Welcome to Summer Swallow Press

Summer Swallow Press is my personal imprint, created primarily as a publishing outlet for my writing. I’m currently in the launch phase, with two short stories and a novel on the near horizon. This site also serves as a resource hub for writers—especially indie authors.

You didn’t—and I’m sorry for over-formatting. Here’s a light, no-frills copy edit that keeps your structure and wording intact, just fixing typos and grammar:

Independent publishing has taken more time than I anticipated, so release dates are tentative but conservatively set. The first short story, Swan and Nightingale, is planned for release by year’s end and will be free to mailing list subscribers. A second short story, The Final Chapter of the Roman Empire: A COVID Allegory (title is still in flux; you may notice it appears as Decline instead of Final Chapter in places), will complete editing by early next year, with both ebook and audiobook versions to follow. My flagship novel, Femina, is scheduled for 2026 (hopefully early) and is currently undergoing a second round of editing. As I am a self-described “writer with ADHD,” a new project has popped onto the radar—Gaius the Ripper, my foray into fusing historical fiction with horror/suspense. I’ll post updates here as each project progresses.

The articles available here come from a mix of sources: my own writing journey, research, and in some cases my areas of expertise. At present, they are organized into five series. Among these, the series on anthroponymy—a fancy word for the study of personal names—and the series on generative AI for writers are the most prominent and content-rich.

I’ve also provided a tool for realistic name generation, which grew out of a meeting of the Writer’s Coffeeshop in San Diego. Authors there expressed a need for something I had written a decade earlier to fill in names in a simulation and to anonymize data. They needed what I already had; a little UI magic later, and voilà—a fun name generator tool.

Best Regards,
H.M. Lu, principal author.

Writing Historical Fiction

November 2, 2025

Introduction This article was originally part of the piece on Roman naming conventions, more or less a rant on the egregious liberties—especially from Hollywood—when dealing with history. Later, I began sketching two case studies on how I incorporate history into my alternate-history fiction, and that naturally suggested turning it into a series on my approach […]

Ancient Greek Names

September 13, 2025

Introduction I know far less about Greek names—particularly in antiquity—than I do about Roman ones. When I first needed some, I took the approach of using Greek words almost as personifications. After all, names in myth and history often worked that way. Pandora (Πανδώρα) means “all gifts.” Theodora (Θεοδώρα) means “gift of god.” Both show […]

AI Series: Part 3 – Large Language Models What They Really Do

September 10, 2025

It is surprising how ignorant people are about what LLMs actually do, even in the very sectors that actively leverage large language models. Take one step back from that—say, to businessmen and the media—and the picture gets even more distorted. No wonder so many writers end up totally misinformed about them.

I did, however, run across an article—though I wish I remembered who wrote it and where it was published—that I think was related to the stock forecasting of NVIDIA. The reporter wrote, to paraphrase: an LLM predicts the next word in a string. Period. Finally, someone who actually understands.

In a very real sense, an LLM is the opposite of machine intelligence. It is not “thinking.” It is not “reasoning.” It is simply a massive statistical model. It has no semblance of reasoning, no capacity even for basic if–then logic. At one point, I went through a phase of calling these AI systems (both text and image) BASM: big ass statistical models. It was my way of driving home that point. While the phrase is a cute encapsulation of what they are, it doesn’t really capture what they do.