The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers

How can you audit your writing process so you get more words on the page and finish your books? How can you network at author conferences, even if you’re an introvert? T.D. Donnelly shares tips from 30 years as a Hollywood screenwriter and his book, Superdraft . In the intro, memento mori , and updated dates for AI webinars . This show is supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn T.D. Donnelly is a bestselling thriller author, and he’s been a professional screenwriter in Hollywood for 30 years. His first book for authors is Superdraft: The Art and Science of Better, Faster Writing . You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes How to network at author conferences, and why it works for introverts The difference between craft and process, and how to audit your own writing process Balancing the creator and the critic at each phase of writing Dictation tips for getting words on the page with AI tools What the rules of improv can teach you about writing How to bring a professional mindset to your writing You can find Tom at TDDonnelly.com . Transcript of interview with T.D. Donnelly Jo: T.D. Donnelly is a bestselling thriller author, and he’s been a professional screenwriter in Hollywood for 30 years, which we talked about on our previous episode in March 2025. His first book for authors is Superdraft: The Art and Science of Better, Faster Writing . So welcome back to the show, Tom. Tom: It’s great to be here, Jo. Great to talk to you again. Jo: Yes, indeed. Well, give us a bit of an update, because when we spoke last, and it was only, I guess, 18 months ago, you’d just launched Year of the Rabbit . I read it, and it was a fantastic book, but it was your first novel even though you’re so experienced. So give us an update. How has your career developed, and what have you learned about launching and books? Tom: Oh God, what have I learned? Have I learned anything, I think, would be the fairer question. So I’m still a screenwriter. I still have a day job in Hollywood. It’s been a rough time in Hollywood, but I still get the occasional job there. So my plan, in the first two or three years of my novel career, to put out six books has not quite gotten to six. I do have three out. I have Year of the Rabbit , I have Year of the Horse , and I have Year of the Serpent , and I should have Year of the Dragon out by Christmas. So that part has gone well. Now, I have a lot of people that I’ve met through this community that know a lot more than I do, and I have to rely on them for learning about marketing, things like that. In Hollywood, nobody wants to ask a screenwriter about marketing questions. They have a whole department with hundreds of people in it that are in charge of all of that sort of stuff. The advice that I got overwhelmingly was, “Don’t even bother doing paid ads until you have three books out.” Because the odds of them being able to pay off and make sense aren’t there. So I have just started advertising this year, and everyone has said this is a really, really bad year to be starting advertising. Everything is in flux. Everything is in question. What is going on with Facebook? What is going on with Amazon? Why are the things that we were doing not working anymore? I have found a modest level of success with my ads, which I’m very, very happy about. I’m happy that at least I’m doing slightly better than breaking even on the ads, and I’m getting a lot more signups to my newsletter, which I have to admit has been… how would I put this? Inconsistent. I will say I have an inconsistent newsletter. My New Year’s resolution for this whole year is to get more consistent with it. I am loving it. The books have been very well reviewed. Year of the Rabbit was the one that I spent so much time just making it perfect. Then the next two I was able to do a little bit faster, and people seem to really love the series and to see these characters evolving. So I’m having a great time. That’s all I can say. Jo: Well, I think you’re doing the things that are the right things to do. You’re writing books in a series, which is one of those things that everyone says you should do, and in fact, many of us do. I’ve certainly never been very good at doing multiple books in a series one after the other. I tend to start a series and then start another series, and then another series, and then maybe write a second book. So you’ve done things in a really good order, and I hope people are encouraged. I mean, you have 30 years, like we say, in Hollywood. I’ve read Year of the Rabbit . I know you can write. But that’s not the only challenge, and I think that is so important in an age of AI, because whether or not anyone agrees that AI could ever write a book, the writing of the book is only one part of the journey, right, as you have discovered. Tom: Absolutely. Jo: Actually reaching readers is a real challenge. Tom: Oh my God, it’s so hard. Just read a gosh darn book. This book’s great. You’re going to love it, okay? I have a once-a-week golf outing with some old friends of mine, and there’s three of us, and the golf course we play on likes to go out with fivesomes, so they generally pair us up with one or two more people. The number of times we have finished a round and I have not sold a book to one of the poor two hapless people that are paired with us… my friends are just like, “Oh my God, there he goes again. Oh my God. What, did he make it to the third hole before he started pitching them the book?” It is one of those things, and it’s not easy to be good at writing a book and good at writing ad copy. These are very different hats you have to wear. Not everybody can be great at them. That is why I think your advocacy for “let’s see what AI can do for us in these realms”, to maybe help us with the things we’re not so good at, I think is really key. Jo: Oh, good. Right. Well, one thing you have been incredibly good at is pitching and speaking and networking at author events. You’ve spoken at lots of author conferences over the last few years. I’ve seen you speak. You give a lot to authors, but also you’ve done a really good job at networking and becoming part of the community. There’s a lot of writers who feel like that’s something they want to do. Maybe they’ve written a book that would help other authors, but they just don’t know how to break in. Now, I realise part of that is personality. You’re a friendly guy, right? What tips do you have around networking and pitching, and how has that helped you? Tom: It’s really funny. I’ve been talking to some writers. I was just speaking at NINC, and then before that at SPS Live in London, and at both conferences it came up. “You’ve only been in this business for two years, Tom, and you know everybody, and everybody knows you. How did you get to do that?” Then I start talking to people about networking, and it’s like I’m speaking a foreign language to them. I guess in Hollywood you kind of have to. You’re trained up. It’s a relationship business. You have to have the goods. You have to be a great writer, but that alone… great writers fail in Hollywood all the time because they can’t do that. So eventually I will have to do a talk at one of these conferences about networking. So here’s one thing that I do, which is going to sound mental. First of all, every conference I go to, I come up with three goals. What are my three goals? What are the three things that I want to accomplish going to this conference? In the beginning they were all very me, me, me goals because I needed a lot of help, and I still do. So I went to a conference, a conference where I met you actually, and said, “I’m going to find writers that are in my genre, and I’m going to pitch them and ask them if they would consider reading the book, and if they like the book, to blurb it.” I wanted to get professional blurbs, and you were very kind to give me a fantastic blurb that is on the cover of one of my books. Jo: Only because it was a good book, by the way, for anyone listening. I don’t normally do that, and I said that to you. Tom: No, and I said it in the pitch. I said, “Listen, if you don’t love it, do not even worry about it. It’s going to be absolutely fine.” Jo is not a blurb factory, people. Do not bother her, okay? Anyway, so I put together these three goals, and then once I have those three goals I think, “Okay, how am I going to approach those goals?” So before I’ve even gone to the conference… and what I do, it’s a weird thing. Do you know the app called Anki, A-N-K-I? Jo: No. Tom: It’s this tiny little free app that basically allows you to make flashcards for yourself, and you can test yourself with these flashcards. People use it for language learning all the time. I get pictures of people that are speaking at the conferences I’m going to that I don’t know, and for about a week or two before the conference I flash those pictures twice a day on the screen, and I have to be able to identify who they are, something interesting about them, and something that they’ve written. It’s one of those repetitive things where if I got it right away, then I don’t need to see that card again for the next 10 minutes. If I didn’t get it, that card goes right back into the slot. So I get to be on a first-name basis with a person I haven’t met yet. So when I go to these conferences, I feel more comfortable because, oh, I know you, and oftentimes they’ll be like, “Have we met?” I’m like, “No, we haven’t, but I think you’re fantastic. This book looks really interesting. I haven’t read it yet, I’m sorry to say, but I’m dying to take a look at it.” That helps break the ice. I’ve tried this with introverts—I am not an introvert—and they have said that it is way more powerful for introverts than it is for extroverts, because breaking the ice is the hardest thing, and if you know something about someone, you have a starting-off point to talk to them. Does that make sense? Jo: Oh, that is genius. It’s so interesting, and I’m so glad you mentioned that. I’ve done this before as well, and still do at various things. I will look at the speaker list and I will look at their website or whatever, and I just take screenshots on my phone so that I have that there. Then, like you say, if there’s somebody I want to meet, I will practise. Even sometimes I’ve been at conferences, I’ve seen somebody is there who maybe I didn’t even expect, and then I will duck into a toilet stall or something and I will go look them up. I’ll often go look on their social media to see what they’ve been talking about, maybe something today or yesterday. Then I can use that, and then I’ll go out, and I’ll have something prepared. As an introvert, as you say, going up to people and just trying to strike up conversation is extremely hard. So I love that you mention that, and I really hope that helps people listening. In terms of how you got to speak, is that really because you have the Hollywood background? As people immediately, like I did, go, “Oh, okay. You have some chops here.” So you leaned on your other career, basically. Tom: I think so, yes. So three years ago we were in the middle of a Hollywood writers’ strike here, and for 10 months I couldn’t write movies or television. They shut us out, and it just happened to be when I had two kids in college. So lovely, wonderful. Perfect timing for that. I was really starting to worry about no money coming in, only money going out, and then I decided I was going to write the first book in what is now a series. I met this community, first at the last 20Books Vegas, and then at all the conferences since. You guys were so welcoming to me, you included me. You were so welcoming and positive and encouraging that I really feel a debt to you guys, because you are a second family. I say that all the time. You are my second family, and it is a found family that I’ve discovered in the last three years. So I just want to give back as much as I can. It turns out being a Hollywood screenwriter means a lot to a lot of people, but you still have to sing for your supper. You still have to prove it. But people hear “Hollywood screenwriter” and think, “Well, this person probably knows something about writing,” having done it for 31 years now. The interesting thing that most people don’t know is that screenwriters are forced to talk about craft and defend their craft in a way most novelists never have to. Novelists have, if you’re traditionally published, an editor or two that gives them feedback, and that’s about all the feedback they get. Indies, we get feedback from beta readers, from people like that as well, but once again, not a ton of feedback. In screenwriting, oh boy, everybody who reads that script is going to be in a development meeting, sitting around a corporate boardroom table with billionaires saying, “Why are we spending so much money on this? Tell me what the hell is going on.” They’re going to challenge everything. They’re going to tell you that they want to cut this, and you know that cutting this is going to destroy the story. Can you explain why? Can you defend it? Can you talk about character? Can you talk about character arcs? Can you talk about thematic constraints? Can you talk about the setups and payoffs in a way that these people that are barely literate can understand? It turns out that makes for a person that can give a really good presentation on things like craft, on story. Jo: Yes, and just for people listening, of course it’s kind of obvious that your background would be relevant. So I just want to encourage people to pitch based on their background. So for example, I had a wonderful lady, Johanna Rothman, on this show a while back now. When I met Johanna, she was like, “I’m project manager, business, entrepreneurial,” the management side of being an author, managing all these different tasks we have to do. I was like, “Great, I want to talk to you about project management for authors and that kind of thing.” So I had her on the show to talk about that. I’ve got someone coming on who’s an expert in change management, and we’re going through a lot of change. So I feel like anyone listening— You can take what you do in your daily life, and you can apply that to the author environment. That can be useful, right? As you’ve discovered, there’s a whole load of things that are useful. Tom: Absolutely. Yes. Sing for your supper. Our community is what I call stone soup. You know the myth of stone soup, where you put a stone in there, and everyone else is like, “Oh, the stone is going to make a magic soup.” Yes, but we need a few things, so you go and get some ramps or some onions, and you go out and get some carrots, and then we all put in. Of course, the stone has nothing to do with the soup, right? But the community that we have and the richness of it is the conglomeration of all the little unique things that we bring and put into it. That we all do. So put things into it. You introverts, you’ve got to put yourself out there because you have a lot to share, and it’s really worthwhile. Jo: Oh, yes, for sure. Right. Well, let’s talk about your book, Superdraft . What I found interesting is you say this is a process book (I guess you’d say “prah-cess”, but I would say “pro-cess”) rather than a writing craft book. I found this really interesting because it feels like you were making a point of this. So what do you mean by a process book, and how can people audit their process in order to improve? Tom: The vast majority of books you will read on writing are about, when you are writing, how to make the things that you’re writing artistically valid and meaningful and better. Process is the nuts and bolts of how you get yourself up in the morning, sit down, or maybe in my case I don’t sit down, I walk, but write those words, get those words down, and do the thing that is writing. That is what the process is. There are very, very few books on process. There’s Julia Cameron. Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones . Those are books on process. It’s very hard to find books that are specifically about what we do to write. Not what we do when we write, but what we do to write, and that is how I would define process. Jo: So how can authors examine what their process is in order to improve it? Tom: So I think first what we have to recognise is there’s a reason that there are so many books about craft and so few about process. That’s because if I told you that I have this great craft tip, you would, with no emotion whatsoever, look at it, listen to it, and potentially incorporate it into the next thing that you write. If I tell you, however, that I want you to change your process, how you actually write, I see the deer-in-the-headlights look on people’s faces when they’re like, “Wait, what? No, no, no, no, no, no, no,” and that’s because writing is very, very hard. What we do is incredibly difficult. There is a German author, Thomas Mann, who said, “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for the average person,” and I think that’s absolutely true. Writing is more difficult for a writer than it is for a normal person because everything means something to us. It’s important. If I asked a non-writer to write 20,000 words, and you get paid $10,000 when you have those 20,000 words done, I would almost always get a manuscript within two or three days. If you tell a writer to do that, oh my goodness. Because, “Oh, but somebody’s going to read it. It can’t just be anything. It’s got to be good. It’s got to be this. It’s got to be that.” I use an example: which is harder, running a marathon or writing a novel? And we have experience on this, right? I talked to marathon coaches, and they say 70% of the people who start a marathon finish a marathon. We have stats from NaNoWriMo, rest in peace, that say 11% of people who start NaNoWriMo finish the novel. That is six times harder than it is to run a marathon. That’s how hard it is, and that’s all emotion, right? There are physical things that are going to stop you from running a marathon. There’s nothing physical, for almost anybody nowadays, especially with all the different ways we can write, stopping you from writing. So the key to process is going to be to get the mental and emotional roadblocks that are keeping you from your best way through this process out of the way so that you can write. I think it comes down to the two parts of the brain that operate when we’re writing. I call them the two voices, the creator and the critic, and finding a way to harness both of them is very, very difficult. Jo: Okay, well then— Let’s get into some of those roadblocks that might be stopping people. Tom: Sure. So, you are a discovery writer. Jo: Mm-hmm. Tom: In Hollywood terms, I am a discovery writer. In novel terms, I am very much still a plotter. In Hollywood you can’t be a pantser really. You really can’t do that, but I’m as close to a pantser as you can be and work in Hollywood. I will hit a point in the outlining process where I’m like, “I know enough. Can I please just write? Can I please not outline anymore and just write?” Sometimes they accept that, and sometimes they don’t. But I would say that what these two things really are is which of those two voices is more dominant in your process. For a discovery writer like yourself, you guys are great with that creator voice, that quiet, soft voice that is saying, “Go, try it, try it. Just let it flow. It’s going to come. Don’t you worry. I’m going to feed you when you need to be fed, but you’re not going to know what it is right now.” You guys can write that way, and write forward, and write beautiful, amazing things. Whereas for me, I need to see the buoys coming ahead so I know that I’m still in the channel. I need to have some amount of a road to follow in order to write. That’s the critic v

