Tag: ai

State of the Author, 3Q2025

Posted on Posted in ai, Art, Editing, Fantasy, Gladiator, Health, history, Jaiya, Jane Austen, LLMs, Mel Dunay, Midjourney, Mystery, Myth, Oldblood Series, Publishing Plans, Space Opera, Star Wars, Steampunk, Weird Science, World Building, WritingTagged , , , , Leave a comment

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…

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Midjourney Monday: Daumier and Austen Part II

Posted on Posted in ai, Art, Jane Austen, LLMsTagged , 2 Comments

There were too many to fit into last week’s post on the results of prompting Midjourney with the name of artist Honoré Daumier and various Jane Austen characters, so here’s the overflow:

Edmund Bertram and Fanny Price (Midjourney doesn’t like her nickname, so use her Christian name of Frances Price. Also there are glancing references to both characters being blonde in the book, and I had to include that in the prompt).

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Midjourney Monday: Meet Honoré Daumier

Posted on Posted in ai, Art, Jane Austen, LLMsTagged , 3 Comments

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor%C3%A9_Daumier

This French artist (1808-1879) is perhaps best known for his caricatures, but he was also a capable painter, and I guess he must have painted a bunch of images set in the early ninteenth century, because you can prompt Midjourney with his name and various Jane Austen characters and get something halfway plausible:

Yes, I know Austen said that Jane Bennet was the one who liked green, but these sure look like Lizzy and Darcy to me.

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So, Novelcrafter…

Posted on Posted in ai, Editing, Jane Austen, LLMs, Midjourney, Scrivener, Weird Science, World Building, WritingTagged , , , , 1 Comment

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…

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For the People Who Complain that Claude AI is Too Much of a Sycophant

Posted on Posted in ai, Dictation, Editing, LLMsTagged Leave a comment

Here’s Claude’s response to the latest round of dictation cleanup I brought him, yesterday evening:

I mean, give me a break, Claude, I recorded that while driving home after an uncomfortable medical appointment (nothing serious, just uncomfortable) in excruciatingly hot weather (also known by its street name, “summer”) with the car AC going full blast.

(Please note that in this particular chat, Claude is completely turned around about Chloe Fortebat’s last name. I don’t find it to be worth the trouble of correcting him in this particular instance, it’s just a bit of find/replace when I take the text back to my word processor and do additional editing.)

Blurbing With Claude AI: Slaying a Tyrant

Posted on Posted in Cool Websites, Editing, Fantasy, Gladiator, LLMs, Marketing, Mel Dunay, Oldblood Series, Weird ScienceTagged , , , , , , Leave a comment

(Disclaimer: some of my past “blurbing with LLMs” posts have been very TL;DR because I included a lot of unnecessary fluff that the LLMs churned up and that I didn’t use. This prompt below helps cut down on the fat, so, although this is several paragraphs long, it is much shorter than those previous posts.)

First off, I prompted Claude in this manner: You are a book marketing expert trying to help a fantasy writer. Please help her improve her blurbs. The first novel in her fantasy series is Slaying a Tyrant by Mel Dunay, which may be part of your training data, if so, please feel free to refer to your training data. The problem is that the Empire mentioned in the blurb is mostly a background issue throughout the series [then I spelled out what role the Empire plays throughout the series, and fed Claude the existing blurb for Slaying a Tyrant].

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Midjourney Monday: Flavia os Winterhalter’s Sitting Room

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Basically, the third book in the Hunter Healer King series has a lot of stuff going on, including the election of a new Emperor (if you’ve never heard of this being a thing, look up the Hapsburgs and how they originally became Emperors of central Europe). Flavia was one of the candidates, but after her husband and political ally is injured, she withdraws. Her brother, Prince Bertram os Carlhart, convokes a sort of informal council of himself, Flavia, series protagonists Maxim and Chloe, Maxim’s cousin Victor, and friendly rival candidate Father Feuerbach to decide what to do next. They meet in the room shown below.