Monster hunters, spaceships and comedy of manners by indie author Mel Dunay
Three thousand years ago, when Arent os Storm fled the fall of Thule, he brought with him more than just survivors and ancient knowledge.
He brought a weapon.
The Armor of Arent is a forty-foot-tall mecha in the shape of a knight in armor, with a crow-faced visor on the helmet, framed by wings. It can walk, it can fly, and it’s been waiting for a king worthy to pilot it. It may have finally found one.
Continue reading “The Armor of Arent: A Forty-Foot Mecha Waiting for the Hunter Healer King” →For more information about this project, check out the earlier posts in the category “Sense and Sensibility and Placage.” Claude did very well on its first draft. For the redraft, I asked it to rework an incoherent description of what the Dashwoods’ mother was doing with her hands during the cart ride, and have Marianne show more emotion. My instinct is that free women of color in this time and place would not have survived long, if they showed the overwrought behavior that Marianne and her mother do in the Austen novel. But Marianne isn’t Marianne if she isn’t the most emo person in any given room. Then I realized this was the right time to introduce Edward, and that led to two more drafts. I manually removed an em-dash rather than ask for another draft.
Journey to Faubourg Marigny
Continue reading “Fanficcing with Claude: Sense and Sensibility and Placage, Scene 5” →For the origins of this project, see previous posts in “Sense and Sensibility and Placage” category. Claude’s first draft was fairly satisfactory on this one, and draft two was me asking for em-dash removal and sentence level fixes in a few places where the AI’s lack of logic became obvious. The words “with her [Frances’s] advice” are mine. I didn’t like what Claude had there but couldn’t justify mucking around with a third draft for it.
Planning the Departure
Continue reading “Fanficcing with Claude: Sense and Sensibility and Placage, Scene 4” →For more information about this project, please see past posts under the “Sense and Sensibility and Placage” category. Claude, amazingly, got through draft 1 with no em-dashes! I asked for a rephrase of one sentence that felt anachronistic to me, and to break down a loooong sentence that ended this scene in draft 1. Otherwise draft 2, which you see here, is much what draft 1 was. I did realize at the last minute that this needed to come before the first Marianne POV, even though the latter was written first, and adjusted the scheduling accordingly. I haven’t had much reason to quarrel with these early setup scenes, but we will see how Claude does once the romance arcs start.
Letter from Mrs. Jennings
Continue reading “Fanficcing with Claude: Sense and Sensibility and Placage, Scene 3” →https://youtube.com/shorts/uzB7gH_NEUo
⚠️ SPOILER WARNING for Books 1-2
Continue reading “Video Thursday: Mecha vs Dragon Edition” →Maxim os Storm was a young man away at university when a kallomancer and her leeches attacked the airship carrying his parents.
The creatures tore through passengers and crew, drinking blood and spreading terror. By the time it was over, Maxim had lost his parents and other family members to the monsters many hunters consider the most dangerous algomancers of all.
This is personal for him. And for the Stormcrows who survived that night, kallomancers represent a threat that can never be forgiven.
Continue reading “Kallomancers and Their Leeches: The Most Dangerous Algomancers in Hunter Healer King” →For more information on this fanfic project and why I outsourced the drafting of it to Claude, see the previous post in the “Sense and Sensibility and Placage” category. Claude completed this scene in five and a fraction drafts. It started out with a confused approach to the will, which draft two corrected after I set it on the right path. It also had John Dashwood offering a cottage (supposed to be the property of Mrs. Jennings) to his half-sisters. I got it to correct that and the em-dashes in draft three. The last fractional draft was to address a particular bit where John Dashwood talks around how much money he’s going to give his stepmother/half-sisters per annum. I sympathized with Claude’s desire not to specify an amount in currency, but I thought there was a better way of not committing ourselves, and asked for a redraft. Then I realized that Celeste Dashwood, the heroines’ mother really needed to be present and at least somewhat active for this scene. And then I caught a couple of other minor things I wanted to correct, so then came draft five. Eleonore’s last line in the scene is my rewording of Claude, and minor edits by me were also made for continuity with later scenes.
The Promise and Its Breaking
Continue reading “Fanficcing with Claude: Sense and Sensibility and Placage, Scene 2” →Up til now, the only writing projects I have let Claude draft are fanfics that I wanted to read but don’t care enough to write myself. This one is a retelling of S&S set in New Orleans in 1813-1814 with the female leads as placées. In this case, I did so partly because I felt uncomfortable with trying to recreate the often downbeat tone of the source novel. Another reason I undertook this was to get a better feel for Claude’s project feature. I will probably do a process post either at the end of this experiment or maybe the midway point. Below the cut is Claude’s third draft of the first. Its first draft elided any discussion of the heroines’ ethnicity and social status, which is pretty important to this retelling. After I had it fix that, I told it to eliminate the em-dashes (which it tried to argue with me about) and rework a labored metaphor about Henry Dashwood’s illness. The result is below the cut.
The Death of Henry Dashwood
Continue reading “Fanficcing with Claude: Sense and Sensibility and Placage, Scene 1” →Since my last series of AI process posts, the much hyped Claude CoWork finally came to Windows. I was curious about it, so I upgraded to a Claude Pro account. I am enjoying the increased chatbot usage that comes with a Pro account. Claude, possibly, is not. Periodically it starts gently hinting that we are DONE with a particular subtopic and need to MOVE ON. As for CoWork itself, the Windows version is very glitchy. I’ve only gotten a modest amount of useful work out of it. Specifically, I wanted to go back and make clearer POV shift indicators for some of my past novels. I put the manuscripts in a subfolder of the only folder on the computer that CoWork has access to. Then I asked CoWork to review each manuscript, and write a report which quotes the first sentence after each POV shift. Here’s a couple observations:
-Opus 4.6 glitches out less often than Sonnet 4.6 does in Cowork mode, but lives up to its reputation as a usage hog. Reviewing one 50K-ish word manuscript and writing the report on it used up most of a Pro Plan usage session. I ended up running these tasks at times when my session limits had reset, and I did not expect to need Claude for a while. Late at night, early in the morning, times like that.
-Even Opus 4.6 glitches out in CoWork when asked to write fanfic. This might be a guardrail related to Anthropic’s predominantly corporate focus for CoWork. Or maybe I’m not giving it clear enough instructions. As you can see from the past “Fanficcing with Claude” posts, I tend to be pretty general in my fanficcing instructions.
-My initial feeling is that CoWork is going to be most useful for tasks too large for a chatbot and too specific to justify building a whole automation, but we’ll see how it goes.
Jaglion Press