How can you sharpen your craft when the self-critical voice gets louder the more you learn? What kinds of literary devices might enhance your prose? And how do you write an ending that pays off the promise you made to your reader? Amy Jones shares her writing tips after 15 years of teaching storytelling. In the intro, Kindle Unlimited rebranded as Kindle+ , How to Market a Book Fourth Edition , and AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinars . This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life , which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn Amy Jones is a writer, lecturer, and researcher who has designed courses and lectured for over a decade on literature, linguistics, and the craft of storytelling. She is the author of multiple books on writing craft, and today we’re talking about The Story Book: Plot, Character, Setting, Genre, Narrative and Literary Devices . You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Note s Why writing is like being an athlete, and why struggle is a good sign The differences between academic writing and writing for a commercial audience Endings, killing your darlings, and not underestimating your reader Why Dickens could waffle and modern writers can’t What Gen Z storytellers on TikTok can teach conventional fiction writers Literary devices as a toolkit, and why reading aloud matters in a world of audiobooks You can find Amy at WoodenBooks.com . Transcript of the interview with Amy Jones Jo: Amy Jones is a writer, lecturer, and researcher who has designed courses and lectured for over a decade on literature, linguistics, and the craft of storytelling. She is the author of multiple books on writing craft, and today we’re talking about The Story Book: Plot, Character, Setting, Genre, Narrative and Literary Devices . So welcome to the show, Amy. Amy: Hi. Thanks, Jo. Thank you for having me. Jo: Oh, lots to talk about. First up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing. Amy: Okay. So, I grew up in Somerset, which is where I live again now. There’s a strong literary history here, I think. I went to primary school in Nether Stowey, and was introduced to Samuel Taylor Coleridge very young. So I think that’s had a strong effect on my interest in writing, which has really always been there. As soon as I finished my undergraduate degree, I went into teaching, which has now been about 15 years. As you said, I’ve taught across A level and then undergrad. I started a course for undergraduates with a very good friend of mine with the University of Plymouth, and covered literature, linguistics, creative writing. So I have been a bit of a jack-of-all-trades in the writing world, and loved it. My connection with writing has really been… it’s a lovely opportunity for me to download all of that teaching knowledge that I’ve had over these years. I was in touch with John Martineau, who is my publisher at Wooden Books, and he was interested in creating a series of storybooks, or story writing books. I was originally starting that with that friend, my good friend Emma Craigie, who is a writer. But she had other projects in mind, so the six small books and then the large Story Book all came to me, which has just been a delight. So it’s been one a year for the last seven, eight years, and that has culminated in The Story Book now. Jo: Yes. So we’ll come back to The Story Book in a minute. In terms of your writing history, has it all been non-fiction, or do you also write fiction? Amy: I do write fiction, but I don’t tend to put it out there. I find the more that I have expertise in the craft of storytelling, the more I’m self-critical of my own work. Jo: Oh. Amy: I’m a really big fan of Horace, and especially the Ars Poetica , and he has a wonderful line in there about how he considers himself to be a whetstone, upon which, largely, fiction writers sharpen their craft. So I use that model for myself. I spend a lot of time these days—as well as academia, which we’ll talk about—doing consultancy work for scriptwriting, media companies, but also novels and fiction at the same time. So that’s where I’ve found myself. Jo: I think that’s really interesting, because that whetstone idea, and if people don’t know, that’s W-H-E-T-stone, right? Where you can use it to sharpen a knife. So essentially you’re helping other people sharpen their skills. I actually really love that metaphor. I guess essentially you’re a teacher, but also a form of editor in that way. That is a role that editors play too, isn’t it? Amy: Exactly, yes. It is a gorgeous quote, and that text is one that I come back to time and time again if I’m ever in doubt about my feedback. Horace is my guy. Yes, I especially love that whetstone metaphor. Jo: That’s great. It’s interesting. You mention there the self-critical thing, in terms of the more you learn, the more self-critical you become. So how do you balance that for your students then? Because I know I recognise that, and I’m sure many people listening also recognise that. It’s like you see your flaws more easily. Amy: Yes, exactly, which is very valuable. I think what a lot of creative writers are looking for, in my experience, is someone to be that kind of critical friend. You never want to rip somebody to pieces, but if you can put your finger on the one particular element which is bringing their story down, or which they haven’t recognised as an integral part which they need to blow up a little bit more, it’s a wonderful symbiotic relationship between that role and the writer themselves. Jo: How do you encourage writers who want to publish more of their work? How do you encourage them past that point? Because let’s face it, the manuscript is never finished, just abandoned, right? Whoever said that. I mean, that’s true of so much of art. How do you help other people get over that critical voice? Amy: Mm, yes, the self-critical voice. I think to say, “Just get it down. Get it down.” It’s your idea, it’s your baby, and then use the critical friend. I think it’s hard to entirely do that on your own, because we know that old adage of the need to kill your darlings, and a big part of my job is building that relationship with writers or creatives, to the point where it’s very easy to be defensive of elements of your story that you feel are integral or you’re really attached to. If you have an outside voice which says, “I understand, and these are your great strengths, but this one thing just isn’t working,” that can be really valuable to the final piece. I know the critical voice is always there when you’re creating, but—I’ve just said I’m a victim of it myself—as much as possible to ignore it, I think, and push through. I think a lot of the time I find myself saying… people often think that writing should be easy, but it’s not. It’s like being an athlete. You may be, I don’t know, naturally flexible and therefore a good gymnast, but if you don’t train, and you don’t know that mistakes are a really positive thing that will eventually lead to you improving your performance, then it’s not going to get there. So I always say struggle is good. If you find you’re struggling and you’re wrestling with that critical element, that’s a good sign. Just push through it, keep doing it. Let the mistake be there, and then you can come back and revisit it, or someone will help you to address it. That’s my take. Jo: I’m glad you said that. I mean, this whole “think it should be easy” thing. I feel like some people, as you say, they think it should be easy, and if it’s not easy, then they think they’re doing it wrong. Whereas what we’re basically saying is— Writing is hard. Writing a book is really, really hard. It’s hard work, and people are like, “Oh, well, if it’s not easy, maybe I shouldn’t be doing this.” I’m like, yes, it’s good work, but it is work. I mean, there’s these moments of happy flow or whatever, but to be honest, they’re quite few and far between in my experience. Amy: Yes, exactly. There’s a lot of walking and thinking on your own, which is part of that training. Again, it’s that athlete metaphor, with the very best writers making writing look easy. I’ve written in the introduction to this book that there is that common trick that Truman Capote used to say a lot, which was that he just started. He didn’t train. Jo: Mm-hmm. Amy: Which is part of an illusion that perhaps writers like to build around themselves. Truman Capote definitely did train, partly through reading a lot, and getting things wrong. We see the best athletes at the Olympics, and they look fantastic. We see the best writers in their final products, and we don’t see the struggle, and that’s part of the skill. The struggle is there. It’s just silent. Jo: Yes, and we’re comparing our first draft to somebody’s finished, edited, complete book. So it is really hard. Then I also wanted to talk to you about the academic side. So you’re working in academia. You’re working on a PhD in English. I recently finished a master’s, and I was like, oh, my goodness, this wrestling with academic writing, it’s very, very different to commercial mainstream writing. Now, I would say that The Story Book and your books on craft are pretty, well, literary and verging on academic, but still are commercial, right? There aren’t footnotes on every page and all of that kind of thing. What do you find are the main differences between academic writing and writing in a more commercial way? Amy: Hmm. In some ways, the similarities, I think, are stronger than the differences, but the differences are where we hit a wall sometimes. I think academic writing is still storytelling. I think academic writing does suffer a lot from people feeling like they have to sound very clever. I think it shouldn’t be inaccessible. I’m a big fan of the plain English society, in that sense. So, yes. I have got two excellent supervisors who are always telling me to be clearer, to be more concise, which is just how you want to be in storytelling. I think the two big differences for me when I’m doing academic writing is I have to slightly dial down the… I love playing with language, as I’m sure we’ll discuss later. I really like, especially, sounds within language. So I do run away with the occasional whimsical sentence, which I have to then come back and edit. I’m just a real sucker for alliteration, and that doesn’t necessarily have a place there. Also, like you say, it’s the footnoting, it’s the referencing. The Story Book is academic in that it draws on an awful lot of sources, but I’m not engaging in critical argument in the same way that academia requires. Which is a joy in many ways when you’re writing like that, actually. Jo: I think the other thing I found sort of annoying, as someone who writes primarily commercially, for being read, is that these essays that I spent so long on have an audience of one. Well, I was one, I suppose, and then my professor was the other one. Obviously academics aim to get published in some way, but the readership is so much smaller, whereas obviously with The Story Book it’s going to be read by far more people. So how do you deal with that in your head, around who’s the audience? Amy: Yes, that’s a really good question. The academia, mine is very niche. My PhD is on, how do I explain it? The Welsh March, the English-Welsh borders in the medieval period, and how the myths surrounding that went from marvels and wonders to more chivalric acts. So that is a very niche audience of medieval Celtic scholars, essentially. So I can rely on the fact that some of the references I make, they’re going to be very, very familiar with. Whereas with The Story Book , because I’m trying to cater to scriptwriters, even social media creators, there’s a page in there, and poets with the different literary devices, it is broad. It also means that I can draw on far more variety. There’s quite a lot of classical scholarship in there, but there’s also Back to the Future , and that’s alongside Jane Eyre . I have a page on chiasmus, and that has a quote from Macbeth , and then a quote from Snoop Dogg in it. So the range is far wider, and I’ve tried to go for a lot of popular culture alongside the classical. Obviously academia, especially my particular field, is not… I couldn’t bring Snoop Dogg into my medieval essay. Jo: I’ll try. Well, I guess there’s… Amy: I’m not sure how that will go. Jo: Yes, I guess on the commercial side also, there’s the kind of permissions that you need for a commercial project, versus when you’re quoting things for an academic essay that’s not necessarily being published anywhere. It’s quite different. The other thing I found was that I never really found a moment of flow when I was writing essays. I was always questioning what I was claiming or what I was trying to say, and then trying to support that with other things. So it was very stoppy-starty, versus when I’m writing, say, a nonfiction book, even on topics I know really well, I can crank through thousands of words, whereas the academic writing, it’s so dense. That’s really interesting. Amy: Yes, and especially with master’s and PhDs, you’re almost formulating your ideas as you go, because they are these extended pieces of writing. So whereas if you have a plot in mind as you’re writing and you know you need to get from A to B, you can get into the flow. Although I have found that the approach in the academic writing that has really worked for me has been to know my next step, and then to just dump every single piece of information I could possibly need, every reference, every person, onto a Word document, and then I can just pull from it and write as I go. Although it’s not for the whole piece. I get temporary flow from, yes, a big vat of research before I start. That does help. Jo: Yes, whereas I also love the research. I feel like the research… You must love research, because The Story Book is just packed with amazing stuff. So does your research process differ between your PhD and this book, for example? Amy: Yes. I mean, in that I know how many page spreads I have with the Wooden Books and with The Story Book . So I know broadly what my limits are, and then I do love research. I will just go down into a lovely big hole of research for a couple of days, and put in all the potential quotes I could use. I do have, from that teaching and across those different fields, quite a large bank of things in my head. But discovering new things is a huge joy. So yes, it’s been a lovely thing to put together, actually. It’s really brought me into more texts that aren’t necessarily my genre. I have always been a big fan of Gothic literature, but never too heavily into sci-fi, but I’ve dabbled in that for some of this research too. So yes, it’s gorgeous. Jo: So much fun. Right. Well, The Story Book itself goes into every element of the writing craft. It is such a compendium, I guess, and you also teach these things with students. So we can’t get into everything, but I wondered— What are the elements that you find are common issues with new writers, and any sort of tips for them? Amy: Yes. Again, that’s a really lovely question, because it depends on the individual, but there are a few things that I find are my hills to die on, I suppose. One is endings. That is a real point of fixation for me, because especially these days—and I see it not just in written fiction, but also in a lot of modern media and film—people tend to fall in love with a pitch or an idea or a concept, and then begin writing it, and then slightly panic and not know where the ending is. The ending is, to me, almost the promise that you make to your reader or to your audience, that which pays for their commitment. You are going to give them a payoff. So I am always saying, “Okay, how are we going to wrap this up in a way that feels like it’s a whole cohesive piece, so that we’re not falling down at the ending?” So for new writers, I think really thinking about your ending. Of course, come up with a lovely concept and do fall in love with your idea, but think about how you’re going to actually wrap that up in a satisfying way. I have a whole section on great endings in here, too. As I mentioned earlier, killing your darlings, I think, is a common issue for new writers. Just getting attached to certain characters, or even certain lengthy descriptions, and having to accept that they need to be cut. I think sometimes just underestimating the reader is a common mistake. I’m interested in the idea of the death of the author, and the idea that once you’ve written something, it doesn’t actually belong to you anymore, and people are going to make of it what they will, and you have to accept that. That’s part of why people love reading so much. It’s a subjective experience. So not trying to spoon-feed your own agenda too heavily, but just weaving the story and telling it as best you possibly can. I think those are my top three. So endings, killing your darlings, and not to underestimate your reader. Jo: Yes, I feel like readers are much more sophisticated now. I love James Michener. I used to read a lot of James Michener when I was younger, as a teenager, back in the ’80s and ’90s, and I went back to read one more recently, The Source , which was one of my favourite ones, about Israel. I was quite shocked by the writing and some of the references. I just had not remembered a lot of that style that obviously he’d been writing decades before, and so it was quite dated, and it was quite different.So that happens, doesn’t it? The way readers have changed and the way modern readers are, I think we do have to be aware of that. For example, if you’re writing for people who love detective fiction, you have to be blooming good to stop them just being bored. Amy: Yes. Yes, exactly. I think keeping people’s attention is undoubtedly much, much more challenging these days. There’s an exercise I used to do with students, which was to give them a sentence from a Dickens novel and to try and make it a sentence which would be applicable today. Dickens had the luxury of people who weren’t distracted by televisions and mobile phones and this fast-paced world that we live in, so he could have a good old waffle in his sentences. So yes, I think recognising that is really important. I’m a big fan of more minimalist writers, like Cormac McCarthy. I really love how pared back a lot of his writing is. And yes, for crime, Raymond Chandler is a big influence for me, I think. He’s really good at keeping things minimal and writing really good dialogue, too. Jo: Yes, just on Dickens, didn’t Dickens write a lot of serials for newspapers and was paid by word count? Amy: Yes. Yes, exactly. Jo: So… Amy: That is very convenient, isn’t it? Jo: That explains it. I mean, people are like, “Why is it so long?” And it’s like, well, it wasn’t so long. It was in the paper every week or whatever, and then put together into books later. When people use older comparison titles for more modern books, it just doesn’t make sense, right? Because it’s just a very different scenario. Amy: Exactly, yes. I mean, Dickens was very canny in that sense. Jo: Yes, he’s like, “Make more money by really long sentences.” Amy: Yes, but as you say, it’s not going to work in this kind of market, unfortunately. I think he was arguably the first writer to go viral, right? I’m trying to remember which one it was. I think The Old Curiosity Shop was one of the first novels which caused fights when the next serial came out. I think that’s the right one. When the next episode, as it were, came out, and it was transported over to America, there were fights at the port t

