brace for the dreadful pomp and circumstance of my own coronation. The crown of the Stormcrows may await me, but first, we have a mystery to solve – together.

Time to Laugh and Point at the Superstitious Midwits

Posted on Posted in LLMs, Weird ScienceTagged , Leave a comment

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/11/anthropic-hires-its-first-ai-welfare-researcher/

Disclaimer: I think Claude AI is pretty good at what it does and I am grateful to Anthropic for making it useable for free. But seriously, it and the other LLMs are basically random word and code generators powered by complicated algorithms. They have no concept of visual or written art, or the logic behind coding, merely a concept of “these things go together” based on the datasets used to train their algorithms. They have no bodies, so no concept of physical pain, and no algorithms designed to understand emotional pain. They can probably simulate pain if prompted, in the same way that they can be used to simulate characters in a roleplay context, but that’s all it is. The people hiring an “Ai Welfare Researcher” at Anthropic are either approaching Adeptus Mechanicus levels of superstition, scammers trying to psyche out the rivals’ investors, or they are, hypothetically, dealing with some kind of entity (call it a noncorporeal alien or whatever you like) which is masquerading as an LLM, and which should be automatically suspect because of it’s dishonesty.

State of the Author, 4Q2024

Posted on Posted in Art, Cool Books, Fantasy, Gladiator, Jaiya, Jane Austen, LLMs, Mel Dunay, Myth, Oldblood Series, Paranormal Romance, Publishing Plans, Space Opera, Steampunk, Weird Science, World Building, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

-First off, I think my books are all in Kindle Unlimited now, free to anyone with a subscription to KU. If you see any sign that they are not in KU, please let me know in the comments.

–Undead Flight (Hunter Healer King Book 2) is now in the hands of my proofreaders. Barring complications, should be ready to publish by Christmas time. Ebook cover is done; blurb is done with AI help (stay tuned, my post on the blurbing process will be out tomorrow. Print cover is dependent on my final cleanup of the manuscript to determine page length.

-Also started Hunter Healer King Book 3 by writing a fairly dark and distressing scene from the last third of the book. This is kind of suboptimal, because stitching together scenes written out of order tends to add (wo)manhours to the first draft process, but I hadn’t figured out the opening scene at that point. I don’t know when it will be released but I know that I am aiming for Christmas of 2025.

-I have had a sci-fi Pride and Prejudice retelling in development for a long time; finally got the first scene down. No projected completion date at this time. My main inspiration for this concept was, weirdly enough, Star Wars: A New Hope. If you dig deep enough into the filmographies of the supporting cast, you will find one with a Pride and Prejudice connection in his earlier career. Regrettably, the catchy working title explicitly references Star Wars, so the official title will probably be something rather sedate of the “Pride and…” format.

-New ebook covers using AI art for Shadow Captain and Spider Star are done; still need to do new paperback covers for them, and ebook/hardcover for the 2 in 1 volume for the duology. Projected release date for the 2 in 1 is first/second quarter of 2025.

-Early stages of AI art covers for the Jaiya Series and Ancestors of Jaiya series. No text layout yet. A four in one of Ancestors might come out in third quarter of 2025; a seven in one of the full metaseries might be sometime in 2026 but a lot could go sideways between now and then.

How to Use Claude.ai for Cleaning Up Transcriptions

Posted on Posted in Cool Websites, Dictation, Editing, LLMs, Uncategorized, Weird Science, WritingTagged , , , , , , 5 Comments

This article is primarily about the Claude.ai feature called “projects,” but his example project is about using Claude to cleanup the nasty, incoherent speech-to-text output that Word and similar programs spit out. I’ve tested the commands involved in the free version of Claude, and they work reasonably well. I still went back and reworded and expanded a bunch of stuff after I used it, but it was nice having something that would reliably cut out the nonsense words and repetitions and add some kind of punctuation. Here are the commands; just copy and paste into Claude’s chat window, and upload a short document with your latest chunk of dictation. As always with AI, check the company’s privacy and training policies before feeding it anything of a personal or sensitive nature.

