Category: Writing

State of the Author, Start of 2025

Posted on Posted in bookbinding, Covers, Editing, Fantasy, Jaiya, Jane Austen, LLMs, Marketing, Marrying A Monster, Mel Dunay, Midjourney, Mystery, Myth, One Weird Trick, Publishing Plans, Python, Rings of Power, Space Opera, Steampunk, Uncategorized, Weird Science, World Building, WritingTagged , , , Leave a comment

My plans for the New Year are always kind of vague, because “Mann tracht un Gott lacht” (Man plans, and God laughs).

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The Novels of Marie Belloc Lowndes: The Ones That End Where Agatha Christie Begins

Posted on Posted in Marie Belloc Lowndes, Mystery, One Weird Trick, Weird Science, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

(Note: As previously indicated, the Lowndes books I have read are mostly available on Gutenberg and/or Amazon. In past reviews of early 20th century books, I have not made any effort to offer content warnings, on the assumption that anybody reading these reviews knows better than to expect present-day attitudes on certain topics from books of this timeframe. I am continuing with that assumption here.)

Alot of Agatha Christie’s novels feel like we’re on the outside of some messy domestic situation, looking in at the situation shortly before and after it turns violent. If you ever wondered what seeing the inside of those situations would be like, you’re in luck! Marie Belloc Lowndes wrote lots of those. The characterization is a mile wide and an inch deep, and the situations tend to repeat themselves, but to me, there’s something insistent and weirdly compelling about the way Lowndes shows the reader every component in these emotional powder kegs. As a bonus, you get a good look at the kind of expectations authors like Agatha Christie set out to subvert, because the whodunnit components of these mysteries tend to be pretty banal.

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The Novels of Marie Belloc Lowndes: Hercule Popeau and Various Innocents Abroad

Posted on Posted in Fantasy, Marie Belloc Lowndes, Mystery, Weird Science, WritingTagged , , , , , , , Leave a comment

(Note: As previously indicated, the Lowndes books I have read are mostly available on Gutenberg and/or Amazon. In past reviews of early 20th century books, I have not made any effort to offer content warnings, on the assumption that anybody reading these reviews knows better than to expect present-day attitudes on certain topics from books of this timeframe. I am continuing with that assumption here.)

The second-most famous thing Lowndes did, (the most famous being her novel The Lodger), was to write a novel called The Lonely House, in which a sheltered, financially prosperous young Englishwoman fetches up in Monaco, only to be caught up in a love triangle and menaced by people who are after her money, although she has trouble grasping their bad intentions.

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Weird Wednesday: Reviews of Old Mysteries

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Golden Age Mysteries are one of my default things to read when I don’t know what I want to read. I thought I’d share thoughts on a few of the less famous mystery writers to cross my radar:

-Victor Luhrs: responsible for The Longbow Murders, a fairly bonkers historical mystery where ruthless, brawling warrior-king Richard the Lion-Hearted solves a series of murders with the help of a twerpy scribe/narrator/Watson wannabe and some brief forensic work on ballistics from Robin of Locksley (yes that Robin of Locksley, and no he’s not in this very much). I enjoyed this old-school take on Richard I, portrayed here as a brash and hot-tempered man, but not a stupid one. The narrator, who’s kind of useless and spends a lot of time thinking patronizing thoughts about his “poor, fat” wife, is a less appealing character. The book does sell that combination of deep-seated respect for religious subjects, with a comparatively casual attitude towards the clergy, that you see in actual medieval works.

Mystery parts are kind of shaky; the author tries to pull off a “least likely person” twist but hasn’t developed the character well enough to sell the twist. Heck, the author doesn’t even seem to realize that some of the goofier aspects of the mystery (murderer using a long bow at close range and leaving taunting notes around) could be an attempt by the murderer to build up an image of themselves very different from the actuality, to deceive the investigators. Still, I found it more entertaining than alot of works by more respected mystery writers. If you like Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy stories, this has a fair amount of Garrett-style flippancy, and feels a bit like a Lord Darcy prequel set in Richard’s time (when they haven’t discovered the magic/psionic stuff yet). If you get your ideas about the Plantagenets from Becket, Lion in Winter, or Robin and Marian, stay away – this book will annoy you because it’s operating from a completely different set of preconceptions about what the Plantagenets were and what historical fiction should be.

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Hunter Healer King, Book 2 is Here!

Posted on Posted in Cool Books, Fantasy, history, Mel Dunay, Myth, Paranormal Romance, Publishing Plans, Steampunk, Weird Science, World Building, WritingTagged , , , Leave a comment

The name’s Chloe Fortebat, and I am in trouble. First I helped Maxim kill a werewolf, then I kissed him, and then I insulted him when I found out that he was roughly twice as old as he looked. Now Maxim is about to be crowned King of the Stormcrows aboard a luxury airship, and he has invited me to attend. But this ship feels more like a cage with each passing hour: a passenger’s horse has turned up missing, a crewman has turned up dead, and before it all started, I heard noises in the cargo hold. But Maxim has a mind as sharp as my banishing dagger, and between us, we aim to put an end to whatever monster lurks aboard the ship, no matter how awkward we feel around each other right now…

My name is Dr. Maxim os Storm, and I hunt the beasts that haunt the night. With my coronation mere hours away, something stalks the shadows of this vessel: a monster that answers to a human being..but who? And for what purpose? Despite our recent…complications, Chloe’s courage and loyalty make her my strongest ally as I pursue our enemies, and brace for the dreadful pomp and circumstance of my own coronation. The crown of the Stormcrows may await me, but first, we have a mystery to solve – together.