How can you move from the starving artist mindset to becoming a creator CEO with multiple streams of income? And how can you get traction on Substack if you’re starting from zero? Amy Suto shares her tips as a former Hollywood TV writer turned author, Substack creator, and ghostwriter. In the intro, Novel November with ProWritingAid ; Book Marketing in a Changing World [ ALLi Podcast with me and Orna Ross ]; Navigating tough times in indie publishing [ Wish I’d Known Then ]; watch out for fake agent emails [ Write Beware ]; AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinars for beginners and advanced . Today’s show is sponsored by ProWritingAid, writing and editing software that goes way beyond just grammar and typo checking. With its detailed reports on how to improve your writing and integration with writing software, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 15% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn Amy Suto is a former Hollywood TV writer and the bestselling author of books around freelance writing, as well as romance, fantasy, and detective fiction. She’s also a ghostwriter and a top 25 ranked Substack creator. Her books include Write for Money and Power . You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes How to take back power when your dreams are in the hands of gatekeepers Moving from the starving artist mindset to creator CEO The income flywheel of freelancing, a paid newsletter, and book royalties How serialising fiction on Substack can build true fans and supercharge pre-orders Getting traction on Substack, and how to manage comments and Notes Using AI tools like a scalpel, and how to move past the fear of backlash You can find Amy on her Substacks, Make Writing Your Job and Sutoscience . Transcript of the interview with Amy Suto Jo: Amy Suto is a former Hollywood TV writer and the bestselling author of books around freelance writing, as well as romance, fantasy, and detective fiction. She’s also a ghostwriter and a top 25 ranked Substack creator. So welcome to the show, Amy. Amy: Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to be here. Jo: Yes, lots to talk about. First up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing. Amy: So I came up in Hollywood as a TV writer, and I was climbing my way up the ladder, starting as an assistant, working in Los Angeles, and then eventually, finally got to start to write episodes of TV. When I hit what I thought was my peak, I was working with a CIA agent on a spy show. It was literally my dream, to be able to pick his brain about all the conspiracies that were actually true and be able to write TV around that. I found myself a little bit disillusioned with the way the system was running. I found that I really wanted to spend more time writing my own original work instead of being work for hire on other people’s shows. So when 2020 happened and everything shut down, I ended up being able to travel the world, ghostwrite memoirs for Olympians and CEOs, and have some crazy experiences as a digital nomad, which then inspired my first fiction book, The Nomad Detective . From there I continued writing novels and also non-fiction books about my experience as a freelance writer, to help other authors and writers figure out how to have this balance of both being able to pay the bills as a writer while also having creative freedom to put together your own work. Jo: I love that. I guess just to address the dream—so you hit this dream of Hollywood TV writing, which of course for some people, that’s their dream and they never got there, and then you left it all. I mean, the strength to walk away from that. So if people have that dream, or there’s the dream of the eight-figure movie deal for a novelist and all this. So can dreams end up not be the thing we really want, I guess? Amy: This is a great question, and I think that the thing that I was running into is that I was putting my dreams in the hands of gatekeepers. I think that when you hand over that power, then suddenly you are left without agency and you are finding yourself working for free or doing work for producers that maybe you didn’t sign up for. People are dangling your dreams in front of you to get you to do what they want you to do. That was a little bit of what I was beginning to experience, and seeing in other writers that I was talking to in the industry. So I knew that I wanted to take back that power for myself. I also love books. Writing novels is something that is very close to my heart and part of my own dream as a writer as well. So when 2020 was happening and everything was shutting down and the writers’ room that I was in went to a Zoom room, I thought, “This is a perfect opportunity for me to explore some of these other areas of writing.” So basically there is this experience that I was having of remembering all of these novelists who started off as journalists, and they started off as journalists because some of the best inspiration for fiction is actually in non-fiction. When I was starting to moonlight as a memoir ghostwriter in between projects in Hollywood, I found myself completely captivated by working with these incredible clients who’ve had lives that were beyond anything I could have ever imagined. So my work as a memoir ghostwriter ended up feeding my creative work, not only being able to pay the bills with these really cool projects, but also being able to interview people about their lives and being able to understand humanity through a completely different lens. I never would have had the experience to get flown out to Vienna and sit down with an entrepreneur who had changed the direction of the way that technology had been built in his industry, and be able to ask questions about what it was really like to be these types of people and to be in their lives and to grow up in Austria or Singapore. So I think that memoir ghostwriting ended up being the perfect primer for me to continue to develop my work as a fiction writer, because I was able to meet so many different people I never would have had the opportunity to meet or work with or ask questions of before. Jo: Yes, I love this empowered attitude to making your own career. In fact, when you pitched me—and I’ve told you this, but for people listening—I had already bought your book, Write for Money and Power , and the reason I had bought it is, obviously, I’m a 20-year writer at this point, but it was your use of the word power. I have not seen another writing book that says Write for Money and Power: The Anti-Starving Artist’s Guide to Becoming a Seven-Figure Writer . And again, the subtitle, other people have done that. Let’s talk about power because why did you use that word, and what kind of power are you talking about? Amy: So when I was coming up in Hollywood, a lot of the writers around me, we were all being funnelled into the gatekeepers’ world for us, and the vision that other people had for us. That meant that we were giving up our power. So when I went on this journey of being able to travel the world, and ghostwrite memoirs, and being able to write my own novels and connect with readers directly, I discovered my own sense of power. I think that for writers, you’re not really allowed to want to be able to have power over your career because it’s so discouraged by gatekeepers and society. You’re supposed to be a starving artist who is grateful for anything that comes your way because you get to make your art. So I think that there’s a shift happening in culture where writers are being treated not just as artists that are expected to starve, but also as creative entrepreneurs, where we’re learning how to own all parts of our creative journey. Both the creation of our books artistically, but also the marketing of them, and how we get them out into the world, and treating that like one whole entity. I think that there’s a shift happening where writers are no longer wanting to write what gatekeepers tell them to, and are wanting to be able to have unburdened creative freedom. That’s why so many authors like Brandon Sanderson end up self-publishing or independently publishing, because they want that creative power to be able to serve their fans and their readers better. That’s so cool, and it also proves the fact that even with people like Taylor Swift buying back her masters, so many people who are at the top of their game are outgrowing the gatekeepers. If they’re not finding use for these older systems, then that also brings them into question for the rest of us. Jo: I love that. Coming back to the book, so you mentioned the starving artist mindset, and in the book you also talk about the creator CEO, and I love that. I feel like I can claim those words, but I know some people listening will just find that pretty intimidating, I think. So what do you think the process is for moving from scarcity to the more empowered author mindset? Amy: When I first was starting my career as a writer, I never wanted to be a business person. I didn’t want to look at spreadsheets, I didn’t want to deal with accounting. The thing is, if you want power over things like what does your book cover look like, or how is your book marketed, or how does your book enter the world, and even just what are the contents of what you’re writing, what are the subject matters, what is actually something that gets to reach your readers? If you want that power, then it does come with some of the other elements of being an entrepreneur, which is understanding how to price your book. There are so many interesting mechanics of bookselling, which is what I really love that you’ve been covering on The Creative Penn Podcast and on your blog, Joanna. It’s just so beautiful to see writers talking about the entrepreneurial side of what does it mean to sell books? How do you do it? What are the mechanics of that? Today, with different types of technology, it’s gotten easier than ever for writers to be able to do a lot of things themselves, which can feel intimidating, but then you realise how much it unlocks. Even something as simple as, if you sell one book to a reader who likes your work, your royalty percentage can go from 10, 20, 30% to up to 70%, because you’ve made that switch of being able to take on the cap of CEO and being able to own a little bit more responsibility. With that, the number of books that you need to sell to have a beautiful life as a writer immediately drops. So for me, the added responsibility was worth it because I was able to have all this freedom, being able to write on my own schedule and set my own publish dates, and not have to wait two years for a book to come out. I could wait instead six months and pick exactly how I wanted the book to come out. So I think it’s reframing this step into becoming a creator CEO, not as a burden, but as an opportunity to flex your creative muscles in different ways, and to be able to have more flexibility in your own life on how your creative work comes out and is distributed. Jo: Absolutely. It’s so great to hear. I just feel like so much of what you say is what I’ve been saying for years. When I started saying it back in 2008, this was not popular, and we were considered the early indie authors. It was considered vanity. It was considered the worst form of publishing. You were not good enough to get published. hat’s not how you’re talking about it, is it? Amy: No, and I think that— A lot of people are shifting what it means to be “self-published.” It’s not a vanity press thing. We’re just seeing so many examples of people using the internet to take their work and bring it directly to fans, and understanding that there are fewer barriers than ever to getting your books into your readers’ hands. Actually working with a bunch of bureaucracy of a larger publishing house can slow you down, can dilute your ideas, and can potentially keep you from being the kind of author that has the career that you’ve always wanted. So I think it’s an empowerment of the creator age and the creator economy, and this ability to publish more, to publish faster, to publish more creatively, to put out bolder ideas. So, yes, I think that you are definitely a trendsetter, and I think that that’s so incredible, the trend that you were riding the wave of, and that you were originating, coming to fruition. I think that just proves that you were ahead of the curve. Jo: Oh, well, thank you for that. I feel like one wave crested, and now we’re in another wave, and we’re going to circle back to technology. But just so people get a sense of your creator CEO self, what are your multiple streams of income? How are you making your income with all these different ways of writing? Amy: The income streams that I cover in Write for Money and Power are my own income streams as well as what I recommend for other authors, and it’s a trifecta of freelancing, a paid newsletter, such as a newsletter hosted on Substack, and also income from your books and royalties related to your work as an author. These three income streams have helped me balance this side of both creativity and also commerce and the needs of being able to pay bills, so that I can travel the world and live in beautiful cities like San Francisco, where I get to call home. These three pillars are really great because they also support each other. If you have an audience that subscribes to your Substack or your other paid newsletter, regardless of what platform you’re on, that audience can pay a subscription fee to access certain types of content, similar to platforms like Patreon. Then you can not only get revenue from that, but that paid newsletter audience can then buy your book when your book comes out and become early readers of your book. From there, the audience that buys your book on Substack can also serve as a point of proof for your freelancing. So if you offer any services, like so many novelists I know offer developmental editing and things like that, then you can use the proof point of a community to become a freelancer and then sell your services that way. So the three of them feed into each other, because then the money that you make from freelancing can fund your next book launch, or it can fund more time for you to go and write on Substack. That flywheel is something that can help writers, and it is an alternative to what we’ve thought about in the past about a traditional day job, about going and working as a barista or a coffee shop worker. There are so many other different careers that you could do, but these are nice because these three pillars feed into your future book launches and your writing as a whole, to create this holistic flywheel of income. Jo: Yes. I definitely think having another stream of income other than just book sales is important. Obviously, this podcast, for example, has sponsors, and I also have a Patreon, although it’s not a paid newsletter. I think what you mean is a subscription, some kind of subscription where you have,—not guaranteed income every month—but at least more regular income every month rather than the up-and-downiness, which books are so much so. Amy: Definitely. There are so many different models, and the paid newsletter is one that I think is becoming more attractive right now because you are able to keep all of the email addresses of everybody who signs up, and you’re able to email them directly. So compared to building an audience on Instagram or TikTok, you’re able to own your email list and take that email list with you from platform to platform, so you’re not dependent on these platforms. I like the paid newsletter as a format for authors because you’re able to keep people in the loop about every book and your writing process, and give them a behind-the-scenes look. It’s also just such a great format that’s built for writers. On platforms like Substack, the people who are doing the best are novelists and authors and writers. So I think it’s also trying to look at the places where you already have the skill set to thrive versus having to build an entire audience on YouTube or TikTok. Some authors really take to that, but I know a lot of writers who are introverts and prefer to thrive in the written form. So putting out a paid newsletter allows them to connect and build that fan base with their readers, and also thrive in the medium that they’re already in. Jo: Fantastic. Well, let’s talk about Substack then, because you have two. I have two author names, and I know how hard it is to maintain two lots of everything. So you’ve got Make Writing Your Job and Sutoscience . So tell us about those Substacks—why two—and a bit more about using Substack in general. Amy: Make Writing Your Job is our community for writers. We host a job board. We list different grants, contests, and residency opportunities. We also do author interviews and try to find different ways to bring people cool resources on how to make writing their jobs, including some discounts on different products like Scrivener and things like that. Make Writing Your Job was my first Substack that I built, and we have over 60,000 subscribers today, and we’re in the top 25 of business on Substack. I built it as a place to try to help everybody else with the concepts of my books, and then also to be connected to other freelance clients that I was too busy to work with. So it came from a place of wanting to just empower people to make writing their job through a myriad of different ways. That’s been a really exciting community to grow because it’s truly become something that I’m just so proud of. We do in-person meetups in Los Angeles and other cities. We have such a great group of people that we’ve been able to put together on that Substack that it became something that I’m just so grateful to have. Then Sutoscience is my own personal Substack where I share all of the behind the scenes of what it means to be a writer and an entrepreneur, trying to figure out how to stay connected to my creativity while thinking strategically about how to grow on Substack and things like that. So on Sutoscience, I write about the behind the scenes of everything I’m up to, and I also have a monthly mastermind group with my founding members where we all talk about this. We’re basically a writers’ group for what we’re building on Substack and beyond with our books. So it’s been fun. The reason why I have two is because Make Writing Your Job is something I run with my husband. It’s a community. It’s something that I’m building in service of a larger group, whereas Sutoscience is more my personal behind the scenes. Jo: What about serialising your fiction? Talk about that. Amy: This is something that I was really excited to get working on this year, and it surprised me in so many different ways. A lot of writers who have serialised fiction on Substack have promoted it as a way to just bring in tons of paid subscribers, and it’s something that has unlocked so much for them. I have found that the benefits of serialising fiction go even beyond paid subscribers. When you do the math on it, it makes a lot of sense. When you sell a single book, then you are usually making around $6 to $7 of profit, depending on how you’re publishing, who you’re publishing with, if you’re going direct. If you have a Substack that’s priced at around $8 a month, then if you have people sign up to read even the first few chapters, they’ll read the chapters, and then if they stay subscribed, you’ve already out-earned what you would have made on a book. So the math already makes a ton of sense, but the thing that really surprised me when I started serialising my novel, Let Me Be Your Ghost , on my Sutoscience Substack, was

