Category: Writing

Where Did That Come From? Phantom Queen

Posted on Posted in Fantasy, Hunter Healer King, Mel Dunay, science-fiction, Steampunk, Weird Science, World Building, WritingTagged , , , Leave a comment

The Phantom Empire, starring Gene Autry, is a matinee serial that is part musical, part western and part sci-fi adventure. It’s not really very good at being any one of those things, but when I was a kid, it taught me that genre was more of a guideline than an actual rule. That was reinforced by some of the Hindi and Tamil movies I explored as an adult. The musical counterterrorist thriller/romcom Thuppaki, and its Bollywood version Holiday, are good examples of mashups that worked for their target audiences.

At any rate, the main image I retained from The Phantom Empire was of an arrogant woman lording it over an underground city. I made at least one attempt to write my own version of it in middle school. Life went on. I read H. Rider Haggard’s She, and decided the only characters I liked were the narrator/supporting character Horace Holly and Ustane, another supporting character who gets killed because Ayesha (the title character) sees her as competition for the love of boring himbo Leo Vincey.

Haggard wanted people to see Leo as a heroic figure and Ayesha as a tragic anti-heroine destined to be purified (in the sequel) by reincarnation and vaguer forms of woo-woo. He devoted a whole paragraph of his foreword to shooting down Holly/Ayesha shippers, which tells you something about the feedback he was getting before publication. For my part, I mostly felt that Ayesha was a villainess, and Holly was the real hero of the piece, and the Ursula Andress film version from the mid-sixties appealed to me because it…kind of almost looked like the makers agreed with me? At least on Ayesha’s villainy, anyway.

Sometime in the 00s, when I was making my first fumbling attempts to write actual novels, I brainstormed an idea I called The Phantom Queen. It went through a few variations, including a post-apocalyptic western about a couple of roving cowboy troubadours broadcasting from the wasteland, but the gist of it was always the same. The young, dashing man who turns out to be an empty suit; his wiser and kinder mentor; the glamorously evil Queen of a subterranean city; the well-meaning woman forced to serve her and destined to fall for the mentor. I didn’t write it at that time, and it eventually faded to the background.

Then, sometime in the middle of writing Undead Flight, the idea returned to me as a kind of backstory for Maxim os Storm’s parents. The steampunky Drill and the dragon wandered in as well at that point, possibly inspired by the film version of At The Earth’s Core. (No, they don’t call it a dragon in that movie, but as of the point you have a giant fire-breathing lizard that dies to an arrow-shot ala Smaug, it’s a distinction without a difference.)

Some more references to the evil Queen emerged over the course of writing Dragon’s Teeth. By the time I was done with that one, I had a pretty fair idea of what my next book in that setting was going to be. Phantom Queen is a prequel. Maxim’s parents, his uncles, and the underground city where a glamorous woman has been ruling longer than for thousands of years. It is gaslamp fantasy with a Drill, a dragon, and a slow-burn romance. There is no explicit content, and there is plenty of drama.

It comes out on the 16th and is available to preorder now.

If you are new to the series, I would read it fourth. I explain why here.

Hunter Healer King Reading Order, and Why Phantom Queen Goes Last

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Once upon a time, Hunter Healer King was a simple trilogy. It told the story of a cowgirl with a knife and a doctor with a gun and a royal destiny. They hunted monsters together, and fell in love. Then, I got interested in telling the story of the doctor’s parents, and that became my upcoming release, Phantom Queen. If you’re new to the series, here’s the order I’d read it in:

  1. Wolf’s Trail: Chloe frees the wrong man, and gets turned into a werewolf for her pains. Maxim turns out to be the only doctor who can cure her.
  2. Undead Flight: Maxim is to be crowned aboard an airship. A monster is lurking somewhere aboard, and Chloe must help him destroy it in between coming to terms with her feelings for him.
  3. Dragon’s Teeth: Chloe’s marriage to Maxim may be doomed before it begins. That won’t stop them from facing down a killer in the city, and a dragon flying over it.
  4. Phantom Queen: Eighty years earlier, Maxim’s father drills into a dying kingdom and meets the woman who will become Maxim’s mother. Out November 16.

