Tag: Writing

Due Disclosure: Me and AI and Marketing

Posted on Posted in ai, Art, Marketing, videos, World Building, WritingTagged , , , , , 3 Comments

To me, AI is a flawed but interesting tool, brought to us by the same flawed (and often corrupt) people who brought us the rest of the modern conveniences we live with. Other people have other opinions about it, and out of respect for them, I try to be transparent about my use of AI.

I do not use AI for first draft writing or for high-level concept and character background work. I have found ai chatbots (mostly Claude.ai) helpful for tasks like:

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Weird Wednesday: The Role of Religion in My Science Fiction and Fantasy

Posted on Posted in Fantasy, history, Jaiya, Marrying A Monster, Mel Dunay, Myth, Space Opera, Star Wars, Steampunk, tolkien, Weird Science, World Building, WritingTagged , , , , 4 Comments

(Adapted from a comment made elsewhere.)

Religion is not at the foreground of the stories I tend to tell, but it is in the background, part of the “vibe,” so to speak. I tend to stick to versions of a specific cosmogony (Creator+quasi angels+quasi devils), partly because it reflects my own Catholic beliefs, but also frankly because my world-building energy is limited, and most of the time, I’d rather spend it elsewhere.

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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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Friday Fragments: A Cold Kind of Anger

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Maxim’s Uncle Ambrose is prone to that type of nervous Edwardian blethering that we Americans mostly associate with Bertie Wooster, or maybe Miss Bates of Highbury. To me, this was actually kind of a cute insight into Ambrose’s thoughts on both his nephews, Maxim and Victor, but I had to cut most of it because Ambrose was wandering just a bit too far off topic:

“Victor told me Maxim was out of his mind with grief and anger when he saw what had been done to you. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him really angry. It was a cold kind of anger, Victor told me, and I can believe it. The two cousins have rather similar temperaments pointed in different directions, and I’ve seen Victor in that kind of cold rage once or twice. I wonder if he recognized it when he saw it on Maxim, or thought that only he himself was like that.”

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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Midjourney Monday: The Longbourn Ballroom

Posted on Posted in ai, Art, Jane Austen, LLMs, Mel Dunay, Midjourney, Space Opera, Star Wars, Weird Science, World Building, WritingTagged , , , 3 Comments

Longbourn’s ballroom was the site of most of the asteroid’s streaming videos, and Mrs. Bennet had insisted on giving it a more regular shape than most of Longbourne’s interior spaces. The space was an immense rectangle with gleaming white marble floors and columns that reflected the purple and gold lights. The far wall was decorated with a pattern of hexagonal screens set in gold frames, which continued across the ceiling. The main video feeds played out on the screens on the far wall, the more minor ones being relegated to a merely decorative role on the ceiling.

Hunter Healer King 3 is Finished

Posted on Posted in Fantasy, Mel Dunay, Music, Myth, Publishing Plans, Steampunk, WritingTagged , , 2 Comments

67000 words, so a bit longer than my usual. Usually, I’m pretty happy to wrap things up with whatever set of characters I’m working with, but for some reason, I feel like I’m going to miss Chloe and Maxim. Maybe it’s just because the dual first person POV put me in their heads in a more intense way than any of my other characters. The fact that I managed about 20000 words on other writing projects in the eleven months or so it took me to write this one can probably be attributed to the new workflow. Current publication target is “before the end of the year,” but I have relatives who are gearing up to move and who may need my help, so publication is kind of a moving target. I’ll keep you all posted. In the meantime, not one but two triumphalistic Bollywood songs are in order:

Friday Fragments

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I just finished reworking a core setpiece late in Hunter Healer King 3 and am now writing the bridge from that into another pre-written scene. This part below (slightly censored for spoilers) was part of the prewritten scene, but no longer fit in for continuity reasons.

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State of the Dictator, 2025

Posted on Posted in ai, Dictation, LLMs, Uncategorized, Weird Science, WritingTagged , , , , 3 Comments

When I was talking to another writer on Discord, I realized that I tend to be somewhat vague and off-handed when I talk about my writing process, and assume people already know what I’m talking about, so I’m going to walk through the whole process here for transparency’s sake. This process includes the use of AI software for transcription and cleanup of dictated content, but it doesn’t start or end there, so if you are interested in that part, please, bear with me until I get there.

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Austenian: Harriet Smith and the Case of the Missing Parents

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Let’s get the book’s official statement on the subject out of the way first. Late in the novel, Harriet’s father is stated to be a tradesman, marital status unknown, who is “rich enough to afford her the comfortable maintenance which had ever been hers, and decent enough to have always wished for concealment.” Her father approves of the match with Robert Martin, and there’s a suggestion he possibly settles money on Harriet on her marriage. Nothing is said of the mother. I personally do not think Harriet is related to anyone we meet in the book. No named character in the book is high enough in status to weather the scandal of being known to have fathered or given birth to an illegitimate child. This doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t have done it, just that they wouldn’t have kept the child, and the accompanying risk of gossip and scandal, in the neighborhood of Highbury. However, the alternative theories are potentially of interest to people writing Jane Austen spinoffs, so let’s go over them. You’ll notice I don’t really address the question of whether particular character seem moral/immoral enough for certain behaviors; a lifetime of reading murder mysteries makes me unwilling to go that route in discussing what fictional people are capable of.

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