How can giving your characters two bad choices raise the stakes in your stories? And how do you ask for the feedback you need from a critique group, and disregard the rest? Erin Dionne shares her writing and publishing tips after more than 20 years as an author and professor. In the intro, The Future of Listening Audible survey [ Publishing Perspectives ]; Spotify expand audiobooks globally ; Audible announce immersive new AI features [ Publishing Perspectives ]; Writing Storybundle ; SPS Live USA conference ; AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinars in November. Today’s show is sponsored by Bookfunnel, the essential tool for your author business. Whether it’s delivering your reader magnet, sending out advanced copies of your book, handing out ebooks at a conference, or fulfilling your digital sales to readers, BookFunnel does it all. Check it out at bookfunnel.com/thecreativepenn This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn Erin Dionne writes middle grade novels, picture books, chapter books, and nonfiction, as well as cosy mysteries under a pen name. She’s also a college professor, and her latest book for writers is Bad Choices Make Good Stories: Conversations About Writing . You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes Why two bad choices beat an easy choice and a hard one How pre-writing in a notebook builds confidence in your characters before you draft Giving characters dimension beyond the bubble of their story How to ask for the feedback you want, and protect the core of your story Forming an indie press with your critique group How to get school visits through librarians and conferences You can find Erin at ErinDionne.com . Transcript of Interview with Erin Dionne Jo: Erin Dionne writes middle grade novels, picture books, chapter books, and nonfiction, as well as cosy mysteries under a pen name. She’s also a college professor, and her latest book for writers is Bad Choices Make Good Stories: Conversations About Writing . So welcome to the show, Erin. Erin: I’m thrilled to be here. Thank you for having me. Jo: There’s lots to talk about. First up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing. Erin: Sure. Like some of the other people that you’ve talked to on the podcast, I’ve been a huge reader and writer ever since I was a little kid, but when I was about seven, I realised that it was people that wrote books. I thought that they came out of a machine or something. When I found that out, I thought, oh my goodness, I love reading stories, so being a writer must be the best job in the world. So I was single-mindedly focused on being an author as a career after that. I wrote off and on in school. I wrote short stories and things. When I went to college, I got a degree in English and communications, and then I went and got my MFA in creative writing. While I was in school, I also decided that I wanted to learn about the publishing industry, so I worked as an intern for a local magazine. Then after I graduated, while I was in grad school, I actually worked in publishing for Houghton Mifflin in their marketing department. I became an editor for a magazine, and then ultimately, I became a professor, and I work at an art school. It was at that point, finally, when I was surrounded by other creative people, that I thought, “Okay, I’ve learned all this stuff. I need to actually put it into practice.” So I got serious about my work in 2005, and my first book came out in 2009, a traditionally published children’s book, and I published in the children’s book field for the next 11 years. I released my first indie book in 2021, and now I consider myself a hybrid author. I do some books traditionally published, some books indie, and I really like being able to have control in different aspects of my career. Jo: Well, that’s great. Wow, you’ve just done so much across the whole industry. That’s fantastic. I do want to ask you then, before we get into the book, you did an MFA, and obviously you love studying. I also love studying. I understand that. I wonder where you stand now on whether people need to study so much. I found personally, as someone who also enjoys studying, that sometimes I make myself not do the practice. I’d rather sometimes be learning than doing. So how can people balance learning a lot with actually writing the book? Erin: Yes, I think that’s a great question. For me, my undergraduate degree in English was not creative writing focused. We didn’t have that. So I thought, “I need to learn how to write.” What I really learned in grad school was how to revise and how to teach. I think now, 20 years later, with the cost of education, you don’t have to have a master’s degree to write. You don’t have to have a degree in English to write. You have to read a lot, and you have to write a lot. I think the MFA is great for deep study on your particular genre if you feel like you need to learn more, and I think it’s great if you want to teach, but it’s not necessary to be a writer. To be a writer, you have to write. So sometimes we can hide behind learning and hide behind all kinds of things to avoid doing the work, but what it comes down to is you have to put your butt in the chair and you have to write at some point. Jo: It’s funny, isn’t it? I like the “hide behind the learning.” I still struggle with it because I love learning so much. I also just finished another master’s degree. I can’t help myself. I do a lot of research for all my books, and I almost have to just pull myself up sometimes and say, “Look, do you really need to do any more research in order to write this novel?” Erin: Exactly. Jo: Okay. Well, let’s get into the book. So you start writing with characters first, and other people, like me, often start with a theme or a question or a place or something. So talk about your process of creating characters and this bad choices idea as well. Erin: Sure. Most of my books start with a character. Like you, I’m a discovery writer, but I love to do all my discovery work in pre-writing phases, and I pre-write by hand. I’m a big proponent of using a notebook. I carry a notebook with me wherever I go, and I have specific notebooks that are for specific projects. Most of my pre-writing is character-based. I really want to learn about who this person is, what do they want, what are they going after in their life and in the story, and what do they need? Wants and needs are always a big one for me, because I feel like a character should be able to articulate their want, but they don’t always know what their need is. That’s up to us as the author to identify that. Then through the course of the story, I always think about it in terms of the character is going after what they want, but they’re going to get their need met by the end of the story. That brings satisfaction to the reader when a character gets their need met. So I take a lot of time to try to figure out what that is, because for me, that’s going to drive the story. I really have to understand the character’s world before I begin. When I feel like I have a really good handle on who these people are that the book is about, I’ll do a beat sheet, like what Jessica Brody was talking about on your show earlier in August. I’ll do a beat sheet to get some general ideas of plot points, and then I’m ready to write. Then that’s where the bad choices come in. If you think about a character and they get to a crossroads in a story, lots of times the first thing that we think about are an easy choice and a hard choice. So for example, if we have a character who’s 16 years old, and she’s grounded, and there’s a party on Friday night that she wants to go to, one choice is for her to just stay home and then hear about the party. The other choice is for her to sneak out and go to the party, and obviously sneaking out and going to the party could have higher stakes and better consequences. But that’s also an easy choice, and both you and your reader know where the character’s going to go. If you give your character two bad choices, that character is going to go to the party no matter what. So are they going to sneak out and have a friend pick them up, or are they going to sneak out and take their mother’s car and go to the party? Now we have two bad choices, higher stakes, and more potential for story drama if they take that bad choice. So I’m always looking at ways that I can have my characters get into a little bit more trouble, make things a little harder. For me, that comes with those decision points, and giving them two bad options so that the reader knows, ooh, they’re going to do something wrong. It’s just a matter of what wrong thing are they going to pick? Jo: So it’s interesting, because you said you’re a discovery writer, and then you talked about your pre-writing phase and the beat sheet, and now these bad choices. So are you coming up with these bad choices at the pre-writing, at the beat sheet phase, or do these emerge once you’re actually into the drafting process? Erin: They come out in the drafting process. I have a general idea by the time I start writing of some of the highs and lows of the book, but I don’t know how the character is going to get there. Because I know my character really well, I can write with confidence, and I know that I’m going to figure out the path that they’re going to take. Jo: The word pre-writing, maybe you could talk more about that, because I feel like some people listening are like, “I don’t even know what that means.” So what is pre-writing for you? Erin: Brainstorming. I just throw down in my notebook all kinds of things about my characters. Everything from the way they look to what they think about, hobbies that they have, people that are important in their lives, people that have influenced them in some way. I make lists. If I’m writing about a young character, I make lists of things that are in their backpack, or I’ll think about what their school schedule is, who their friends are, what their family situation is, and really try to figure out the dynamics of the world around their want, and why do they want this thing that they’re going after. So I will spend three or four months just getting these ideas down on paper. I’ll write letters from my character to me. And all of this is building confidence in who my character is so that I can inhabit them fully when I start to write. Jo: Wow, that is so interesting, and I have to say I’ve never done anything like that. Again, it’s so fascinating, isn’t it? I might spend all my research time on the mythology behind a particular place. I’m often fascinated in places where there’s been a lot of death and killing and blood soaked into the ground, because these places have a historical and often religious depth to them, and then I’ll stick a character there. Erin: Yes, it’s just two different ways of coming at the same problem, right? And that’s the beauty of writing, is we all do it in our own way, which is what makes our stories different and interesting. Jo: Totally. Well then, if somebody finds their characters are not interesting enough, maybe someone is more like me and they want to become more like you, how might they address this? How could they look at some of the common issues with characters? What are some of your tips if people want to enrich their characters before they write? I mean, you’ve given us some things there, but I feel like what is in a character’s backpack, for me, just feels way too detailed. Erin: I think a lot about the reader experience, and readers want to connect with characters, and they want characters to feel real. I think sometimes as writers, we confuse that idea that a character is interesting with making them angsty or having all of these heavy issues around them. I like to think about characters in terms of dimension. What else exists in this person’s life outside of the bubble of their story? I don’t mean things that we don’t see on the page, but we all have different interests, and we all have different fears that may or may not come up, depending on what’s going on in our lives. So creating a character that has multiple facets, and things then bleed into the story. I can give you an example. There’s a book by Angie Thomas, a young adult novel called On the Come Up , and the main character wants to be a rapper. She has a family history of performance, and that’s her goal. She also characterises herself as a super nerd. She’s really into Pokémon and Star Wars and Marvel movies, and these things show up in the way that she sees the world and the analogies that she makes and the references that she makes. All of a sudden you have this character that has so much more dimension, because she feels more real. So I’m always looking for things that I can pull in from other facets of my character’s life to give us a lens that they see the world through. So thinking about, beyond what’s happening in your story, what do they do in their free time? What are the things that they would reference when talking to a friend?What are some of the inside jokes maybe that they have, or cultural elements that they would carry through? Even just sprinkling in a couple of those things, all of a sudden your character becomes richer for your reader. Jo: How do you take that further and turn that deep character into plot points on your beat sheet? Erin: So I always think about, how is the character moving through their life and their story? What type of story am I telling in terms of genre? And then how do those things intersect? So I have a book called Moxie and the Art of Rule Breaking , and the character is solving a mystery, but she’s also really good at math. So she uses geometry proofs as logical paths to help her solve the mystery. I am not good at math, so I had to figure all of that out for her. Then all of a sudden, this character has a very different type of problem, and she’s literally using her logical problem-solving skills to solve it. So there are those moments where we can see how these other elements intersect with our characters’ lives, just like they would if things were happening to us in real life. You use the skills that you have. I think that also ultimately ends up making you more confident when you approach the page, and readers can sense that confidence in your work. Jo: Yes. What are your thoughts on character flaws? This is another thing that everyone emphasises. Do you focus on flaws, or is it more those wants and needs? Erin: I think in creating characters, everybody has flaws, right? So I don’t so much think about what is their major flaw in this story, but in terms of getting their need met, usually their need somehow feeds into a flaw. Maybe they’re a character who needs to be more generous, so by nature they’re behaving in a way that’s more selfish. Or maybe they’re a character who needs to have stronger relationships, and so their flaw would then come out of that need, and they are a little bit more withdrawn or standoffish. So over the course of the story, the events of the story cause them to change, right? The experiences that they have cause them to move a little bit further over on the continuum to getting that need met. Jo: Another thing I think about a lot is characters in series. As I said, I do character a bit different to you. I’m more of the Lee Child, Jack Reacher vein, or James Bond, where the characters stay similar in each adventure and the plot moves around them. For people writing series, and you write cosy mysteries, sometimes there are little things we can do. If people want to have a long-running series, how should they construct characters in that way so that you’re not running out of ideas for that character? Erin: That’s a great question, and one that I’ve been wrestling with with my cosy mysteries. The way that I am addressing it is I’m acknowledging the experiences that she has from book to book. So in the first book, she gets herself into trouble solving a mystery, and she gets captured by the criminal. Then in the second book she’s struggling with that. She’s having nightmares. She’s got a little bit of PTSD. So now she has a new problem that she has to wrestle with for herself that has never happened to her before. So in that type of a series, where it’s not so episodic, where you do have a longer line, you can pull and build from book to book. You can also build in overarching issues that take two or three books, or four or five books to resolve, whether that’s a larger external mystery or a larger character issue that you want to explore. Lots of books have on-again, off-again romances, will they or won’t they, that add to the stakes, and that’s also a way that you can explore how the character is dealing with relationships. What’s preventing her from connecting with that other person? Why is she skittish? What would cause her to trust? What happens when trust is broken again? So I think that there are all different ways to come at it, depending on the type of character you’re creating and the type of book that you’re writing, and also what type of audience you have for your stories. There are certain expectations depending on genre for certain audiences. So I think having an understanding of what your audience’s expectations are and what it is that you’re writing is also really important. Jo: Yes, the longer the series goes on, I mean, if your character’s already been kidnapped and has PTSD in book two, by book 20, they’re pretty beaten up. Erin: She’s going to be a mess. Jo: Exactly, and then you have to keep thinking about how many awful ways they can be attacked. It can get pretty tough for our characters. But then, happy people in happy land, as I think James Scott Bell says, is not a story that anyone wants to read. Erin: Exactly. You just have to come up with new ways to torture them. Jo: Exactly. Now, just coming back to the book, you have a great chapter on the art of giving critique, and you also talk about receiving it as well. A lot of writers go to classes or writers’ groups and get eviscerated, often by other writers, for whatever reasons. Personally, I don’t do group work. I hire an editor, a professional editor. How can we give critique better and receive critique better, and also not even take it from people who we don’t value? Erin: Those are great questions, and there’s a lot of things to unpack in there. In terms of the way that we give critique, I talk about in the book how I had an epiphany in my daughter’s second grade classroom watching their writer’s workshop. I thought, “Oh my goodness, this is the way that I’ve been teaching writing and have been taught, to just read your story or hand your story over and just take whatever feedback comes for you.” It was the exact opposite of what I did in my real professional life. I’ve been in a critique group for over 25 years, the same group. That’s pretty long. That’s a long time to share your work with people. What I realised is we ask for the feedback that we want. Most of the time, those of us who are writers, we know where we’re struggling and what we’re not doing well and what we need help with. So when I turn over a piece of writing to my group, or when I’m working with my students and we’re sharing work with one another, I always say, “Identify the areas that you feel like you’re doing well, identify the areas where you need help, and make sure you tell the person where you are in your process.” I’ve been a professional writer for 15, 17 years, and when I’m working in a brand new draft, if I’m giving something to my critique group and I haven’t even finished the book, I don’t want to lose that momentum on the story I’m working on. So I tell them, “This is brand new. I need some help figuring out this problem, but I also want your encouragement to finish.

