I feel like there’s sometimes a tendency among writing gurus to pretend that either you systematically plot everything beat by beat, or you only write the story as it spontaneously generates in your head, with no notes or thoughts about how it’s going. As it happens, I’m reading History of the Lord of the Rings right now. Tolkien is usually described as a discovery writer, and the people who say that are not wrong, but he didn’t necessarily sit around waiting for inspiration to strike either…
Continue reading “Weird Wednesday: Discovery Writing”Category: World Building
That Horrifying Moment…
When you create a space regency setting as kind of a joke about
Continue reading “That Horrifying Moment…”Midjourney Monday: The Bennets’ Drawing Room in the Space Regency
I have like one line in the space regency about Longbourn having a drawing room with turquoise walls and pink furniture, but Midjourney kind of ran amok with the idea when I prompted it.
Friday Fragments: Chloe and the Wolf
An example of me getting a bit rambly during the previous week’s dictation session. This got cut because Maxim’s cousin Victor interjected himself into the conversation earlier than I originally thought. And it’s not entirely in character for Maxim to try to shield Chloe to that extent.
Continue reading “Friday Fragments: Chloe and the Wolf”Friday Fragments: Chloe on Maxim’s Cousin Victor
I cut this bit during the dictation cleanup process because it’s kind of rambly, and it’s not literally true that all Chloe knows about Maxim’s cousin is his parentage. Back in Wolf’s Trail, she also had to look up stuff in a book Victor wrote.
I’d heard references once or twice to Victor. Maxim and the other Storm Crows seemed to respect him, while the Continentals—the ordinary people of Noricum with no ancient knowledge or long lifespan—seemed to fear him. The only thing I knew for certain of him was that he was Jerome’s son, and Jerome I had no particular use for.
Midjourney Monday: Spot the Difference
I had to use “Vary Region” on this image. Vary Region is a Midjourney tool which keeps most of the image intact and only changes one area in it. The first image below is the revised image, the second one below is the original. Can you see what was changed?
Continue reading “Midjourney Monday: Spot the Difference”Friday Fragment: Bad News
This conversation originally took place with the two leads from the Hunter Healer King series talking in an elevator. In revisions, they’re actually having this convo on horseback, so the physical movements or “business” surrounding the conversation are different. For the record, Chloe and Maxim are not actually any kind of cousins, they just have faulty information about her family at this point.
Continue reading “Friday Fragment: Bad News”Midjourney Monday: Reception Area aboard The Last Repose
From the space regency, a brief bit of scene setting and the image which helped me visualize it, although you can also see where I chose to ignore it:
Continue reading “Midjourney Monday: Reception Area aboard The Last Repose”Friday Fragments: Alternate Geneaology Conversation
Note: this was cut from a longer discussion about Maxim and Chloe dealing with the possibility of being too closely related to marry. Parts of this backstory may reappear in some other part of Hunter Healer King 3 This is dictation transcribed by Whisper and cleaned up by Claude AI, without additional revision. You may spot some misspelled place names below and some examples of why I feel obliged to revise and rewrite after dictation cleanup.
Continue reading “Friday Fragments: Alternate Geneaology Conversation”Friday Fragments: The Wounding of the Quantum Tree
When I created the Jaiya setting, I thought it best, for various reasons, to use my own religion as the inspiration for the cosmogony and beliefs of the settings, rather than messing around with other people’s religions. So, here is Afaro Viamafar, “The Wounding of the Tree of Choices”, sometimes also titled “The Wounding of the Quantum Tree.” Parts of it are quoted as chapter headings in the novel Seeking the Quantum Tree. Apparently there are other scriptural writings in the setting (you can see passing references in the text below to at least two others), but this is the only one I ever wrote out in full, and one of the first things I wrote in the setting.
Continue reading “Friday Fragments: The Wounding of the Quantum Tree”
Jaglion Press 