That’s publication order, and it’s also the order I’d choose.

The books connect. Each has its own monster-hunting case, but the romance and the kingship carry through all three, and Dragon’s Teeth opens with the aftermath of Undead Flight. Starting with book two might theoretically work, but you’ll be a little behind, and it’s more fun to start at the start.

Why Phantom Queen goes last. It takes place eighty years before Wolf’s Trail, so I understand why a numbering system might put it first. I decided against that for a practical reason. The book can be read on its own, without reference to the first three. But personally, I feel like it’s a richer, more interesting experience for people who already know the world and care about Maxim and his family.

There’s also a plainer reason. Some of the characters you meet in Phantom Queen are people you’ll already know from the trilogy, and you’ll read their scenes differently when you know what’s coming. It’s a better book read fourth, and that’s the order I wrote it for.

If you’ve already read the trilogy, you’re set. Phantom Queen is a story you can pick right away, and you’ll get the most out of it.

Heat level and tone: All four books are dual POV gaslamp fantasy with monster hunting, a slow-burn romance and an unlikely king. No explicit content.

Where to start today: If you’re new to the series, Wolf’s Trail is where you would want to begin. Read it and the other two books today, so you can be ready for the arrival of…the Phantom Queen!

Fixing the Clank: Using Stylometry to Improve AI-Written Fiction

Posted on Posted in ai, georgette heyer, Jane Austen, LLMs, Weird Science, WritingTagged , , , , , 2 Comments

Two JAFF-reading acquaintances of mine, one broadly pro-AI and the other fairly AI-neutral, have both complained recently about the AI-written JAFF turning up in Kindle Unlimited. The ideas are often interesting. The prose is so tedious and repetitive that many of these are barely readable and absolutely unlistenable. Audio is a merciless format: it exposes every clank and clunk in a sentence, along with any typos.

For the love of Heaven, AI authors, please use stylometry to get your skynets writing with a little more human rhythm. Stylometry is the statistical analysis of literary style: sentence length and how much it varies, sentence structure, vocabulary, punctuation habits, and so on. Here’s how to get started.

  1. Install spaCy (spacy.io) in your Python environment, plus a language model such as en_core_web_sm. spaCy is a general-purpose language-processing library, and it handles the sentence splitting and part-of-speech tagging you need.
  2. Ask your AI to write a Python script that reports the statistics you care about: mean and spread of sentence length, commas and semicolons per thousand words, dialogue versus narration, and so on.
  3. Download a batch of public domain texts from Gutenberg by an author you like. Strip the Gutenberg license text from the front and back so it doesn’t muddy the numbers, then run the script on the lot.

Georgette Heyer’s famous Regency novels are not public domain, but Gutenberg has four of her early novels, and that’s enough to get started. They’re historicals from various eras rather than her mature Regency style, so they won’t help much if you’re trying to imitate her voice. They’re plenty for the statistics, though. When I ran a stylometric analysis on my own work, the numbers came out surprisingly consistent across first- and third-person books and every genre and setting I’d written in.

Even on a bad day, Heyer was probably a better prose stylist than you or me, and certainly a better one than our clanker friends. There’s a bonus, too. Gutenberg’s txt files render em-dashes as double hyphens, which your script won’t count as em-dashes, so the benchmarks come out em-dash free. That helps offset one of the AI’s most notorious tics.

Once you have the analysis, take the numbers back to your AI and explain that these are rough benchmarks for its writing style. It doesn’t need to hit them in the initial composition. It should audit its drafts against them afterward and rewrite where it misses. Stylometry won’t cure everything, since stock phrases and repetitive vocabulary need their own attention, but it goes a long way toward fixing the rhythm.

For a more detailed walkthrough, please see this Future Fiction Academy video on the method:

Then run the revised chapter through text-to-speech. If it still clanks, try, try again.

