Tag: book-review

State of the Author, 4Q2025

Posted on Posted in ai, Art, Dictation, Editing, Fantasy, Jane Austen, LLMs, Marketing, Mel Dunay, Midjourney, Music, Mystery, Myth, Publishing Plans, Space Opera, Star Wars, Steampunk, videos, Weird Science, World Building, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

It’s been roughly three months since the last State of the Author, so here’s where I’m at:

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Hunter Healer King 3 blurb

Posted on Posted in ai, Dictation, Editing, Fantasy, LLMs, Marketing, Mel Dunay, Mystery, Myth, One Weird Trick, Steampunk, Weird Science, World Building, WritingTagged , , , , , Leave a comment

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.

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Sense and Sensibility 2026? Wut?

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(Note: a previous version of this post assumed screenwriter Diana Reid was the TV director from Handmaid’s Tale. It appears screenwriter Diana Reid is instead the novelist of that name. This post has been revised accordingly.)

Daisy Edgar-Jones, whom some people were hyping as a potential Lizzie Bennet in the Netflix Pride and Prejudice before Emma Corrin got the role, has been cast as Elinor in a new S&S adaptation.

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Adapting Jane Austen: Sense and Sensibility, the Story in London

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It’s been a few months since I’ve done one of these, so here’s the previous posts as a refresher course. New thoughts below the cut.

Adapting Jane Austen: Sense and Sensibility, The Dashwoods and Ferrarses
Adapting Jane Austen: Sense and Sensibility, the Rest of the Characters
Adapting Jane Austen: Sense and Sensibility, the Story in Sussex
Adapting Jane Austen: Sense and Sensibility, the Story in Devonshire
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The Novels of Marie Belloc Lowndes: Hercule Popeau and Various Innocents Abroad

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(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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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.

Sign of the Times, Austen Edition…

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(Disclaimer: I do have a Mr. Collins plot bunny I might write sometime, in which he commits Obfuscating Stupidity and is actually a pretty smart guy underneath, but I don’t intend to invalidate the Bennets’ experiences of him, or demonize Charlotte in the process.)

Rather than give us what would be the first traditional P&P adaptation in 20 years, and the first BBC adaptation in 30 years, the Beeb opts to adapt some fan novel that tries to nice-ify the self-centered hipster known as Mary Bennet, and the clueless buffoon known as Mr. Collins, at the expense of more interesting characters like Charlotte Lucas. And of course, flawed but self-aware Mr. Bennet has horns and a tail. (Although in fairness, it sounds like the author is an equal opportunity hater when it comes to the Bennet parents, which is a reasonable take). And somehow this deserves to be ten episodes(1) long, nearly twice as long as any actual P&P miniseries ever made? And it’s from the modern Dr. Who(2) people?

No, thank you.

BBC Announces Pride and Prejudice Spinoff: The Other Bennet Sister

(1) of an unspecified length, but it seems like the BBC’s norm in recent years has been for episodes to run about an hour.

(2) Disclaimer: am not a Doctor Who fan in general, so I generally don’t see the involvement of behind-the-scenes people from that franchise in other stuff as being a good thing.