How do you find and notice story ideas, and how do you turn those into short stories, novels, or as anecdotes for your non-fiction or memoir? Why is an author’s note so important in an age of AI , and what might it contain? Joanna Penn shares her thoughts, and her short story, The Black Church, along with its author’s note. In the intro, Ebook Preorders on Smashwords ; Two titles per week on Amazon KDP; AI-related Digital Publishing Awards at Frankfurt Book Fair [ Publishing Perspectives ]; AI webinars in November ; JFPenn YouTube ; This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn Joanna Penn is an award-winning New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of thrillers, dark fantasy, short stories and travel memoir under J.F. Penn and also writes non-fiction for authors and hosts The Creative Penn Podcast. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes From story seeds to stories Writing an author’s note The Black Church , a short story, available as a stand-alone or as part of The Buried and the Drowned collection . Author’s Note for The Black Church You can find How to Write, Publish, and Market Short Stories on all platforms, in all formats: www.TheCreativePenn.com/shortstorybook From story seeds to stories One of the most common questions that writers get asked is ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ This is a strange question for many of us, since we are often so deluged with ideas that the difficulty is sifting out which ones to turn into a story. The trick is to tune into your curiosity and start noticing what grabs your interest. As Elizabeth Gilbert writes in Big Magic , “The universe buries strange jewels deep within us all, and then stands back to see if we can find them.” What do you see that others don’t? What turns your head while others pass by? What do you want to learn more about? What questions come up for you? What obsessions do you keep returning to? Each of these may be a fragment, a word, or a few lines. I call these story seeds. An idea, in its earliest form, is like a seed. It’s small, easy to miss, and nothing like the thing it might grow into. You literally can’t tell what it will look like when it’s grown, but there is potential in it. A seed isn’t a plot, or a character, or a full setting. It might be a line in a book or a film, a headline in the news, something you see in a museum display, or a place that made you feel something. It might be a question that bubbles up, or a feeling that won’t let you go. You just have to notice these seeds and, importantly, write them down! Capturing your story seeds Thoughts and ideas and story seeds will flit through your mind all the time if you let them, but they are fleeting, so you need a way to capture them before they leave once more. It doesn’t matter how you do this, but you need some kind of simple process. I use the Things app on my iPhone, which syncs to my Mac so I can always access it. Other people use a note-taking app or a physical notebook. It doesn’t matter. You just have to get it down. My story seeds are often one-liners, quotes, or links to articles I’ve seen that I want to investigate later. They might be passages from books I have underlined, or places I visit, or questions I have while out in the world. Here are a few examples from my Fiction Ideas file that might even spark ideas for you: United Arab Emirates plans world’s first underwater bullet train connecting Dubai to Mumbai L’appel du vide. The call of the void. The compulsion to jump. “Vengeance of the lost garden.” Ben Okri. A Fire in My Head Noah’s Ark on the moon, like the Svalbard seed bank The Wicked Bible. Printing error. Thou shalt commit adultery. 1631. You can see that these are not fully formed ideas. They are just seeds. Most will lie dormant, but some will sprout, appearing in stories or books years later. When I’m thinking about writing a new short story, I sometimes go to a cafe and sit with a coffee and scroll through my seed folder and notice patterns and see what strikes me as interesting. Sometimes I won’t even know an idea came from a seed I once found, but I look at my list later and discover I had thought about it once before. It’s a wonderful way to plant ideas and later find they have grown into something wild and curious. If you haven’t already got a way to capture your story seeds, establish a simple process now. Don’t overthink it. Just start noticing and writing them down. They might not make sense at the moment, but they may flower later. Searching for story seeds Julia Cameron discusses the idea of an Artist’s Date in her book The Artist’s Way , and this practice has always been important to me. It involves taking time out on your own to go somewhere and fill your creative well, whatever that means to you. For me, it’s often travel to interesting places or visiting museum exhibitions that I know will have nuggets of fascination that may result in full blown story seeds. On the morning of my fiftieth birthday, in March 2025, we woke up in Iceland next to the Black Church at Búðir on the Snæfellsnes Peninsula , a few hours’ drive northwest of Reykjavík. The small church and graveyard sit on a bed of ancient lava under the gaze of a glacier and there is a sense that time has stopped in this place. As we walked around the church that morning, the place itself became a story seed, and I later wrote The Black Church from that spark. On the cheaper end of the inspiration spectrum, I often go to the British Museum in London seeking story seeds and over the years, it has provided much inspiration for fiction of different lengths. An exhibition on religious relics inspired Crypt of Bone , a Viking collection appeared in Day of the Vikings , and one of the main characters in Desecration works as a researcher there. In terms of short stories, a sunken Egypt exhibition inspired The Dark Queen and I saw the actual Bronze Age wooden spars of Seahenge at an exhibition on the ancient world. If you follow your curious impulses, you will find story seeds everywhere. From seed to story Now that you have a load of story seeds, how do they become stories? For me, it’s usually about a juxtaposition of multiple seeds that suddenly coalesce into something coherent. With a Demon’s Eye came from my own experience of laser eye surgery, which was unsettling in so many ways, but a feeling is not enough for a story. Some months later, I read It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War by combat photographer Lynsey Addario , and I suddenly had a character, someone whose life was defined by their sight, and who might indeed choose a dangerous path to keep it. Questions: Where do you find your story seeds? How can you make time to tune into your curiosity and discover more of them? How are you saving your story seeds? Can you open up time to revisit your seeds and see what might take root as a story? The Author’s Note As a reader, I love an author’s note, and as an author, I always include one in every story, of any length. I want to share the spark that started my thought process and I love to include my research trips and links to photos, as well as a bibliography if I’ve gone deeper into any subject. In an age of AI, when whole stories can be generated with a single prompt, the author’s note is a way to double down on being human and include your fingerprints on your finished work. What is an author’s note? An author’s note is a separate chapter, long or short, at the beginning or end of a story. It’s from you as the writer addressed to the reader who might be interested in what inspired your fiction. As an example, you can find my author’s note for The Black Church below. It can be simple, even just a few lines. At the end of Blood, Sweat, and Flame , I note that the story was inspired by watching the Netflix series Blown Away , a reality show where glassblowers compete in a hot shop filled with furnaces and molten art. It can also be far more substantial. My author’s note for Between Two Breaths is a mini essay on how I left London in 2000 to go travelling after the stress of working in the city in the ’90s and found peace diving beneath the waters of the Poor Knights Islands in New Zealand. Later, that led to diving alone and a moment where I made the choice to carefully ascend when everything in me wanted to stay down in the blue. That author’s note also includes recommended books on free diving as well as a documentary, and links to a solo episode of my Books and Travel podcast where I talk more about why I loved scuba diving . While the two notes differ greatly in length and emotional depth, and they shouldn’t affect whether the reader enjoys the story or not, I feel like they provide an element of humanity that adds to the experience. So, what should you include in an author’s note? Start with the seed I love to include my story seeds, the initial impetus for how the story was born. In my author’s note for Seahenge , I explain that Seahenge itself is real and did indeed emerge off the coast of Norfolk, but my own experience of it began in 2022 when I stood in the British Museum in front of the actual blackened Bronze Age timbers and imagined a sacrifice laid across that upturned trunk. Standing there, I knew that I’d write a story inspired by it someday, I just didn’t know what that would be at the time. Then I talk about how the seed expanded after a rainy visit to Ely Cathedral two years later, as I considered rising seas and drowned land and how the ocean wants to take it all. A curious reader can almost understand how the story came to be, and that may change how they regard it, and perhaps, how they think of you, the author. Include your research and links to resources One of the reasons I write is so that I can feed my books with the results of my endless curiosity. I love research, and many readers are also interested in the lines between fact and fiction. I also make short behind-the-book films from my research trips, like this one for Tomb of Relics , from Becket’s Canterbury to the Shrine of the Three Kings in Cologne, so readers can see the real places behind the story. In the author’s note for Soldiers of God , I include a link to the news report about the Vatican scanning project to digitise the secret archives and use AI to uncover hidden meanings, as well as a link to the twelfth-century papal bull Militia Dei (Latin for soldiers of God) that granted the Templars the right to be buried in their own cemeteries. In A Thousand Fiendish Angels , I explain the elements from Dante’s Inferno that inspired various parts of the linked stories, like the Arctic location reflecting Dante’s icy hell, the terrifying city of Dis, and even the symbolism of the character names. These hidden layers in the stories can bring an element of surprise and delight which some readers love to explore further. Include emotion and your personal story Part of the idea of doubling down on being human is bringing your real experience and authenticity to the page. Sharing personal emotions in your author’s note can bring a sense of connection between you and the reader that no AI tool or human ghostwriter could ever mimic. But of course, your note has to come from your honest experience of life, and there’s no need to fabricate anything to make a story seem deeper than it is. Your story may be inspired by something simple, like Blood, Sweat, and Flame stemming from my enjoyment of a TV show, or it can be a more emotionally resonant connection. Beneath the Zoo opens at the gates of the derelict Bristol Zoo on the eve of its destruction, and the author’s note tells the reader why this real place had such a hold on me. After my parents divorced when I was young, my dad would take my brother and me to Bristol Zoo for a couple of hours every month, all the time we really had with him for a period of years. It was difficult, but walking those paths and looking at the animals gave us precious hours together. When the zoo finally closed, and the news reported that it would be turned into housing, I wondered what might be found beneath its Victorian structures. I entwined my imaginings about what might lie there with my own nostalgic grief. Of course, these revelations might feel difficult to talk about and only you can choose what to share. Sometimes we write fiction to obscure the truth and bury our feelings beneath metaphor, but even sharing one true thing will help you connect with the reader. My author’s notes in The Buried and the Drowned reveal aspects of me that even some close friends and family may not know. I reveal myself on the page, knowing that if a reader gets that far, I can trust them with these fragments of my life. Bibliography and other resources As Cormac McCarthy said, “Books are made out of books,” and I love to share further reading for those who are curious to investigate the truth behind the stories. For De-Extinction of the Nephilim , I shared news articles about de-extinction as well as a podcast interview with the founder of Colossal, the company that inspired the story. And, of course, I shared more fiction recommendations, including Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton and Extinction by Douglas Preston, both inspired by the same technology. For The Black Church , I include the history of the church itself as well as website links for the hotel next to it, and a link to my notes and photos from the Iceland trip, which you can read in appendix 4. Including these kinds of multimedia links can take the story off the page and into the real world, and perhaps even encourage the reader to go on their own adventures. If I’ve written on similar themes before, I may include links to those stories or books in the author’s note. At the end of Between Two Breaths , I note that I’ve written about other memorable dives in some of my other fiction. In Stone of Fire , Morgan Sierra recalls a dive at the Moeraki Boulders in New Zealand while inside St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice. In Deviance , O’s memory of an encounter with an octopus plays an important part in the story and is based on my own experience, and The Dark Queen features a dive to a submerged Egyptian city. You can also use your author’s note to say thank you, although sometimes acknowledgements, email list sign-ups, and other back matter are kept separate. There are no rules You don’t need an author’s note at all, and if you include one, there’s no need to follow any template. It’s up to you how much you share, especially if you are self-publishing your own work as only you control the word count. If you submit to professional markets, author’s notes are often not included or are a few short lines, so you may have to be concise, but if you reprint later, or include your stories in a collection, I urge you to consider adding something about the story behind the story and bring yourself, the author, alive. Questions: As a reader, do you love an author’s note? What do you like them to include? For whatever story you’re working on, what are the elements you could include in an author’s note? If readers want to do further reading on the topics of your short story, do you have sources from your own research you could share? How could you connect with readers on a personal level through your author’s note? You can read The Black Church as a stand-alone here , or read or listen as part of my collection, The Buried and the Drowned . The post From Story Seeds To Stories, And Writing An Author’s Note, With Joanna Penn first appeared on The Creative Penn .