Phantom Queen Complete!

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The first draft of my fourteenth novel is done. There’s backfilling and revising left, but it should reach you in mid-November.

The Stormcrows tunnel down in an ancient drill the size of a mansion, to reach a city that has been sealed under the earth for three thousand years and is running out of air. Urban os Storm goes along as the translator: a scholar and monster-hunter who has had eighty years to get good at both, and looks about half that. Mara, twenty years his junior and equally long-lived, keeps the peace in the underground city, trying to shield the common folk from the wrath of their deathless, evil Queen. Then this stranger from the Drill takes apart the centerpiece at the Queen’s midwinter feast and hands it out the gate to the city’s children, one at a time, with a greeting for each of them. Mara has served the Queen for decades and dealt with all kinds of scum, but she’s never met anyone like Urban.

It’s a prequel, but it will be numbered book four in the Hunter Healer King series. Urban and Mara are Maxim’s parents, and I feel like their story works better if you already know Maxim and his world. Since it’s a single book rather than a trilogy, and Urban is a bit more urbane than his son, he and Mara get where they’re going considerably faster than Maxim and Chloe did. Still no explicit content. As with the other books in the series, this is a gaslamp fantasy adventure with a romance growing up around the adventure, rather than the other way around.

I’ve been self-publishing for around ten and a half years. I’m a little horrified to realize that Phantom Queen would bring my average to something like 1.33 books a year. And also…I just turned fifty recently. It seems like I ought to have some kind of wisdom to share, but I can’t think of much. Here’s a few suggestions:

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Yay, My Books Are Now Available on Audible!

Posted on Posted in ai, Cool Books, Fantasy, Hunter Healer King, Jaiya, Jane Austen, Marrying A Monster, Mel Dunay, Myth, One Weird Trick, Pride & Planetoids, Publishing Plans, science-fiction, Space Opera, The Stars By Degrees, Weird Science, WritingTagged , , , , 3 Comments

These use Amazon’s Virtual Voice feature. I was pleasantly surprised by how convincing these artificial voices were, and I hope you will enjoy them as well. I had to have Claude Cowork resplit the chapters for the ebooks on the Hunter Healer King trilogy, so that each chapter was strictly a Chloe POV or a Maxim POV, because you can’t switch voices midchapter with Virtual Voice. If you have any issues with the new formatting, please let me know. For the Jaiya books, I only had the series collections voiced.

For my fellow writers, I have some additional tips below the cut…

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The Making of A Curious Case: A Claude CoWork Project

Posted on Posted in A Curious Case, ai, Editing, Jane Austen, LLMs, Weird Science, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , , 6 Comments

Usually, I hold the “making of” posts for these fanfics until a bit later in the serialization, but I wanted to report on this one while my thoughts were fresh.

A Curious Case started out, the way all these AI-drafted fanfics do, with a story idea that I wanted to read but didn’t feel passionate enough to actually write. I knew it was going to be a long, complicated story to tell. I also discovered that Anthropic was running a promotion through most of June and the beginning of July that doubled the user’s session limits when working inside Claude CoWork.

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The Copernicus Expedition: A Public Briefing 

Posted on Posted in ai, Jane Austen, LLMs, Lore Drop, Mel Dunay, Pride & Planetoids, science-fiction, Space Opera, Star Wars, The Stars By Degrees, Weird Science, World Building, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

From the Parliamentary Record of Albion Space, Educational Broadcast, House of Resources 

[The following is an excerpt from the public educational archives maintained by the House of Resources, recorded for general distribution across Albion Space and for Terra-side audiences. Transcript lightly edited for readability.] 

There are moments in the life of any civilisation when it becomes necessary to return to first principles. The Commonwealth of Albion was founded by people who understood that the circumstances which make a place habitable are not permanent, and that the capacity to move, when moving becomes necessary, is not a failure of commitment but an expression of it. 