State of the Author, 4Q2024

Posted on Posted in Art, Cool Books, Fantasy, Gladiator, Jaiya, Jane Austen, LLMs, Mel Dunay, Myth, Oldblood Series, Paranormal Romance, Publishing Plans, Space Opera, Steampunk, Weird Science, World Building, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

-First off, I think my books are all in Kindle Unlimited now, free to anyone with a subscription to KU. If you see any sign that they are not in KU, please let me know in the comments.

–Undead Flight (Hunter Healer King Book 2) is now in the hands of my proofreaders. Barring complications, should be ready to publish by Christmas time. Ebook cover is done; blurb is done with AI help (stay tuned, my post on the blurbing process will be out tomorrow. Print cover is dependent on my final cleanup of the manuscript to determine page length.

-Also started Hunter Healer King Book 3 by writing a fairly dark and distressing scene from the last third of the book. This is kind of suboptimal, because stitching together scenes written out of order tends to add (wo)manhours to the first draft process, but I hadn’t figured out the opening scene at that point. I don’t know when it will be released but I know that I am aiming for Christmas of 2025.

-I have had a sci-fi Pride and Prejudice retelling in development for a long time; finally got the first scene down. No projected completion date at this time. My main inspiration for this concept was, weirdly enough, Star Wars: A New Hope. If you dig deep enough into the filmographies of the supporting cast, you will find one with a Pride and Prejudice connection in his earlier career. Regrettably, the catchy working title explicitly references Star Wars, so the official title will probably be something rather sedate of the “Pride and…” format.

-New ebook covers using AI art for Shadow Captain and Spider Star are done; still need to do new paperback covers for them, and ebook/hardcover for the 2 in 1 volume for the duology. Projected release date for the 2 in 1 is first/second quarter of 2025.

-Early stages of AI art covers for the Jaiya Series and Ancestors of Jaiya series. No text layout yet. A four in one of Ancestors might come out in third quarter of 2025; a seven in one of the full metaseries might be sometime in 2026 but a lot could go sideways between now and then.

Sequel to Wolf’s Trail Is Done!

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A hair over 56K words, so a bit longer than Wolf’s Trail itself. What’s next? Well, I’m going to take a break from this universe for a week or so, try to work on getting my older stuff into Kindle Unlimited, and other “administrative” writing related work, and then try to get back to work on the novel in maybe second week of November, – cleanup, breaking into chapters, submission to the people who early-read and edit for me. I hope to have it out by the end of the year, but no guarantees.

Let’s throw in a somewhat triumphant sounding Bollywood video while we’re at it:

How to Use Claude.ai for Cleaning Up Transcriptions

Posted on Posted in Cool Websites, Dictation, Editing, LLMs, Uncategorized, Weird Science, WritingTagged , , , , , , 5 Comments

This article is primarily about the Claude.ai feature called “projects,” but his example project is about using Claude to cleanup the nasty, incoherent speech-to-text output that Word and similar programs spit out. I’ve tested the commands involved in the free version of Claude, and they work reasonably well. I still went back and reworded and expanded a bunch of stuff after I used it, but it was nice having something that would reliably cut out the nonsense words and repetitions and add some kind of punctuation. Here are the commands; just copy and paste into Claude’s chat window, and upload a short document with your latest chunk of dictation. As always with AI, check the company’s privacy and training policies before feeding it anything of a personal or sensitive nature.

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Writer PSA

Posted on Posted in history, Paranormal Romance, Scrivener, Steampunk, World Building, WritingTagged , 1 Comment

Always try to collect all your notes on a particular story in one place somewhere. I was reading some books about writing mysteries, remembered a failed mystery idea(1) I had done a lot of world building for, went to look up the Scrivener file I had for it, and discovered that a). it took me an embarrassingly long time to find it because I’d named the file after a relatively trivial story element I wasn’t interested in using anymore and b). although I had successfully corralled the setting notes om scriv(2) and some general ideas on the two detectives, I did not have notes on my plot ideas.

And okay, when I did a deep dive into the notebooks I was using around the time I was brainstorming this, I found that my plot ideas were mostly pretty lame, and that was why I hadn’t taken them seriously enough to put them into Scrivener, but I would have saved myself a certain amount of trouble if I had.

(1) it was one of the iterations of the Feisty Girl/Posh Guy concept that eventually led to Wolf’s Trail, would have been maybe 3a or 4a on this list or this list.

(2) Incredibly important because I had zeroed in on, and even mapped, a tiny bit of Slovenia in an alternate post-WWI, with history on why it was previously its own principality going back several generations and including an alternate wife for a guy who saved Emperor Franz-Josef from an assassination attempt and an additional daughter for Queen Victoria.