How can you keep writing when midlife brings grief, exhaustion, rage, and a creativity that seems to have dried up? How can you accelerate if midlife brings you more energy? And how can you market your books authentically when your energy and your interests have changed? Jordan Rosenfeld shares what she learned from writing through her own pause. In the intro, how to write short stories [ Novel Marketing Podcast ]; Bestsellers: Excavating the Tools and Techniques of Successful Novels – Kristen Tate. Plus, Hugh Howey: The AI Bubble Explained ; NEO writing software ; Will the AI Bubble Destroy our Retirement? By Mr Money Mustache ; Future Vision X Prize winner, The Gifted ; and my Cathedral Zero trailer ; How to Market a Book Fourth Edition survey . Today’s show is sponsored by ProWritingAid, writing and editing software that goes way beyond just grammar and typo checking. With its detailed reports on how to improve your writing and integration with writing software, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 15% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn Jordan Rosenfeld is the author of psychological suspense novels and books on writing craft, as well as an editor and writing coach. Her latest book is Writing Through the Pause: Mining Midlife for Powerful Writing . You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes What midlife is, and why so many changes seem to arrive at once Disenfranchised grief, empty nest, perimenopause and the losses nobody talks about A fallow period is a germinating period, not a dead one Don’t isolate, try something new, and learn to write as play How to market your books in a way that reflects who you are at your core Vulnerability, curation and how much of yourself to share online You can find Jordan at JordanRosenfeld.net . Transcript of the interview with Jordan Rosenfeld Jo: Jordan Rosenfeld is the author of psychological suspense novels and books on writing craft, as well as an editor and writing coach. Her latest book is Writing Through the Pause: Mining Midlife for Powerful Writing . So welcome to the show, Jordan. Jordan: Thank you so much. I’m so excited to be here. Jo: Yes, this is an excellent topic. First up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing. Jordan: Absolutely. I’m really one of those annoying writers who’s been writing all my life since I was a little girl, and it was all I really wanted to be or do. I’m a Gen X-er, so of course we grew up before the internet, and I read for pleasure and escape. So I was really dogged in figuring out how does one go about becoming a writer, because it was the only thing I wanted to do. I remember going to the library and checking out—eventually, later in my 20s—this massive tome, I forget what it was called. Like the Writer’s Guide to Publishing , one of those big old things that has all of the editors, agents and stuff. It was really just figuring out how to do it and sending snail mail queries and going to writing conferences. So I think I was just dog on a bone with it, really, since I was young. Like anything, once you get your toe in, it’s a little easier to keep publishing. I laugh because the first traditionally published book of mine was actually a book on writing craft before I had published any of my novels. So that felt strange, but I wasn’t complaining at the same time. Jo: So when was that, and what has your career looked like so far? Jordan: So I published Make a Scene: How to Craft —oh my gosh, I’m forgetting my own subtitle— Crafting Powerful Scenes in 2005, which means I pitched it in 2003. That was the beginning of my era as a writing craft teacher as well. I was right out of graduate school at that point. Then eventually I published my first novel. When I say my first novel, I just mean the first one that hit the world. It wasn’t my first one written, but Forged in Grace . Then I eventually started putting out a writing craft guide every couple of years, just thanks to the wonderful people at Writer’s Digest. I just found a niche early on. Sometimes that just happens. I also like to point out that I was pitching books at a time before this whole concept of platform was a big deal. So you could be just any old body without a big following, because we didn’t really have social media. I did write for the magazine, the Writer’s Digest magazine, which I think gave me a leg up in the book part. So writing craft became my niche, and then I always have really found success with small press for my novels. So my current publisher is called Sibylline Press, and they are a publisher of women 50 and over, actually. That’s their whole thing. Jo: Oh, okay. That’s interesting. Well, we’re going to come back to the book in a minute, but just in terms of that journey, it’s quite interesting. You mentioned platform there, that changed, and Writer’s Digest publishing themselves got into trouble, didn’t they? They got bought by a different publisher. Jordan: Yep. Jo: So you’ve been through some changes. Well, we’re going to be talking about change in general, but changes in the industry have also happened. So how have you navigated all that change over time? Obviously a lot of listeners to this show are independent authors as well, so thoughts on how things have changed in the industry. Jordan: Well, what’s interesting is Writer’s Digest actually went bankrupt. They got bought by another company who just mismanaged it, called F+W Media, and they went bankrupt. So a lot of us authors were terrified that all of our books were going to just revert. I mean, it was fine to have the rights back, but we didn’t want to republish ourselves at that time. So they did end up getting bought by Penguin Random House, which means our books are still alive in that traditional way. So Forged in Grace , my first novel, I was in the process of querying agents, and then a friend of mine and I decided to start this thing. This was 2012, ’13, this independent publishing collective. So we were going to act like a publisher but publish books. Basically it was people doing work trade. We had someone who did cover design and someone who could do layout and marketing and all these things, and we came together. So I did publish my novel that way, and actually it was the time when Amazon was still quite favourable to indie authors. You could really make a decent amount of money. Then my partner and I just… It didn’t last. There were a lot of different reasons why we didn’t, and it has nothing to do with the idea, which was totally working. I have really seen how the capitalist machine seems to continually come in and eat away at whatever profits there are for independent authors. I’ve seen authors have to become marketers. We went from being people who could write, and then someone else would handle that, to having all of us have to do it ourselves, and now content creators. So I think a lot of us feel really exhausted, which actually is not unrelated to the book of mine that’s coming out. So I worry. Of course, we haven’t even talked about AI, if we even want to, but I do worry a little bit about the future of publishing, but I’m not a pessimist in the sense that I don’t think it’s going away. Jo: Oh, no, absolutely, I agree. Changes, I think, are what this is all about. Well, let’s get into the book then. Let’s start with a definition. So what are you defining as midlife, and why is this such a change for many people? Jordan: It’s a very buzzword, midlife. So I will say it’s a mental state as much as an age, because a lot of people start calling themselves or saying they’re in midlife in their 30s, right? So it’s not a hard age, even though you might say it’s in your 40s or 50s. For me, it’s really the point at which I find people start to realise that they have less time ahead of them than behind. You might find yourself maybe a little past what I’m calling the striving stage of life, where you’re focused on building career and identity and family, and all of that. It also seems to coincide for people with multiple challenges at once. So maybe you’re dealing with health issues or perimenopause or aging, and maybe you’re helping your parents or your fledging teenage children, if you have children. So there’s a lot going on for people, it seems, at this stage of life, and I’ve interviewed 28 people for my book who range in age from 37 to 81. So there is definitely a wide range of age. Jo: Yes, I think that’s interesting. I almost wonder whether it is a realisation of changes. I mean, again, we’ll just say menopause because I feel like for me, that’s when it really kicked in, was there was a health hormonal shift, and I started feeling very different. I started questioning a lot of things, and so much came up for me that I almost felt was out of my control. I think that was the biggest thing that happened for me, was realising, “This is out of my control,” and I don’t particularly like that. It felt like there was a lot of grief at midlife, and you mentioned there parents. Obviously some people’s parents are dying, children are leaving. Is grief a big part of this, do you think? Jordan: Absolutely, and I like what you said about it often is a stage where people feel out of control of things, their bodies, their life circumstances. There’s also a little bit of a, did I do everything I wanted? What will the next X years of my life look like, if they can get there? Grief is a huge part of the transition, and I think grief is interesting. Right now, I’m in empty nest. I just fledged my son a month ago, and it did hit me harder than I thought it would, even preparing. So there’s these kinds of grief we don’t really give cultural credence to. You can call them disenfranchised grief, where nobody died, and in fact, the things happening could be conceived as positive if you let them. But a child moving out of the house and you having to completely rearrange your identity, there’s a grief involved in that. Or not seeing that child that you love so much. Aging, dealing with aging parents in a healthcare system that doesn’t offer supports, while you’re trying to be a creative person. Or the perimenopause thing is huge for a lot of people, because a lot of people were not told anything about this transition, and it can last 10 to 15 years for many people, and radically change your mind, your mental energy, your capacity, your executive functioning. It’s huge. So I definitely started writing this when that was happening to me, the perimenopause transition, but I also like it. As a creative person, I like the idea of a pause for anyone being a number of things that can happen in midlife. Jo: Yes, and I think that’s really important because, as women, that’s one thing, but men go through different things, and people who identify in different ways go through different things. So we’re not saying that it has to be specifically around menopause at midlife. I think there are lots of different ways that this can show up, and of course, this is a show for writers. You’re writing the book for writers. So in talking about creativity, let’s talk first about if people find that their creativity has just dried up, that it’s almost died. How can we learn to accept a fallow time, or perhaps accept and embrace a time of not plenty? Jordan: That’s a great question. First of all, I really looked into the idea of what fallow means, and you realise that a fallow period is not a dead period, it’s a germinating period. It’s necessary, right, for crops to come back. So I really love this metaphor of not seeing it as dead or gone, but as germinating. I took a lot of relief and inspiration from this, it only exists as an audiobook, by Clarissa Pinkola Estés. She’s the one who wrote Women Who Run With the Wolves , but she wrote a book called The Creative Fire , and she describes creativity as an infinite creative source that is never gone, but what happens is our access to it gets blocked. So when I conceive of a fallow period as something in me is blocking access to my creativity, not that the creativity is gone, that was the first key for me. I also recommend that people work backwards and ask themselves, what life experiences, frustrations, disappointments, what burdens have you been dealing with? There’s usually a path back to what is preventing you from having access. And I really find the first thing is you need to apply gentleness and patience with yourself, and second, honestly, it sounds silly, but really reframing this idea that your creativity is not gone. It’s not dead. It’s germinating. My therapist gave me the term rooting. She’s like, “Oh, you’re rooting,” like you’re putting down roots, but you don’t know what, if anything, is going to flower or bloom. I was like, “Oh, I’m rooting. I’m not dead.” So I think it’s a lot of reframing what we can do about it, rather than just conceive it. Jo: Yes, I remember listening to that audiobook. I remember her voice saying la chispa. Do you remember? La chispa. I don’t know if that means fire, but I remember it. I’ve listened to that, and you brought it up again. La chispa, yes. I feel like that Women Who Run With the Wolves is just such an excellent book that we come back to at different points in our lives. On other things, I feel like sometimes—you mentioned the word exhausted earlier—sometimes people are just exhausted. You are just tired. You’re fatigued, and perhaps you just need a break. It doesn’t need to be anything more than that, right? You can just say, “I’ve got a lot going on. Maybe I just need to not do anything.” Jordan: Absolutely. Actually, I find a lot of creative people are very driven in different ways, not necessarily ambition-wise, but driven to create or driven to express themselves. So sometimes that drive energy persists even when you don’t have the energy for it. So then we go into all this mental stuff about, “Well, something must be bad and wrong and broken,” rather than, “Oh, maybe I do need to be resting or conserving energy for myself right now.” I think really it’s having that confidence or trust that it’s going to come back that is hard for a lot of us at midlife. We really think it’s gone. I do think that this is a stage of life where really getting support is necessary, whatever that looks like. I understand that things like therapy are not always accessible to everyone for cost reasons or time, so maybe it’s your best friend or someone you see at the coffee shop or the gym or partner, anything. Or it’s two people who are both feeling creatively stuck and frustrated who say, “We’re just going to get together once a week and see what happens,” talk, laugh, that kind of thing. I just want to add that I really feel that if we’re relying on our usual, typical, or former ways of doing things at midlife, they often fail us. It often requires a shift. Jo: Yes, I also think that our mentors in books—I mean, you’ve mentioned there the Clarissa one, and of course your own book. I found when I needed to withdraw, I was reading a lot of books on the power of the older woman. Reclaiming the crone. I mean, I love this reclaiming language. The hag. There’s these words that we could reclaim around becoming older, and the cultures that respect elders, and what does it mean to move into that stage. I must have read 20 or 30 books in a period of a year of really trying to get to grips with things. I feel like we can find therapy in these book mentors, as I like to call them. Jordan: Yes. Absolutely. I don’t know where I would be if I hadn’t had book mentors most of my life. In fact, in a later chapter in the book, I quote Ursula K. Le Guin, who was obviously a science fiction writer, but notorious for really reclaiming older age. She has a whole essay on the crone, and really the beauty of that stage of life, which is what I’m now aspiring to, because you’ve gone through the hardship of midlife, but you come through with more wisdom, more certainty. Maybe just a little bit more, “Oh, yes, I’ve been through these ups and downs, and I know I can come out the other side.” Jo: So I guess on the one hand it can be, at that time, a fallow, it can be that time of exhaustion. As we say, this isn’t just a moment in time. This can go on for years. Sometimes it can be a quickening. There can be a desire to accelerate even, and also sometimes we might need some tough love. I think that might also help. So what are your recommendations for those who feel the need to shift up a gear, or who want to move forward? Jordan: Yes. I mean, I think one thing is not trying to do it all yourself. Seek out other people who you can connect with. For me, what got me out of my fallow period was I joined someone. We do a silent write and then we talk shop afterwards. It was a fellow writer. So I logged on at 8:00 in the morning and we all just got together and wrote, and then we talked. There was something about not isolating, I think, is key. So not isolating. Then I’m really just a big fan of trying something new. It’s that whole metaphor, right? If you’re doing the same thing, expecting different results. So if something has changed for us at midlife and we don’t feel the same and we can’t access our creativity in the same way, then we have to do something different. Another thing that I had to let go of was every time I sit down to write, it has to be purposeful. It’s going to become a book. It’s like, can you just play? What does it look like to write as play? That was a really new concept to me. Obviously I have joy in the writing process, but I was attaching it to a product. So that’s honestly one of my biggest pieces of advice drawn from my experience and others, is try something new. Be a little bit brave. Maybe it’s not brave, but don’t be afraid that everything is going to lead to something that’ll be hard, that’ll be scary. Let’s face it, nobody’s going to do it for us. There’s always that reminder. If you just sit around feeling bad and wonder when it’s going to stop, it may not stop on its own unless we try something new. Jo: Yes, reframing things. I think also as creative people, as writers, we do feel better if we are creating and writing. It may be that writing isn’t the thing you need right now. It may be that you want to get into, I don’t know, painting. I’ve been doing different things, like I did some stone carving, and I’m doing really random things, and not in a serious way. So as you say— Maybe writing for us is too serious, and so we need to just change it up a bit. Jordan: I had a lot of my interview subjects do that. They are like, “Well, when I can’t write, I paint. When I can’t paint, I knit.” I was really impressed at how many people will just keep that creative energy going in another form. I found that very inspiring, because while I don’t consider myself deeply creative in any other medium, it did make me think, what else could I do that feels creative? For some people that’s cooking food or, I don’t know, organising closets. I really don’t know, but there are ways to transmute that energy. Jo: Yes, and I mean, you mentioned there about trying something new in our writing as well, and I did find that my interest shifted, and I did a lot of long distance walking and I wrote a pilgrimage memoir, which is quite out of character. Then I also did a book on writing the shadow, that darker side of psychology. This did not fit with what people expected from me at all. I feel like it is scary, but we are also making money out of this, and when things don’t fit with what people expect of us, it can change things in terms of our business. So how do we deal with that? How do we lean into change but also bring our aud

