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”Tag: Fantasy
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…”Midjourney Monday: Now In Motion
Couple weeks late to the party, I know, but here’s a short Midjourney video based on the Wolf’s Trail cover.
Minireviews of Sense and Sensibility Adaptations
Note on Margaret Dashwood: in the book, she’s Marianne’s teenaged (but not “out”) sidekick and echo, sort of a Kitty Bennet analogue. She blabs two different secrets of her sisters (“his name begins with an F!” and “he took a lock of her hair!”), accompanies Marianne on the outing where she twists her ankle and meets Willoughby, keeps Mrs. Dashwood company after Christmas while Elinor and Marianne are in London, and by the time of Marianne’s marriage has reached an age for dancing and courting and providing fodder for the romantic speculations of Sir John Middleton and Mrs. Jennings. She is a very underdeveloped character in the book; nothing like the obnoxiously cute wittle moppets of S&S 1995, Kandukondein Kandukondein, or S&S 2008. People who whine about her being left out of the older TV versions are really just pining for the version Emma Thompson wrote for S&S 1995, and showing their ignorance of the novel in the process.
Some Jane Austen novels were popular enough to see tv adaptations very early on, which were not preserved for posterity: Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Persuasion. Some were so (comparatively) uninteresting to the TV/movie-viewing public that people only started adapting them in the 1980s (Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey). And then you have Sense and Sensibility, which was studiously ignored by the adaptors(1) until 1971, at the dawn of proper TV archiving, and then received a positive torrent of adaptations and modernizations that have continued at the rate of one or two a decade down to the present. Here are my thoughts on the ones I’m aware of. If I don’t say it’s a miniseries, assume it’s movie length (two hours ish) or tv movie length.
Continue reading “Minireviews of Sense and Sensibility Adaptations”Summer Book Sale Is Here!
Hans G. Schantz has put together one of his massive book sales, and has graciously agreed to include my novel Wolf’s Trail in the sale. Hans’s book sales always cover a wide range of genres and possibilities, so take a look! Happy Summer Reading!
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?”
Happy Birthday to Vincent and Sir Christopher!
Friday Fragment: Dealing With The Dog
This is not what most people would think of as an action sequence, but it involved a surprising amount of choreography (or maybe what the theater people call “blocking”, I don’t know). Basically, the characters’ movements ended up being somewhat different in the final scene relative to what we see below:
Bertram jumped to his feet, turned and snatched his chair, holding it out between him and the dog as if he were a lion-tamer. His secretary, Julius Muller, stood up abruptly a moment later. The dog was barking furiously and jumping up and down in place.
I discreetly hitched up my skirt and started to pull my knife out of the sheath I wore on my thigh, but Maxim stopped me with a hand on my arm.
“Stay calm, everyone,” he said to the room at large.
I understood what he meant now that I was watching the dog more closely. With his bouncing movements and lashing tail, the mastiff didn’t seem angry, just excited. Maxim rose to his feet and moved toward the animal.
Friday Fragment: Talking to a Journalist
So, Maxim got ambushed by intrepid reporter Carl Visser, who’s sort of a homage to a certain Darren McGavin character. This bit got cut out when I was doing final (meaning human) dictation cleanup, because the conversation went in another direction:
I eyed Carl in the same way Bertram had. “As you may have gathered from last night, I know the Prime Minister somewhat well. Any ideas I have about why the Weapons Committee would take an interest in the Beast Garden District, I would not be able to share with you.”
“But there is some kind of reason for their interest?” he asked.
“I have theories,” I said. “I don’t have anything I can prove. And if you attempt to quote me on any of this, I will deny it and sue you.”
Carl cracked a half-smile. “What, you don’t want your friend the Prime Minister to get upset?”
“I don’t think you want Bertram upset with you either,” I told him mildly. “I suggest you focus on finding out who in the Beast Garden District has a trained attack dog of the appropriate size, weight, and muzzle shape.”
Jaglion Press 