When a Jaded Monster Hunter Changes His Mind: Maxim’s Journey in the Hunter Healer King Trilogy

What Does It Take to Impress a Monster Hunter Who’s Seen Everything?

Dr. Maxim os Storm hunts all kinds of evil things. He is the other protagonist and POV character in the trilogy, and all three books end with Maxim POV scenes. Maxim looks thirty-something but he’s actually seventy, with the jaded perspective to match. Even the prospect of becoming king of his people fills him with dread rather than excitement.

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Video Tuesday: Book Trilogy Trailer Edition

https://youtube.com/shorts/6KsxPAlEONk

Meet Chloe Fortebat and Dr. Maxim os Storm in this trailer for the Hunter Healer King trilogy. She’s a rancher’s daughter facing werewolves in a world of airships and steam power. He’s a monster hunter avoiding his destiny as king. Three books of monster hunting, political intrigue, and slow-burn romance where saving the world takes priority over bedroom scenes. For fans of Patricia Briggs and Lindsay Buroker.

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From Gaucho Lifestyle to Monster Hunting: Chloe Fortebat’s Journey in the Hunter Healer King Trilogy

What if a rancher’s daughter discovered that monsters were real?

Chloe Fortebat left her father’s ranch in Silberne with nothing but her horses, her knive, and a mysterious inheritance. She expected to find a new life in the Old World. What she found instead were werewolves, necromancers, and a sharp-dressed monster hunter who would change everything. This is the story of how a pragmatic frontier woman became the co-protagonist of the Hunter Healer King trilogy.

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Video Tuesday: Dancing Mecha Edition

https://youtube.com/shorts/XhTQ__CjtVY

A 40-foot mecha dances to Slavic-inspired folk music in this music video from the Hunter Healer King trilogy. The Armor of Arent has been waiting for a worthy pilot. Now it has one. 🎬 Created with AI tools (Midjourney + Suno) 📚 From the gaslamp fantasy series by Mel Dunay! The Hunter Healer King trilogy combines steampunk monster hunting with slow-burn romance. For fans of Patricia Briggs and Lindsay Buroker.

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Due Disclosure: Me and AI and Marketing

To me, AI is a flawed but interesting tool, brought to us by the same flawed (and often corrupt) people who brought us the rest of the modern conveniences we live with. Other people have other opinions about it, and out of respect for them, I try to be transparent about my use of AI.

I do not use AI for first draft writing or for high-level concept and character background work. I have found ai chatbots (mostly Claude.ai) helpful for tasks like:

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Weird Wednesday: The Role of Religion in My Science Fiction and Fantasy

(Adapted from a comment made elsewhere.)

Religion is not at the foreground of the stories I tend to tell, but it is in the background, part of the “vibe,” so to speak. I tend to stick to versions of a specific cosmogony (Creator+quasi angels+quasi devils), partly because it reflects my own Catholic beliefs, but also frankly because my world-building energy is limited, and most of the time, I’d rather spend it elsewhere.

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State of the Author, 4Q2025

It’s been roughly three months since the last State of the Author, so here’s where I’m at:

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Hunter Healer King 3 blurb

This was a collaboration with Claude.ai, but a bit different from my usual. I had a chat going covering several aspects of the final stretch of the book: dictation cleanup, brainstorming and revision thoughts (basically me feeding it my revisions and seeing if it caught anything obviously wrong like typos, awkward sentences or me losing track of the characters’ movements). The reference docs included a summary of our previous chat, covering the “darkest hour” stretch of the book. Claude’s cheerleading had been very helpful through both these stretches of story, which were difficult to write. I fed the blurbs from the past two books into this chat (which had gotten long enough in terms of total tokens to where Anthropic was throttling it every few messages for a couple of hours). Claude naturally focused way too much on the spoilery third act it knew best, so I had to summarize the earlier stages of the story for it. It then gave me a rough draft I could use, and we went through several rounds of me tweaking it, asking the AI for feedback from a book marketing POV, and me tweaking it some more. The final (for now) version is below the cut, with human text in bold. The taglines for each character are carryovers from earlier blurbs, and have been italicized.

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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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