How can you design your year around seasons of work and rest instead of waiting for financial freedom? And how do you build the money confidence to take extended time off when you come from a scarcity mindset? Brian Herriot shares his ideas on time freedom after a career as a financial advisor and consultant. In the intro, The end of the spectrum [ Seth Godin, Akimbo ]; List of money books ; Lessons learned from 15 years as a full-time author entrepreneur ; My author timeline since 2005 ; Producing AI-narrated audiobooks with Simon Patrick . Plus, please do my short How to Market a Book survey (by 7 Oct) ; and here’s my Cathedral Zero Trailer . This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life , which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn Brian Herriot is a financial advisor, professional speaker, and the author of Time Freedom: Rethink Your Work and Money to Create a Life You Love Now . He’s also the host of The Time Freedom Podcast. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Note s Why writing, speaking and podcasting can build authority without social media What time freedom is, and how it differs from work-life balance and financial freedom How to design your year around seasons of work and rest The three money personalities: minimiser, manager and maker How to build flexibility into your work whether employed or self-employed How a book that leaves nothing out can be the foundation of a business You can find Brian at timefreedom.life . Transcript of the interview with Brian Herriot Jo: Brian Herriot is a financial advisor, professional speaker, and the author of Time Freedom: Rethink Your Work and Money to Create a Life You Love Now . He’s also the host of The Time Freedom Podcast. So welcome to the show, Brian. Brian: Thank you so much for having me. Jo: Yes, this is a great topic. First up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing. Brian: I am a financial advisor, and now I am an author officially. I found writing just short of three years ago. I was actually doing some research on behalf of my wife, because she’s always been an incredible writer, in the fiction side of the world. So I was researching different writing programmes and things like that, and came across one that I thought, “Hmm, this is for nonfiction, and boy, it sounds very interesting. I think it’s something maybe I need to do.” The reason why I was looking at all, even for myself, is I was transitioning into a new line of work, and it was work where you needed to develop some authority and visibility. Everything everybody was telling me was that I needed to do a lot of social media, which I did not want to do. I forget where I heard it, but they’re like, “Or you could do the author speaking thing.” And I thought, “Ooh, that sounds a lot better.” So that’s the path that I ended up on. Jo: Interesting. Can you tell us what that different path you were looking at was? Brian: Well, a lot of what you see, at least online, if you’re to develop a personal brand and try to attract business—in this case into my financial advisory firm—everyone says, “Well, you need to develop an online presence.” In the business world from a long time ago, I had used LinkedIn, but not for anything like developing a personal brand. So then all the advice started turning to, “Oh, well then you need to get onto Instagram and TikTok.” I don’t know, I’ve always viewed all that scrolling as a waste of time, and I’d rather put my mind towards something more productive. So I was just so apprehensive to try and get into that space, that I just kept putting it off and putting it off and putting it off until I heard a podcast. I’ve always listened to lots of podcasts, and I heard a podcast that said, “Well, instead of developing authority that way, the other path that you could take would be through writing.” Because it’s obviously longer form, you can put your thinking into it. Then that can lead to help getting into speaking as well. Between those two you can develop some of the same authority that you could if you went the social media route. There was also the podcasting part, which I do love, and that’s been one of the most fun things I’ve been doing lately. So I do podcasting, writing and speaking instead of social media. Jo: I love that, and I know a lot of people listening love that too. I don’t think this is an age thing, I think this is an aptitude for short-form video thing. I’m the same as you. I’m not really into the short-form video. For people listening, this is an audio-only podcast partly because I don’t want to do video. Brian: And that’s beautiful. That’s the beauty of working on your terms, right? Which we’ll talk a lot about. Jo: Yes, exactly. So I love that from the beginning you were like, “No, I’m going to go the long-form route and reach people that way,” because you absolutely are. I personally would always rather read a book than watch a whole load of snippets or video online to learn about this kind of topic. So let’s get into the book. Let’s start with that concept of time freedom. What is time freedom, and how can we change our mindset to believe that it’s even possible? Because it feels like we’re working harder than ever. Brian: The way that I like to explain this is first by discussing what time freedom is not, because of how it fits. And I have this right up front in the book. There’s this whole concept of work-life balance, right? And work-life balance to me, at least, coming from the professional and the employed worlds, is that you’re just stealing an hour during the day here to then make it up later in the night. Sftentimes, at least when I was living with work-life balance, I was probably more busy than I even was if I would’ve just worked straight from 8:00 to 5:00. It’s very week by week focused, day by day focused, and that is not time freedom. On the other side is this idea of financial freedom, which time freedom also is not in my mind. Financial freedom is where, I mean, the simplest thing is you’re either retired or you’re independently wealthy or in some other way you do not have to work anymore. So you’ve got this absolute freedom, which for me is boring, because I get a lot of joy from the work that I do. So in the middle is the idea, I think, of time freedom, where you do still have to work, but you’re able to design work in a way that works for you. So you can do it on your terms. There’s a lot of choice. There’s flexibility if you want it, and all of those things. I think that somebody that optimises for time freedom looks at their year and says, “This is how I want my year to go.” There’s a seasonality to it. In my personal experience, I do most of my work work, the work that I need to do to get paid and live, in what would be the equivalent of the school year, because my wife and I have a son. He’s a sophomore in high school, and that’s just the way that our life is lining up right now. Then during the summer, we’re fortunate enough to have this not so great cabin on a beautiful lake back where we both grew up. And in the last five years, we’ve designed our life so that we can go back there and live a different season during the summer. I’ve always loved summer, and during that time, that’s when we rest and relax, and we water-ski, and we fish, and we do all the fun things that you could do at a cabin. Then also, there’s this time when you’re starting to think bigger or differently or make creative connections about things in the work that you do. I find it really rejuvenating, so that when I come back in the quote-unquote school year, then I can get back to work and do some really interesting things. So the person who pursues time freedom is really optimising their life around this freedom and flexibility. Maybe they’re working longer and later into life, but they’re doing it in a way that works for them. They’re not necessarily optimising to steal that extra hour that day, or optimising for wealth, which would be the financial freedom path. Jo: Yes, I find this very interesting. I like that it’s not financial freedom because I’m an investor, as I mentioned to you, and many of us are. But that tends to take more time. So if you’re aiming for financial freedom, especially if you start investing later in life, you’re not going to get that at 45 or 50 or maybe even 60. So defining this as separate is really good, because you’re saying, “Well, you can start changing things now, and yes, you might have to work a bit longer, but if you love your work, it’s not a problem.” I want to come back to this idea of seasonality and planning your year around this seasonality idea. How does that work with the potential of other people’s timelines or other people’s possibilities, and serendipity? I have some plans, but then, like this year, this thing came up. It was just a very intuitive thing and has changed the next few months in a completely different direction and blown all my plans out the water. So how do you balance the planned seasonality with serendipity? Brian: Well, first what I want to mention is, if you can figure out a way to organise your year so that you have these extended periods of time off, that’s a wonderful thing, and it’s not something that I think you can do with a snap of the fingers. When I had this realisation that I even wanted to do this, of course it wasn’t even me that came up with it, it was my wife. This was during a time when the stock market had crashed, and I was suggesting to her that we were not going to be financially free any time soon. When she asked me what financial freedom looked like to me, I said that I still had wanted to work, just more flexibly, and she said, “Well, let’s do it now,” right? So back to my point, we couldn’t do it now. We had to get the money confidence to be able to basically figure out how could you work for nine months and have that support 12 months of living. So it’s not immediate, but once you get there, the way that I have looked at it compared to serendipity is, if I can structure the work that I do, and again, it’s so dependent on the type of work that your listener does do, right? In my particular case, when I was able to do this, I was doing independent consulting projects. So I was able to line up projects that would never overlap in the summer. Sometimes they would go into June because it had to, right? But I did the best that I could and tried to be as flexible as it was. Then when I had the time, then I was able to do whatever came up during that period of time. Usually it started as just taking a break, resting and not doing so much work. But by the end of those three months, you really start to want to get back into things. I think you do have to just go with what your body’s telling you and what your mind is telling you. I don’t know if that answers your specific question, but when you say something happens, right, and you want to take advantage of that opportunity, you’ve got to do it, right? I think flexibility is probably the value that comes through the most in the book. Even when you think you’ve figured it out and you finally got that perfect seasonal year, well, something will come up and happen. I think part of what time freedom is, is being able to take advantage of the opportunity when it comes up. Jo: Yes, being able to choose. That’s the key point. I mean, I’m in a situation like you where I run an independent business, so I do get to choose. It’s just funny because I read this and I’m like, I do have time freedom, but I fill my time completely. I do have enough time, but I fill it with more and more creative projects, and I’m not very good at stopping. So while I do have flexibility, I also have a very full calendar. Long-term listeners will know I’ve asked this of other people as well, and I was very interested that you took a transformative sabbatical in 2023. This is something I keep coming towards and then backing away from. Can you tell us a bit more about that [sabbatical]? What was that, and how did you manage that? Brian: My wife and I took a trip in, I think it was 2015 or so. We went to Italy for just two weeks. I mean, you could easily spend two years, I feel, in Italy and still feel like you missed out on things. But our vacation was so packed. It was very typical of the American vacation, I would say. I remember coming back from that vacation going, “You know, I’m more exhausted now than I was when we left.” So we always wanted to figure out a way to do some slower travel. The way that it worked out, after we had our revelation about how we wanted to design our lives, was that we were going to take what ended up being four weeks. So I knew that I was going to have my first fully free summer off in 2023, and we decided to purposely go slow, and we travelled in and around Portugal for four weeks. It’s funny, on the flight back when we were going through customs, the gentleman asked how long we’d been in Portugal, and we said, “Four weeks.” He’s like, “What did you do for that?” Like, what did you do? Jo: I love Portugal, by the way. It’s great. Brian: Lovely. “Why were you here for so long?” But the beauty of it was, if we had a day when we weren’t feeling up to going to see something, we just didn’t. It was wonderful. That was just a wonderful experience. We were able to line it up so that we met other friends, so we almost had a vacation within a vacation. We had an au pair that we hadn’t seen for years who flew over from France and met us. It was just, I imagine, very not typical of the American work lifestyle that I’m familiar with. It was just anything but that, and it was just wonderful. It really pulled our whole family out of the conventional way of thinking, and that was incredible for us, and really then triggered how we’ve spent the last few years of our lives. We haven’t had that same long trip yet. Part of it has to do with now our son’s in high school and he needs to be here at home around his friends. But he’ll be off to college soon and then we can go do it again. Jo: Yes, it’s so interesting, isn’t it? Sometimes you have to really step away from your normal life and the grind of it in order to think differently. It’s quite funny because as a Brit and a European myself— I actually find coming over to America is a way to almost change my mindset. So it’s often just going into a different culture, perhaps. Brian: Yes, absolutely. I think part of this whole living with time freedom aspect for me is just leading a more interesting life. I owe this really to my wife. I think I always, through schooling and coming out of college, I just almost had these blinders on, like, well, you’re supposed to just get to work and do your work, and this is what you do. She’s the one who’s always asked me, why are we doing this? Why could we not experience something a little bit different? And that’s what makes for an interesting life. Jo: Yes, and also from what you’ve said, you’re not spending up big time. You don’t sound like you’re having extravagant times at the lake or when you’re travelling. So I often think that people feel like you have to have so much money in order to do something. I remember being in, oh, it must have been New York, and I was talking to someone and she said, “Oh, it’s my dream to go to New Orleans,” and I’d recently been there. I was like, “Well, why haven’t you been? It’s really easy. You’re in America. You could just fly there.” I’ve even taken trains in America, which I know a lot of Americans haven’t. But there are trains, and all of this. I was like, “Well, why haven’t you been?” It’s like people have in their minds all these barriers. Money is a big barrier, right? But you don’t need as much as you think, perhaps. Brian: It’s true. There’s all of the series of podcasts and blogs and everything about how, when you do this long travel or slow travel, I think is what they call it, you don’t have to stay at hotels. You could stay at an Airbnb and rent a place for two or three months, and it’s far less per day than it costs. The analysis that I’ve seen is how sometimes if you, say, maybe rented out your house back in America when you were going to Europe, and then you did your travelling, it’s actually cheaper to go and take a long trip than just stay put. You actually make money on it. I mean, of course, it all depends, but it’s eye-opening. Jo: Yes, you mentioned Portugal. We’re actually going to Portugal walking in a couple of weeks, and Portugal, for example, is much cheaper than Italy a lot of the time. So it also depends on where you go. Coming back to the book, you mentioned a few minutes ago money confidence. In the book, you have these money personalities, and many of my listeners as creatives and authors, there’s quite a lot of scarcity mindset in the author community, fear of financial