This briefing concerns the Copernicus expedition: a proposal, now formally before both chambers of Parliament, to revive and implement the original colony mission for which the marcher-ships of Albion Space were built. 

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Fanficcing with Claude: The Rector’s Other Business, Notes

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I used a different prompting framework for this fanfic than I did for Sense and Sensibility and Placage. Around the time I started work on this, the Future Fiction Academy open-sourced a set of AI constraints they called the Narrative Physics Engine. (At this link, search for “worksheet” and then for “section_18”. Those are the important parts.) If you’re looking at the stuff at the link and thinking “gee all that seems like overkill just to scratch a fanfic itch,” that’s also more or less what Claude said when I copy-pasted all that stuff in.

We worked together on this set of constraints to build three sets of markdowns. One to use when brainstorming original fiction, to build a source document Claude could refer back to when I fed it bits of WIP for dictation cleanup, etc. One to use at the start of the revision process, to help Claude understand the finished first draft. A third and shorter one for fanfic, which I used for this fanfic. Claude built a usable outline for The Rector’s Other Business in short order, and drafted the whole thing across a handful of sessions. I was not wild about the style Claude used for this, even with an initial discussion about Collins’s voice, and a reference to the film which had initially given me this story idea (Night Creatures, Hammer’s version of Dr. Syn with the serial numbers filed off). If you’ve ever read parodies of Rudyard Kipling by the generation or two of authors immediately after him, Claude sounded kind of like that in this story, with a lot of pseudo-profound, pseudo-snarky tautologies. Because this was a shorter and lighter fanfic than Sense and Sensibility and Placage, I edited it much more heavily at a sentence level. You will note that Claude made very free with the em-dashes for Mr. Collins’s rambling speeches “in character” as the pompous clergyman he is pretending to be. I left them alone because this was a situation where they actually worked and were even period appropriate.

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Fanficcing with Claude: The Rector’s Other Business, Chapter 17

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The weeks that followed had the quality of an aftermath. It was a period in which the important things had happened and the world was in the process of catching up with them.

April moved toward May and the spring advanced with it. The hedgerows filled in and the fields greened and the light stayed longer each evening. Hunsford returned to its routines with the relief of a place that has weathered something difficult and come through intact. The Sunday congregations were perhaps slightly larger than they had been. Whether this represented renewed piety or a clearer understanding of what their rector was capable of I could not say and did not ask. The runs continued. There were two before the end of April, both clean and unremarkable. The Gofton roof continued to hold. Pyke maintained the churchyard with his customary attention and said nothing about anything.

Darcy and Elizabeth came to an understanding, and informed Lady Catherine while she was still chastened by the fall of Gerard Annesley. I do not think that Darcy reminded her that he and his betrothed knew about his aunt’s dependence on the free-traders. He would not have needed to.

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State of the Author, Summer 2026 Edition

Posted on Posted in ai, Art, Fantasy, Holidays, humor, Hunter Healer King, Jaiya, Jane Austen, LLMs, Mel Dunay, Mystery, One Weird Trick, Pride & Planetoids, Publishing Plans, science-fiction, Space Opera, Star Wars, Steampunk, The Stars By Degrees, videos, Weird Science, WritingTagged , , , , 2 Comments

This has been a stressful couple of months, for reasons that I’ve alluded to here and here. The real life stuff mentioned in the second post are still ongoing, so prayers are welcome. In the meantime, here’s what’s happened on the writing front in the meantime:

Three Ladies in Black: done at ~46000 words, except possibly for minor tweaks before formatting, publishing et al. This is the first in a planned series of Ruritanian cozy mysteries with an alt-history angle. Why Ruritanian cozy mysteries with an alt-history angle? Well, if you held a gun to my head, I probably could write something that didn’t sit across three different genres like a disgruntled hippopotamus, but where would be the fun in that? Anyway, the plan is to start a new pen name (possibly implied to be a pseudonym of the femme fatale narrator) and publish the first three together sometime in 2027-2028, then assess how well they do. 

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