I fell in love with steampunk machinery the same way a lot of people did:
Continue reading “Where Did That Come From: The Hunter Healer King Setting Used in Wolf’s Trail”Tag: Writing
Where Did that Come From? The Blurb for Wolf’s Trail
I previously discussed (towards the bottom of this post) how I used Google Bard as a tool in working on the blurb for this book. Bard generated 2543 words by my count, of which 16 were usable in a blurb of 172 words.
Here’s what I used as a starting point and fed to Bard. It’s the blurb I wrote when I was serializing the book on Vella:
To claim her inheritance, Chloe must leave her ranch for the Old World, where she mingles with monster hunters. The most dangerous of these doesn’t look the part: a quiet, sharp-dressed medical man. Dr. Maxim os Storm’s mission is to destroy those monsters which feed on human pain. He is drawn to Chloe, but she is being slowly transformed into the type of creatures he hunts. He does not know if he can cure her in time, or what she will do when she learns his secrets…
Note that this is in 3rd person, but the book itself is in first. Here’s the final blurb, with Bard’s contributions bolded:
The name’s Chloe Fortebat, and I am in trouble. I left my father’s ranch on the plains to come to the Old World: a place of airships, steampower, and monsters nobody talks about. Now I’m dodging giant werewolves with fangs the size of my knife, and the hunters crazy enough to go after them. The most dangerous of these doesn’t look the part: a quiet, sharp-dressed medical man with a tired face….
My name is Dr. Maxim os Storm, and I hunt the beasts that haunt the night. The leader of this pack of werewolves has set his mark on Miss Fortebat, but this brave lady would rather fight him than let him make her his tool. As far as I am concerned, that makes her my ally. My only chance of curing her lies with an ancient machine, hidden by my people in the caves beneath Wolf Island. We must keep that artifact out of the werewolf’s grasp at all costs, for he would put it to a terrible use….
Below the break, I have the Bard-generated content in full, with the bits I used bolded. First come the “long” versions of Chloe’s and Maxim’s POVs which came to around 1858 words and yielded nothing useful. 1-3 are Chloe’s; 4-6 are Maxim’s. Then come the “short” versions, which are where the useful bits (bolded again) come from. 7-9 are Chloe’s POV, 10-12 are Maxim’s. Bard was useful mostly because I’m a little uncomfortable writing blurbs; I can’t imagine this being an efficient way of writing blurbs for someone who was actually good at them.
Continue reading “Where Did that Come From? The Blurb for Wolf’s Trail”Weird Wednesday: My Star Master Books Tried to Warn You About This Tech
Some crazy scientists or other are trying to make quasi-organic computer chips, a technology which plays a small but sinister role in my Star Master duology: https://newatlas.com/computers/human-brain-chip-ai/
Some excerpts from my novels below the cut.
Continue reading “Weird Wednesday: My Star Master Books Tried to Warn You About This Tech”Happy Candlemas!
Christmastide is on February 2. If your parish does the blessing of the throats on the feast of St. Blaise (February 3), maybe give it a shot. We need all the help we can get these days.
In other news, my editors/first readers sent back Spiderstar, the sequel to Shadow Captain, with their notes, so revisions will be ongoing for probably the next few weeks. Also need to work on the cover. Stay tuned.
Weird Wednesday: Leaving Twitter
Well that didn’t last long. Twitter was fun, but enabled too much of the snarkier, ruder side of my personality, and exposed me (even with the world’s most aggressive blocking approach) to more negative news than is probably good for me. After being seeing how rude I had gotten in my comments on another person’s WordPress site, I decided to deactivate my twitter account, to reduce the dopamine hits I’ve been getting from my own snark, and see if that helps. I’ve been neglecting my own WordPress site, so will try to focus more attention on that, and generally do my best to mind my own business.
Happy New Year, I Just Finished Revising Star Master Book 2
Complete at a shade under 94,000 words. Next step is to get it out of Scrivener and into a Word document for my volunteer editors to review. They will be out of town for part of this coming week, so I have a little bit of a breather to get the Word document ready. I should feel more triumphant than I do, but I’ve been fighting with this one in one form or another since November 2020, so by now all I can muster is a bit of weary relief, in the style of Best Van Helsing.
Weird Wednesday: So, About NaNoWriMo…
Right now, I’m still revising the sequel to Shadow Captain. So, basically, this is going to be more of a NaNoEdMo until I get that completed. If I somehow miraculously get done in the first half of November, I might try for an actual first-drafting project, in the NaNo tradition. I have occasionally managed full 50K words in two-ish weeks, but it’s been a long time. So, here’s a cover version of my NaNoWriMo theme song, because somehow this situation doesn’t seem to call for Jerry Reed.
Weird Wednesday: Poohs and Prejudice
Okay, that might have been a overly click-baity way of talking about the fact that A. A. Milne (author of Winnie-the-Pooh), once adapted Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice for the stage. The BBC broadcast a radio version in 1967, with Derek Jacobi voicing Darcy. Surviving copies of the play in book-form will set you back a few hundred dollars, but you can listen to the radio adaptation for free.
Weird Wednesday: Audiobooks!
Thanks to the auto-narrator function at Google Play, I now have audio book versions of four of my novels available:
Shadow Captain
Marrying a Monster
Waking the Dreamlost
Loving a Deathseer
Right now I am working on polishing Shadow Captain’s sequel. I hope to have it published by late December of this year, at which point it will spend 90 days in Kindle Unlimited so that the KU readers of the first book can enjoy it. The audiobook for the sequel will be made available around the time it comes to Google Play, sometime in 2023. Once I have Shadow Captain’s sequel completed, the focus will be on re-editing the Ancestors of Jaiya novels in preparation for their audiobook release, and on a new project to be announced later.
Happy Listening!
Crossdomain “Transmedium” Threats
The Pentagon would have you believe that the truth is out there, although I am not entirely clear on when we started taking the Pentagon’s word for this stuff. I don’t know whether the truth is out there or not, but some days I suspect Robur the Conqueror is.
(Please Note: the film version of Master of the World features Robur’s much more generic airship from the prequel, Clipper of the Clouds. If you watch the film, you will get to see both Vincent Price and Charles Bronson doing their thing, but you won’t get to see any Steampunk Triple Changer that can function as an aircraft, automobile, and submarine.)
Jaglion Press 