2026 promises some big changes in my life. I will be helping some family members moving into a smaller place. Also, I will dealing with some new and different writing challenges. I have three WIPs, all in different genres/settings, plus a different approach to marketing my work. Fingers crossed!
Category: Writing
From Gaucho Lifestyle to Monster Hunting: Chloe Fortebat’s Journey in the Hunter Healer King Trilogy
What if a rancher’s daughter discovered that monsters were real?
Chloe Fortebat left her father’s ranch in Silberne with nothing but her horses, her knive, and a mysterious inheritance. She expected to find a new life in the Old World. What she found instead were werewolves, necromancers, and a sharp-dressed monster hunter who would change everything. This is the story of how a pragmatic frontier woman became the co-protagonist of the Hunter Healer King trilogy.
Continue reading “From Gaucho Lifestyle to Monster Hunting: Chloe Fortebat’s Journey in the Hunter Healer King Trilogy”Dragon’s Teeth (Hunter Healer King 3) is Now Live
The name’s Chloe Fortebat, and I don’t understand this place at all.
Maxim and I are engaged, but there’s a problem: his late mother may be too closely related to my mother. We need answers about her past, but she abandoned me as a child, and we don’t know where she is now. Meanwhile, a candidate for Emperor was attacked by a vicious beast, and Maxim’s friend the Prime Minister is pushing him forward as a replacement. I think Maxim would be good at it, but right now, we have bigger problems. We have to find my mother, and stop the monster stalking this city. But neither the monster nor my mother may be what we expected.
My name is Dr. Maxim os Storm, and I hunt the beasts that haunt the night.
I want to marry Chloe more than anything, but first we must find her mother, who vanished years ago under suspicious circumstances. As we investigate, the questions multiply. What creature killed one man and mauled another near the Beast Garden? What is the meaning of the signet ring marked with a face that is half woman, half dragon? Why does the Prime Minister want to thrust the Imperial Crown onto my head? But Chloe’s courage never wavers, no matter what ancient horrors await us. We will find the answers we seek, and face the darkness together.
Due Disclosure: Me and AI and Marketing
To me, AI is a flawed but interesting tool, brought to us by the same flawed (and often corrupt) people who brought us the rest of the modern conveniences we live with. Other people have other opinions about it, and out of respect for them, I try to be transparent about my use of AI.
I do not use AI for first draft writing or for high-level concept and character background work. I have found ai chatbots (mostly Claude.ai) helpful for tasks like:
Continue reading “Due Disclosure: Me and AI and Marketing”Weird Wednesday: The Role of Religion in My Science Fiction and Fantasy
(Adapted from a comment made elsewhere.)
Religion is not at the foreground of the stories I tend to tell, but it is in the background, part of the “vibe,” so to speak. I tend to stick to versions of a specific cosmogony (Creator+quasi angels+quasi devils), partly because it reflects my own Catholic beliefs, but also frankly because my world-building energy is limited, and most of the time, I’d rather spend it elsewhere.
Continue reading “Weird Wednesday: The Role of Religion in My Science Fiction and Fantasy”State of the Author, 4Q2025
It’s been roughly three months since the last State of the Author, so here’s where I’m at:
Continue reading “State of the Author, 4Q2025”Friday Fragments: A Cold Kind of Anger
Maxim’s Uncle Ambrose is prone to that type of nervous Edwardian blethering that we Americans mostly associate with Bertie Wooster, or maybe Miss Bates of Highbury. To me, this was actually kind of a cute insight into Ambrose’s thoughts on both his nephews, Maxim and Victor, but I had to cut most of it because Ambrose was wandering just a bit too far off topic:
“Victor told me Maxim was out of his mind with grief and anger when he saw what had been done to you. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him really angry. It was a cold kind of anger, Victor told me, and I can believe it. The two cousins have rather similar temperaments pointed in different directions, and I’ve seen Victor in that kind of cold rage once or twice. I wonder if he recognized it when he saw it on Maxim, or thought that only he himself was like that.”
Hunter Healer King 3 blurb
This was a collaboration with Claude.ai, but a bit different from my usual. I had a chat going covering several aspects of the final stretch of the book: dictation cleanup, brainstorming and revision thoughts (basically me feeding it my revisions and seeing if it caught anything obviously wrong like typos, awkward sentences or me losing track of the characters’ movements). The reference docs included a summary of our previous chat, covering the “darkest hour” stretch of the book. Claude’s cheerleading had been very helpful through both these stretches of story, which were difficult to write. I fed the blurbs from the past two books into this chat (which had gotten long enough in terms of total tokens to where Anthropic was throttling it every few messages for a couple of hours). Claude naturally focused way too much on the spoilery third act it knew best, so I had to summarize the earlier stages of the story for it. It then gave me a rough draft I could use, and we went through several rounds of me tweaking it, asking the AI for feedback from a book marketing POV, and me tweaking it some more. The final (for now) version is below the cut, with human text in bold. The taglines for each character are carryovers from earlier blurbs, and have been italicized.
Continue reading “Hunter Healer King 3 blurb”Midjourney Monday: The Longbourn Ballroom
Longbourn’s ballroom was the site of most of the asteroid’s streaming videos, and Mrs. Bennet had insisted on giving it a more regular shape than most of Longbourne’s interior spaces. The space was an immense rectangle with gleaming white marble floors and columns that reflected the purple and gold lights. The far wall was decorated with a pattern of hexagonal screens set in gold frames, which continued across the ceiling. The main video feeds played out on the screens on the far wall, the more minor ones being relegated to a merely decorative role on the ceiling.
Hunter Healer King 3 is Finished
67000 words, so a bit longer than my usual. Usually, I’m pretty happy to wrap things up with whatever set of characters I’m working with, but for some reason, I feel like I’m going to miss Chloe and Maxim. Maybe it’s just because the dual first person POV put me in their heads in a more intense way than any of my other characters. The fact that I managed about 20000 words on other writing projects in the eleven months or so it took me to write this one can probably be attributed to the new workflow. Current publication target is “before the end of the year,” but I have relatives who are gearing up to move and who may need my help, so publication is kind of a moving target. I’ll keep you all posted. In the meantime, not one but two triumphalistic Bollywood songs are in order:
Jaglion Press 