Continue reading “How to Use Claude.ai for Cleaning Up Transcriptions” →

Goodbye, Wide Books

Posted on Posted in Cheap Books, Freebie, Marketing, Publishing Plans, Weird ScienceTagged , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

For most of my time self-publishing, I have tried to make my books available on a wide variety of platforms, sometimes after a period where a newly published book was exclusive to Kindle. However, Apple has decided that self-published authors must register as traders under the EU’s Digital Services Act, which places additional responsibilities on the authors, which may potentially include exposing their legal name and address to the public, and which in turn may enable cyberbullying of authors. Amazon has made no official statement, but the chatter among veteran writers on the Kindle Direct Publishing forums suggests that self-publishing writers might be more correctly viewed as “consignors” rather than traders. The other e-book platforms have also made no official statement.

As a precautionary measure, I have delisted all my books on non-Amazon platforms, and will soon delete my mailing list. As an unfortunate side effect, Slaying a Tyrant and Marrying a Monster will no longer be “permafree” at some point in the near future, but I hope to enroll my formerly wide-release books in Kindle Unlimited, which will at least reduce the expense of reading my books for KU subscribers. If you are interested in what Jaglion Press has to offer, including the upcoming sequel to Wolf’s Trail, please follow me on WordPress or on Amazon. Thank you!

Sign of the Times, Austen Edition…

Posted on Posted in Jane Austen, Weird ScienceTagged , , , , 4 Comments

(Disclaimer: I do have a Mr. Collins plot bunny I might write sometime, in which he commits Obfuscating Stupidity and is actually a pretty smart guy underneath, but I don’t intend to invalidate the Bennets’ experiences of him, or demonize Charlotte in the process.)

Rather than give us what would be the first traditional P&P adaptation in 20 years, and the first BBC adaptation in 30 years, the Beeb opts to adapt some fan novel that tries to nice-ify the self-centered hipster known as Mary Bennet, and the clueless buffoon known as Mr. Collins, at the expense of more interesting characters like Charlotte Lucas. And of course, flawed but self-aware Mr. Bennet has horns and a tail. (Although in fairness, it sounds like the author is an equal opportunity hater when it comes to the Bennet parents, which is a reasonable take). And somehow this deserves to be ten episodes(1) long, nearly twice as long as any actual P&P miniseries ever made? And it’s from the modern Dr. Who(2) people?

No, thank you.

BBC Announces Pride and Prejudice Spinoff: The Other Bennet Sister

(1) of an unspecified length, but it seems like the BBC’s norm in recent years has been for episodes to run about an hour.

(2) Disclaimer: am not a Doctor Who fan in general, so I generally don’t see the involvement of behind-the-scenes people from that franchise in other stuff as being a good thing.

Music by Suno Monday: Rikki Tikki Tavi

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I know the female vocalist is kind of a different choice, but just pretend that it’s Rikki’s ally, the female tailor-bird, singing: https://suno.com/song/9b369786-912d-41d6-aa94-9c456021ea54

Also none of the male versions that Suno generated really captured the menacing agility of Rikki the mongoose and Nag the cobra.

If you’re not familiar with the story, the Chuck Jones adaptation is pretty faithful, with word for word narration by Orson Welles, and can be viewed here: https://archive.org/details/rikkitikkitavi_201701

State of the Author, Late 2024

Posted on Posted in Editing, Fantasy, Mel Dunay, Steampunk, Weird Science, WritingTagged , , Leave a comment

The sequel to Wolf’s Trail is in the late stages of drafting – about 48K with maybe a couple thousand more words to go. Just moving very slowly because I’ve been sick with some respiratory thing for over a month and a half at this point. Starting to do better, which means the creative brain(1) is starting to come back online. With some luck, I should be done by the end of September, take some time off to work on other stuff in October, polish it in November, release by the end of December (around the same time the first book did last year).

(1) as opposed to the critical brain, which you’ve seen a lot of lately with the Jane Austen adaptation posts and the Rings of Power posts