I just finished reworking a core setpiece late in Hunter Healer King 3 and am now writing the bridge from that into another pre-written scene. This part below (slightly censored for spoilers) was part of the prewritten scene, but no longer fit in for continuity reasons.
Continue reading “Friday Fragments”Category: Writing
The Golden Age of Adaptations
(Note: This is adapted from a comment I made elsewhere.)
A good adaptation from book to movie or tv, honors what is worthwhile about the source material, and changes the things that need to be changed for coherence in the new medium or for the audience’s comprehension. It follows therefore that you can’t make a good adaptation of a work that you believe has no merit. For instance, I would be the wrong person to adapt Frankenstein by Mary Shelley,
Continue reading “The Golden Age of Adaptations”State of the Dictator, 2025
When I was talking to another writer on Discord, I realized that I tend to be somewhat vague and off-handed when I talk about my writing process, and assume people already know what I’m talking about, so I’m going to walk through the whole process here for transparency’s sake. This process includes the use of AI software for transcription and cleanup of dictated content, but it doesn’t start or end there, so if you are interested in that part, please, bear with me until I get there.
Continue reading “State of the Dictator, 2025”Friday Fragments
A conversation elsewhere reminded me that Whisper’s raw transcriptions of dictation can be a bit…alarming, so I am showing three versions of a text chunk below. This demonstrates my dictation workflow but in reverse order. For clarity, the first thing you will see is my final-ish draft, followed by what I was working from: Claude’s cleanup of a Whisper transcription, using the commands I’ve shown in the past. The last thing you’ll see is what Claude was working from: Whisper’s transcription of an audio file I dictated.
Continue reading “Friday Fragments”State of the Author, 3Q2025
This really should have been “State of the Author, Mid-Year,” but I was dealing with health issues for most of June (nothing serious, just distracting) and then July was kind of busy at work, so here we are…
Continue reading “State of the Author, 3Q2025”So, Novelcrafter…
In late 2023/early 2024, well before I started writing the space regency, I was trying to brainstorm it on Sudowrite using the free starting credits, and…didn’t get really anywhere with it. This was I think my first experience with AIs other than the image generator Midjourney, and that probably had more to do with my lack of success than anything in particular about Sudowrite. So, I got curious about Novelcrafter, partly because I heard good things about its abilities to store and organize world-building notes, and partly because it could integrate with the Claude AI family, which I use fairly heavily on the free plan; mostly for dictation cleanup and sometimes brainstorming. So, I opened an account on Novelcrafter and one on Openrouter.ai, because it was one of the options for bringing an AI into Novelcrafter, bought a few credits on Openrouter to pay for the AI usage, and imported the space regency (now at 16000 words) into the free trial of Novelcrafter…
Continue reading “So, Novelcrafter…”Friday Fragments: Lizzie is Embarrassed
After writing this, I decided it was more appropriate for Elizabeth to be angry at Darcy for mentioning her parents’ foulup (in not formally inviting his people to a ball already) at this particular point than for her to be angry at her parents’ for committing it, so I cut it.
Elizabeth felt her cheeks grow hot at her parents’ negligence in not sending messages to the Marcher before now. Her father at least had the excuse of his geophysical work, which could not be fully delegated to software programs and drones, but Longbourn’s social calendar was her mother’s responsibility and this was possibly the best chance the four and twenty families of Longbourn would ever have to meet potential spouses from elsewhere.
Gee, Thanks, You BBC Turkeys
Not content with trying to create a miniseries about Mary Bennet, the virtue-signaling Regency hipster beloved by virtue-signaling modern-day hipsters everywhere who think that Jane Austen was soooo mean to their alter ego, the makers have cast Richard E. Grant as Mr. Bennet. I have no particular beef with Mr. Grant, although to judge by the clips I’ve seen, his take on Sir Walter Elliot in Netflix Persuasion would have benefited from a bit more of the silly fop schtick he brought to the Scarlet Pimpernel. And yes, it’s a bit disheartening to think that in The Other Bennet Sister he may once again be called upon to play a humorously absurd and irresponsible Jane Austen dad character as a generic jerk.
More importantly from my point of view, he put in an appearance as a minor baddie in Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker, which is just a teensy bit inconvenient
Continue reading “Gee, Thanks, You BBC Turkeys”Friday Fragments
From the space regency: this is a catchy line, but I decided it didn’t really work for the flow of the conversation or Elizabeth’s character:
“I’m not really very good at reels,” Elizabeth said. “Or at least I play them better than I dance them.”
From the Hunter Healer King book; something like this is in the current draft, but the information flows differently:
“There’s a whole cluster of pictures of them,” Carl said. He pointed to a group which mostly showed They came in various sizes, from low-slung and barely six inches tall to very good-sized examples. Many of them were black with tan masks and tan feet. The centerpiece was a portrait of Countess von Altenberg, whom I had met the night before. She wore a long white dress and at her feet held two standing dogs on a sort of split leash.
Friday Fragments
Chloe and Maxim originally had a lengthy conversation with and about a messenger boy they met, whom Maxim hired to help show her around. When I dropped the idea of Chloe exploring Lower Haupstadt (the “Pest” analogue, to the extent that Haupstadt is loosely based on Budapest) on foot, I aged up the messenger so he was no longer someone whose safety the characters would particularly fret about, and this part became redundant:
“Was it safe for him to be out?” I asked Maxim. “With that beast out there?”
“I don’t think he’s in any danger from the attack dog, or whatever it was,” Maxim said. “It seems pretty clear that the dead man was targeted, that people close to the Armor of Arent and people who take a professional interest in it are at risk. I sent word to the Stormcrows to be careful. And if the police know the dead man’s line of work and understand in broad terms why he was killed, they should be on the alert in that neighborhood.”
“And what about ordinary crime?” I asked. “Thieves and pickpockets and so on.”
Maxim tilted his head to one side. “What makes you think the messenger boy wasn’t one of those?”
Jaglion Press 