Monster hunters, spaceships and comedy of manners by indie author Mel Dunay
(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,
Continue reading “The Golden Age of Adaptations” →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.
Continue reading “Austenian: The Parents of Mansfield Park, Part 2” →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.
Continue reading “Austenian: The Parents of Mansfield Park, Part 1” →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…
Continue reading “State of the Author, 3Q2025” →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…
Continue reading “So, Novelcrafter…” →Couple weeks late to the party, I know, but here’s a short Midjourney video based on the Wolf’s Trail cover.
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
Continue reading “Gee, Thanks, You BBC Turkeys” →From the space regency: this is a catchy line, but I decided it didn’t really work for the flow of the conversation or Elizabeth’s character:
“I’m not really very good at reels,” Elizabeth said. “Or at least I play them better than I dance them.”
From the Hunter Healer King book; something like this is in the current draft, but the information flows differently:
“There’s a whole cluster of pictures of them,” Carl said. He pointed to a group which mostly showed They came in various sizes, from low-slung and barely six inches tall to very good-sized examples. Many of them were black with tan masks and tan feet. The centerpiece was a portrait of Countess von Altenberg, whom I had met the night before. She wore a long white dress and at her feet held two standing dogs on a sort of split leash.
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!
Chloe and Maxim originally had a lengthy conversation with and about a messenger boy they met, whom Maxim hired to help show her around. When I dropped the idea of Chloe exploring Lower Haupstadt (the “Pest” analogue, to the extent that Haupstadt is loosely based on Budapest) on foot, I aged up the messenger so he was no longer someone whose safety the characters would particularly fret about, and this part became redundant:
“Was it safe for him to be out?” I asked Maxim. “With that beast out there?”
“I don’t think he’s in any danger from the attack dog, or whatever it was,” Maxim said. “It seems pretty clear that the dead man was targeted, that people close to the Armor of Arent and people who take a professional interest in it are at risk. I sent word to the Stormcrows to be careful. And if the police know the dead man’s line of work and understand in broad terms why he was killed, they should be on the alert in that neighborhood.”
“And what about ordinary crime?” I asked. “Thieves and pickpockets and so on.”
Maxim tilted his head to one side. “What makes you think the messenger boy wasn’t one of those?”
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