Occasionally, I offer moral support and solutions that worked for me in the comments section of other writing blogs, but I don’t do a lot of it here. What works for me might not work for you, and vice versa. That being said, I’m seeing certain things come up over and over again in certain places on the web, and I feel like I have to put my oar in. Since nobody asked me, I can’t call them “Frequently Asked Questions,” but I feel comfortable calling this “Frequently Seen Questions…”
Continue reading “Frequently Seen Questions About Writing”Tag: Writing
Friday Fragment: Bad News
This conversation originally took place with the two leads from the Hunter Healer King series talking in an elevator. In revisions, they’re actually having this convo on horseback, so the physical movements or “business” surrounding the conversation are different. For the record, Chloe and Maxim are not actually any kind of cousins, they just have faulty information about her family at this point.
Continue reading “Friday Fragment: Bad News”Midjourney Monday: Reception Area aboard The Last Repose
From the space regency, a brief bit of scene setting and the image which helped me visualize it, although you can also see where I chose to ignore it:
Continue reading “Midjourney Monday: Reception Area aboard The Last Repose”Friday Fragments: Alternate Geneaology Conversation
Note: this was cut from a longer discussion about Maxim and Chloe dealing with the possibility of being too closely related to marry. Parts of this backstory may reappear in some other part of Hunter Healer King 3 This is dictation transcribed by Whisper and cleaned up by Claude AI, without additional revision. You may spot some misspelled place names below and some examples of why I feel obliged to revise and rewrite after dictation cleanup.
Continue reading “Friday Fragments: Alternate Geneaology Conversation”Friday Fragments: The Wounding of the Quantum Tree
When I created the Jaiya setting, I thought it best, for various reasons, to use my own religion as the inspiration for the cosmogony and beliefs of the settings, rather than messing around with other people’s religions. So, here is Afaro Viamafar, “The Wounding of the Tree of Choices”, sometimes also titled “The Wounding of the Quantum Tree.” Parts of it are quoted as chapter headings in the novel Seeking the Quantum Tree. Apparently there are other scriptural writings in the setting (you can see passing references in the text below to at least two others), but this is the only one I ever wrote out in full, and one of the first things I wrote in the setting.
Continue reading “Friday Fragments: The Wounding of the Quantum Tree”Weird Wednesday: The Sorceries of Python and AI combined
So, I first became aware of Whisper, an LLM designed for transcription, translation, and subtitles, a couple of years back when I was writing Wolf’s Trail. Whisper was then the “backend” of a free website where I could upload my audio files and get a text transcription back. Then the free website went sideways around the time I started work on the sequel, Undead Flight, so although I did a little dictation on that book (speech to text in Word, cleanup by Claude AI, additional reworking by me), I wasn’t able to dictate on the road very much. So I found out that I could run whisper on my own computer through python, downloaded pytorch, downloaded whisper, and then realized I had no idea how to work with python. I abandoned the idea for 7 or 8 months, then took an online course in python on a whim, fiddled around trying to install some other stuff whisper depended on that I didn’t have, and then, after visiting about half a dozen “whisper in python” tutorials and asking Claude AI for help on the “write to text file” part, I came up with the following. Lines following a # sign are comments rather than part of the code.
Continue reading “Weird Wednesday: The Sorceries of Python and AI combined”
Midjourney Monday
There’s a passing reference in Undead Flight to “the new mooring tower in Upper Haupstadt,” and I was trying to visualize what that might look like for the current work in progress. Here’s Midjourney’s best shot at it:
Friday Fragments: Jerome os Storm on Trial
The bit below the cut is a scene I wrote about half of and then decided I didn’t need for the current work in progress. Figured I’d share it here:
Continue reading “Friday Fragments: Jerome os Storm on Trial”State of the Author, Start of 2025
My plans for the New Year are always kind of vague, because “Mann tracht un Gott lacht” (Man plans, and God laughs).
Continue reading “State of the Author, Start of 2025”The Novels of Marie Belloc Lowndes: The Ones That End Where Agatha Christie Begins
(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.)
Alot of Agatha Christie’s novels feel like we’re on the outside of some messy domestic situation, looking in at the situation shortly before and after it turns violent. If you ever wondered what seeing the inside of those situations would be like, you’re in luck! Marie Belloc Lowndes wrote lots of those. The characterization is a mile wide and an inch deep, and the situations tend to repeat themselves, but to me, there’s something insistent and weirdly compelling about the way Lowndes shows the reader every component in these emotional powder kegs. As a bonus, you get a good look at the kind of expectations authors like Agatha Christie set out to subvert, because the whodunnit components of these mysteries tend to be pretty banal.
Continue reading “The Novels of Marie Belloc Lowndes: The Ones That End Where Agatha Christie Begins”
Jaglion Press 