Blurbing With Claude AI: Slaying a Tyrant

(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

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.

Music Monday By Suno: Door Into Summer

Suno wouldn’t let me use the opening paragraphs of Robert Heinlein’s Door Into Summer as song lyrics (no, it’s not a copyright issue, I’ve gotten Suno to use Star Wars dialogue as lyrics in the past), so instead I gave it a general prompt based on the anecdote of the cat who won’t accept that all doors lead to winter snow: https://suno.com/song/a611bcd1-1579-45bf-ae34-0a2f2732d4e7?sh=Rvqz0Izo10EGxrJv

Frequently Seen Questions About Writing

Occasionally, I offer moral support and solutions that worked for me in the comments section of other writing blogs, but I don’t do a lot of it here. What works for me might not work for you, and vice versa. That being said, I’m seeing certain things come up over and over again in certain places on the web, and I feel like I have to put my oar in. Since nobody asked me, I can’t call them “Frequently Asked Questions,” but I feel comfortable calling this “Frequently Seen Questions…” 

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Midjourney Monday: Spot the Difference

I had to use “Vary Region” on this image. Vary Region is a Midjourney tool which keeps most of the image intact and only changes one area in it. The first image below is the revised image, the second one below is the original. Can you see what was changed?

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Midjourney Monday: Reception Area aboard The Last Repose

From the space regency, a brief bit of scene setting and the image which helped me visualize it, although you can also see where I chose to ignore it:

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