Monster hunters, spaceships and comedy of manners by indie author Mel Dunay
Now, when I finished writing Pride & Planetoids and was running it through automations and all that jazz, my parents were in the process of moving. They didn’t end up beta reading it the way they do most of my books. When they did read it after it released, Dad asked me: “Why would Terra be willing to let Albion pack up a fleet of resource-rich asteroids and fly them off to the Copernicus system? These rocks sit in a region of space that Terra claims sovereignty over and merely leases to Albion. What’s in it for Terra to allow the exodus at all?”
To answer that, I have to unpack some ideas that are deep in the background of the setting, and not really explained by the characters in the book. Elizabeth Bennet, William Darcy, and Effie Price don’t pay attention to these ideas for the same reason that fish don’t pay attention to water.
Continue reading “Dad Asks: Why Don’t They Just…? (Spoiler Alert)” →
For plot-related reasons, I needed Wickham to be more competent than the short-sighted grifter who wreaked so much havoc in the original novel. Even so, he ends up working too many angles at once and having things blow up in his face. I can’t tell you more than that without spoilers.
Continue reading “Where Did That Come From? The Rest of the Cast from Pride & Planetoids “ →When I first came up with the idea for Pride & Planetoids, I decided that Elizabeth Bennet needed to be some kind of Parliamentary backbencher. Spending time in the remote work/zoom conference culture of the early 2020s made it more believable to me that she could live at Longbourn and still participate in the Parliament of Albion the Commonwealth, without having to travel to Albion, the asteroid which gave its name to the Commonwealth. There were a whole horde of supporting characters who were also believable as minor politicians in a large Parliament, which meant that Mr. Collins, Mr. Hurst, etc were all accounted for. I still had to figure out where the Bennet family sat in this society, and that meant figuring out the society itself.
Continue reading “Where Did That Come From? The Space Bennets “ →
(Thank you, unknown internet person, for creating this meme. It makes the job of explaining the origins of my latest novel so much easier.)
Well, let’s start with the fact that I am a GenXer, who grew up with a limited selection of movies available to me, and more often than not the only thing my siblings and I all felt like watching was the 1977 Star Wars. For some reason, I was very amused to discover that Grand Moff Tarkin had once been an energetic middle-aged man who killed the Hound of the Baskervilles twice and Count Dracula over and over again. It tickled me even more to discover that he had once played Mr. Darcy in a now-lost BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, roughly a quarter of a century before Star Wars. I asked myself: “What if Darcy went around destroying planets?” And a surprising amount of Pride & Planetoids grew out of that single question.
Continue reading “Where Did That Come From? Mr. Darcy, Destroyer of Worlds” →So, having gotten Pride & Planetoids revised, formatted, and up for preorder, I thought I’d share a few thoughts on the use of AI in the revision process, both the automations (see here for the original post on this topic) and the chatbot(s).
Continue reading “AI as Writer’s Assistant: Revising with AI “ →
Jaglion Press