Tag: Writing

Weird Wednesday: The Sorceries of Python and AI combined

Posted on Posted in Dictation, Fantasy, LLMs, Weird Science, WritingTagged , 1 Comment

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.

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State of the Author, Start of 2025

Posted on Posted in bookbinding, Covers, Editing, Fantasy, Jaiya, Jane Austen, LLMs, Marketing, Marrying A Monster, Mel Dunay, Midjourney, Mystery, Myth, One Weird Trick, Publishing Plans, Python, Rings of Power, Space Opera, Steampunk, Uncategorized, Weird Science, World Building, WritingTagged , , , Leave a comment

My plans for the New Year are always kind of vague, because “Mann tracht un Gott lacht” (Man plans, and God laughs).

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The Novels of Marie Belloc Lowndes: The Ones That End Where Agatha Christie Begins

Posted on Posted in Marie Belloc Lowndes, Mystery, One Weird Trick, Weird Science, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

(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.

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The Novels of Marie Belloc Lowndes: Hercule Popeau and Various Innocents Abroad

Posted on Posted in Fantasy, Marie Belloc Lowndes, Mystery, Weird Science, WritingTagged , , , , , , , 2 Comments

(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.)

The second-most famous thing Lowndes did, (the most famous being her novel The Lodger), was to write a novel called The Lonely House, in which a sheltered, financially prosperous young Englishwoman fetches up in Monaco, only to be caught up in a love triangle and menaced by people who are after her money, although she has trouble grasping their bad intentions.

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The Novels of Marie Belloc Lowndes: The Lodger

Posted on Posted in Cheap Books, Cool Books, Freebie, history, Marie Belloc Lowndes, Mystery, World BuildingTagged , , Leave a comment

There’s a famous quote by Alfred Hitchcock, about how (paraphrasing) a bomb going off in a scene with no buildup is surprise, while watching the buildup to a bomb going off, knowing there is a bomb about to go off, is suspense. I’ve been reading a bunch of Marie Belloc Lowndes lately, and it seems safe to say that Hilaire Belloc’s sister was a suspense writer, when she wasn’t writing flat-out soap opera. Her best-known novel is The Lodger,(1) which is available for free on Gutenberg or very cheaply on Amazon (basically you’re paying to spare yourself the hassle of getting the book into kindle by yourself).

Essentially, this is the story of Mr. and Mrs. Bunting,(2) a former butler and his very prim second wife, who have gone into business for themselves, subletting rooms in their rental house with the understanding that they will feed the lodgers and clean up after them etc. Business has been bad, and the husband, a true-crime buff, has been distracting himself by following the exploits of a Ripper-like serial killer called the Avenger, who seems to specialize in killing formerly respectable women who’ve gone off the skids due to alcoholism(3). A young policeman acquaintance keeps Mr. Bunting supplied with all the latest news on the case, including some tidbits that he really should keep to himself. By the merest of accidents, Mrs. Bunting ends up being the one who answers the door when a gaunt, nervous gentleman shows up asking for lodgings.

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Hunter Healer King, Book 2 is Here!

Posted on Posted in Cool Books, Fantasy, history, Mel Dunay, Myth, Paranormal Romance, Publishing Plans, Steampunk, Weird Science, World Building, WritingTagged , , , Leave a comment

The name’s Chloe Fortebat, and I am in trouble. First I helped Maxim kill a werewolf, then I kissed him, and then I insulted him when I found out that he was roughly twice as old as he looked. Now Maxim is about to be crowned King of the Stormcrows aboard a luxury airship, and he has invited me to attend. But this ship feels more like a cage with each passing hour: a passenger’s horse has turned up missing, a crewman has turned up dead, and before it all started, I heard noises in the cargo hold. But Maxim has a mind as sharp as my banishing dagger, and between us, we aim to put an end to whatever monster lurks aboard the ship, no matter how awkward we feel around each other right now…

My name is Dr. Maxim os Storm, and I hunt the beasts that haunt the night. With my coronation mere hours away, something stalks the shadows of this vessel: a monster that answers to a human being..but who? And for what purpose? Despite our recent…complications, Chloe’s courage and loyalty make her my strongest ally as I pursue our enemies, and brace for the dreadful pomp and circumstance of my own coronation. The crown of the Stormcrows may await me, but first, we have a mystery to solve – together.

State of the Author, 4Q2024

Posted on Posted in Art, Cool Books, Fantasy, Gladiator, Jaiya, Jane Austen, LLMs, Mel Dunay, Myth, Oldblood Series, Paranormal Romance, Publishing Plans, Space Opera, Steampunk, Weird Science, World Building, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

-First off, I think my books are all in Kindle Unlimited now, free to anyone with a subscription to KU. If you see any sign that they are not in KU, please let me know in the comments.

–Undead Flight (Hunter Healer King Book 2) is now in the hands of my proofreaders. Barring complications, should be ready to publish by Christmas time. Ebook cover is done; blurb is done with AI help (stay tuned, my post on the blurbing process will be out tomorrow. Print cover is dependent on my final cleanup of the manuscript to determine page length.

-Also started Hunter Healer King Book 3 by writing a fairly dark and distressing scene from the last third of the book. This is kind of suboptimal, because stitching together scenes written out of order tends to add (wo)manhours to the first draft process, but I hadn’t figured out the opening scene at that point. I don’t know when it will be released but I know that I am aiming for Christmas of 2025.

-I have had a sci-fi Pride and Prejudice retelling in development for a long time; finally got the first scene down. No projected completion date at this time. My main inspiration for this concept was, weirdly enough, Star Wars: A New Hope. If you dig deep enough into the filmographies of the supporting cast, you will find one with a Pride and Prejudice connection in his earlier career. Regrettably, the catchy working title explicitly references Star Wars, so the official title will probably be something rather sedate of the “Pride and…” format.

-New ebook covers using AI art for Shadow Captain and Spider Star are done; still need to do new paperback covers for them, and ebook/hardcover for the 2 in 1 volume for the duology. Projected release date for the 2 in 1 is first/second quarter of 2025.

-Early stages of AI art covers for the Jaiya Series and Ancestors of Jaiya series. No text layout yet. A four in one of Ancestors might come out in third quarter of 2025; a seven in one of the full metaseries might be sometime in 2026 but a lot could go sideways between now and then.

How to Use Claude.ai for Cleaning Up Transcriptions

Posted on Posted in Cool Websites, Dictation, Editing, LLMs, Uncategorized, Weird Science, WritingTagged , , , , , , 5 Comments

This article is primarily about the Claude.ai feature called “projects,” but his example project is about using Claude to cleanup the nasty, incoherent speech-to-text output that Word and similar programs spit out. I’ve tested the commands involved in the free version of Claude, and they work reasonably well. I still went back and reworded and expanded a bunch of stuff after I used it, but it was nice having something that would reliably cut out the nonsense words and repetitions and add some kind of punctuation. Here are the commands; just copy and paste into Claude’s chat window, and upload a short document with your latest chunk of dictation. As always with AI, check the company’s privacy and training policies before feeding it anything of a personal or sensitive nature.

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