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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The Golden Age of Adaptations

(Note: This is adapted from a comment I made elsewhere.)

A good adaptation from book to movie or tv, honors what is worthwhile about the source material, and changes the things that need to be changed for coherence in the new medium or for the audience’s comprehension. It follows therefore that you can’t make a good adaptation of a work that you believe has no merit. For instance, I would be the wrong person to adapt Frankenstein by Mary Shelley,

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Austenian: The Parents of Mansfield Park, Part 2

As previously indicated, I am interpreting the main body of Mansfield Park’s plot as happening in 1796-1797. However, the age indicators for most of the characters in this essay are very vague. Tom Bertram is apparently 25 during the main body of the plot, and I have randomly assumed that Henry Crawford is around that age, and that his sister Mary Crawford and their acquaintance John Yates are rather younger. 

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Austenian: The Parents of Mansfield Park, Part 1

Ellen Moody admits that only 1796-1797 fully works with the two strongly given dates in the text (Thursday, December 22 for the ball at Mansfield, and a “particularly late” Easter the following spring) but goes with R. W. Chapman’s 1808-1809 dates for the main body of the story, with a bit of handwaving about how the novel is obviously pieced together from partial drafts written at different times, and the “particularly late Easter” is merely an artifact of that process. Here, I am going with the 1796-1797 timeframe for the main plot, which I consider to start with the arrival of the Crawfords and the testing of Edmund and Fanny, and backdating accordingly. But the calendar of the book is heavily debated by scholars, and if you’re doing some sort of crossover work with the elder generation of another Austen novel, you have a lot of room to fudge the timeframes with this one. 

This novel is comparatively easy, in that we have three sisters and their husbands and maybe two other, basically offscreen, sets of parents to keep track of. We start with the fabulous Miss Wards: Miss Elizabeth(1) Ward, Miss Maria Ward and Miss Frances Ward. They were apparently all three of them very good-looking, possibly blonde(1.5) with seven thousand pounds apiece(2) which translates to 350 pounds a year or 87.5 pounds a quarter. 

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