things. So maybe you could just talk about these money personalities and how we get to money confidence. Brian: The track that I took in the book was, before I could just say, “Oh, go live time freedom and have inconsistent income and take these extended periods of time off,” I couldn’t do it without addressing how I felt, which was like, “Well, can I afford this?” So the money piece of it is extremely important. The money personalities is something that I feel like I learned far too late in life. How I describe money personalities, and there are different ways of talking about this, but it’s based on how you were raised and experiences that you’ve had with money from when you were a child, in your family, and then what happened in early life. How has that impacted you behaviourally in terms of how you view money? So for example, growing up, we lived in a small rural part of the Midwest, and so we had money. We didn’t have a lot of money, but I can remember every Saturday morning my mom clipping coupons, right? Because that’s how we bought our groceries. So I do come from this, let’s get the most value out of everything that I buy, and I’m going to restrain my spending because who knows if I’m going to have enough in the future. A constraints mentality. Whereas I’ve met other people now that I’ve been an adult whose parents had their own business, and they had booms and busts, and so there were good times and bad times. So when they get money, they spend it, so that they can enjoy it. I realise that people come with this—I don’t want to say baggage because it’s a bad thing—but people come with these experiences that influence how they think about what’s possible as it relates to money. I think that for one, people need to understand what that is for them and how that works. I also think that you can use it then to your advantage in figuring out how to gain the money confidence to step off into a life of time freedom. So the three that I really highlight in the book are, the one that is called, what I call the money minimiser, which is the individual who doesn’t like to think about money or would rather not think about money. Money is not a big part of their life, or they feel constrained by money. I have elements of this in my background. And in this case, a lot of times you may not need as much money to live off of to be happy, which is actually a huge advantage, because if you don’t need as much money to live on, then you don’t have to go save up as much money, or you don’t need to make as much money. The other type is the money manager, and this is someone who’s much more into saving and investing and understanding how all this works. This is the type of person that a financial advisor loves to address, because they have money to invest

How can you teach yourself anything, even when it challenges the way you see the world? And how can you organise what you learn so it turns into books your readers will find? J. Daniel Sawyer shares his self-education toolkit after decades as a largely self-taught author. In the intro, Spotify for Authors has expanded AI-assisted creation of audiobooks [ Spotify ]; Who is Narrating the Future? [ Publishing Perspectives ; 9 ways AI will disrupt authors and publishing from 2019 ]; Author Voice, Creativity, and Building a Career as an Intuitive Author-Entrepreneur [ How Women Write ]; A fallow season [ Systems and Soul ]; How to Write, Publish, and Market Short Stories – Joanna Penn. Today’s show is sponsored by Bookfunnel, the essential tool for your author business. Whether it’s delivering your reader magnet, sending out advanced copies of your book, handing out ebooks at a conference, or fulfilling your digital sales to readers, BookFunnel does it all. Check it out at bookfunnel.com/thecreativepenn This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn J. Daniel Sawyer is the author of over 30 books across science fiction, fantasy, crime, short stories, and nonfiction, as well as being a podcaster and filmmaker. His latest book is Reclaiming Your Mind: An Autodidact’s Bible . You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes What is an autodidact, and why school doesn’t teach you how to learn How to triage information in a world of way too much How to recognise fear in your body and turn it into excitement for learning Sandboxing dangerous ideas so you can learn without threatening your worldview How to organise research and check quotes when writing nonfiction Why you should never publish a book dead You can find Dan at JDSawyer.net , and The Autodidact’s Bible is out now on Kickstarter. Transcript of the interview with J. Daniel Sawyer Jo: J. Daniel Sawyer is the author of over 30 books across science fiction, fantasy, crime, short stories, and nonfiction, as well as being a podcaster and filmmaker. His latest book is Reclaiming Your Mind: An Autodidact’s Bible . So welcome back to the show, Dan. Dan: Hello, Joanna. It’s great to be back. Jo: Yes, indeed. You were only on the show a few months ago, which is rare I have somebody twice in the same year, so that is quite exciting. We talked about voice mastery last time, very different to the topic of today. But because we did talk a bit more about your background last time, we’re going to jump straight into the book. So what is an autodidact, and why write a book on it? Dan: Well, an autodidact is someone who teaches themselves things rather than taking a course. It’s not incompatible with being taught by others, of course, but there’s a set of skills for being able to pick up new information, new disciplines, new hobbies, whatnot, that’s really useful to have. I wrote the book because I was mentoring a friend’s kid through high school. They weren’t teaching her anything, and she was having a hell of a time figuring out how to get an education in a school that was just not interested in providing one. The process of the conversations over the course of a year forced me to surface all of the tools that I had developed, starting as a child, that allow me to pick up all of those disciplines you were talking about before, plus blacksmithing and academics and other stuff like that. While I have had access to a lot of amazing teachers in my life, I’m largely self-taught, and have become the world expert on a couple of topics as a result. I realised that the tools that you need to teach yourself and the tools that you get in school no longer overlap very much, at least in the US. The old style of classical education, and then the middling style of early school education, both gave you those tools so that when you left school, you were able to continue through the world growing. Nobody does that anymore, so I realised I needed to write a book about all this stuff while it was fresh in my mind, so I did. Jo: I love that. I don’t know if it always was like that for some people, too. We all know now more about neurodivergence. Back in the day, when you and I went to school, that wasn’t really talked about. It was like if you couldn’t learn stuff in the way that it was thrust at you, then you were just dumb, maybe. Dan: Well, what you and I got in school was the very late end of the German model. The German model of education is what arose in the industrial era, and its job is to create good, obedient workers, not necessarily to create independent citizens who can think for themselves and who can move through a world that’s changing and learn things. That kind of education came from an older tradition, but it wasn’t well suited to pulling people out of the hinterlands and putting them in the factories in a way that they could understand what they were supposed to be doing. So the Germans developed a regimented system that was built around memorisation exclusively, rather than processing. Memorisation and repetition. Whereas a more classical approach would have you do memorisation as part of repetition, processing, evaluation, and creativity. So when you go to school, you get some of the toolkit you need, but not all of it. Jo: Yes, and then I think some people were just so bashed over the head with stuff that they didn’t enjoy the process of learning, and maybe just moved away from it now. I want to come back on something you said there, that it didn’t enable the independence, the thinking for yourself. We’re living in this really weird time now where we’re almost in a splintered world where you can find information on anything you want, but a lot of people are finding information, say, on TikTok or in AI-generated books with no rigorous fact-checking. So how can you think for yourself in a world where there’s almost way too much now? Dan: Well, one of the most foundational skills of thinking is information triage. The world has always been full of unreliable information, if for no other reason than the state of the art in any given field at any given time is guaranteed to be about 80% wrong. So even if you’re being very careful about only hewing to the most accepted body of facts, facts change over time, partly as we learn more and partly as the world changes underneath us. Thinking is different than knowing. Thinking is the ability to evaluate the information you’re coming into contact with and figure out what’s likely to be useful, and then to check yourself based on what you are more inclined to believe because of the way that you’re made up emotionally. It’s being able to curb your impulses with an error-checking layer so that you don’t get sucked down into a very nasty rabbit hole, which everybody’s prone to on one front or another. So that explains the how and why, but the what is things like knowing your basic logic, knowing the informal logical fallacies that everybody’s prone to, things like the bandwagon fallacy. We’re partly herd animals. We tend to want to join a group for protection and identity. So if we’re in a group that believes a certain thing, we’re likely to believe it out of fashion, which is great for group solidarity. It’s not so great for actually knowing if what you think you know is correct. I’ve got a whole section of the book devoted to the top 30 or 40 most common informal reasoning fallacies. Knowing how to do basic critical reasoning is one of the things you have to do if you’re going to be learning in a way that’s useful to you. Then of course, there’s another reasoning kit, which is the non-rational reasoning kit, which I also talk about. That’s something that you and I as fiction authors use all the time. Jo: Explain more about that [non-rational reasoning kit] then, because people might not know what that is. Dan: All right. So rational reasoning involves logic. If X is true and Y is true, then Z must also be true. That’s basic deduction. It basically lets you figure out what’s implicit in the body of knowledge you already know. Then subsidiary to that is induction, which is, if X is true and Y is true, what might also be true that could explain X and Y? That’s the scientific method. It’s less reliable than deduction, but it actually grows your knowledge rather than just revealing it. Non-rational reasoning is things like reasoning through analogy, reasoning through metaphor, reasoning through intuition. These are all reasoning modes that allow you to bring something foreign into your understanding, or to deepen your understanding of something you’re already familiar with, in a way that incorporates not just logical propositions, but also emotional truth and relational truth and things like that. Frequently it can generate things you can then subject to logical evaluation and pull new information about the world out of. A really good example of where this happens in science is in visionary experiences. The periodic table, for example, came out of someone’s dream. Now, the fact he dreamed it doesn’t mean it’s true, but what happened while he was dreaming is he had a non-rational reasoning chain that brought him this vision, which he then brought out into the real world and started doing experiments on to see if it would work, and it did. Jo: In that case, yes, I can picture the periodic table, and I often see images of things that help me organise information. So that to me makes sense in terms of somebody who had certain amounts of knowledge, who had some kind of picture in their brain and then was able to prove that. I wanted to circle back. You were talking about critical things, rational things. You mentioned logic, and you did briefly mention emotion and intuition. Coming back to where we are at this point in history, so much emotion is being triggered through the media, whether that’s social media or traditional media or whatever, that all of those logical, reasoned things can be almost triaged immediately by a big emotional response to something. So how can we understand that that emotional response perhaps has to be part of the triage? Dan: Well, simply by stating it outright. What you just said is exactly correct. I’ve got a model in the book where I talk about the difference between feelings and emotions. Feelings, in this model, are your interpretive layer. That’s, I feel angry or sad or excited or depressed or whatnot. Those are your feelings. The emotions are the base physiological states that those feelings are laying over. So elevated heart rate, increased skin conductance, things like that are associated with any excitable state, like anger, sexual arousal, anticipation, fear, that kind of thing. Then depressed heart rate and whatnot, those are associated with depression, relaxation, and a whole bunch of other things. Learning to recognise the base physiological layer within yourself that’s being stimulated allows you a certain amount of freedom about interpreting that base physiological state. That can help you separate your reaction to your own physiological state from your rational evaluation of what’s going on around you. One of the things that our world runs on right now is fear, and there’s reasons for this. If you read Edward Bernays’ Propaganda , he lays it all out. Fear shifts your mind into a survival mode. You’re less likely to take time to think through things. You’re more likely to be easily steered because, as far as your physiology knows, there’s an active threat to you, and you’ve got to take care of that. You’ve got to get away from it. If you stimulate fear in somebody, you can direct who they hate, who they love, who they trust. Very, very useful for anyone who wants to build a cult or sell a product or get elected. If you learn to recognise in yourself that the physiological state associated with fear is the same one associated with excitement over something new, then you can train yourself, to a certain extent, and it’s a learned skill, to do an end run around the fear part and concentrate on the excitement. Then you can deal with whatever it is that’s stimulating you in the way that you would a new piece of information, a new bit of learning, a new adventure. Instead of fear, which closes you down, adventure opens you up, and that’s a much better state to engage in learning and exploration than fear is. Jo: When you said, “That opens you up,” this is exactly what I look for, what is expansive for me. I often reflect on this. When do I feel expansive, and when do I feel like I’m being reduced? When do I feel like I’m hunkered down? When I’m working with AI tools, I feel expansive, I feel more creative, I feel excited. I feel all these things where I just see so many possibilities, and the horizon is off out there in the distance. Yet I know other people, some people listening, will feel that that crushes them, that even mentioning it just makes them reduce into themselves and shrink because of fear, I guess. I also think that a lot of people are feeling those things because they haven’t learnt enough perhaps. They are just responding to emotions. So how can we change those things so we’re more open to learning? Dan: Well, one of the things you run into with creative types is we’ve all got something weird in our background that makes us do this. We’re not just inclined to be creative, because you can meet welders and electricians who are very creative people. They just apply their creativity in a limited domain. People who go into the arts tend to be either people who grew up in incredibly open conditions, or people who grew up in incredibly closed conditions and had to fight against them. People who grow up in closed conditions and fight against them tend to be a little better at sticking around for the long haul of an arts career, which can be punishing financially and emotionally. One of the reasons they can stick around is that they had a lot of practice in sticking around through horrible situations when they were younger. So they’re going to have a negative bias when they come up against things that they don’t understand. If you have a negative bias with something you don’t understand and it turns out to be wrong, you’re not going to lose very much. But if you have a negative bias when you come up against something you understand and it turns out to be right, you’re going to survive that thing. Whereas a more open person might just walk into the jaws of the shark, right? To change that and make your experience better, and give you access to all the advantages that the person who’s got a more open temperament has, you’ve got to find a way to make it safe to experiment with the dangerous thing. For every dangerous thing, and probably for everyone who’s encountering it, it’s going to be a little bit different. With AI, people are worried about the market eroding to the point where nobody cares about human creativity anymore. In fact, my first publishable short story, which is called We Create Worlds , was actually about a novelist trying to outwrite the AI novels. It’s become weird. Jo: What year did you write that in? Dan: That was in 1999. Jo: Awesome. Dan: It’s still a great short story. I did do it in podcast form, which you can find on my website at jdsawyer.net , and it’s also in ebook on Amazon, and it’s part of the Sculpting God short story collection. But the fear is that humanity gets crowded out of the market in the face of the relentless onslaught of the machines. It’s not a ridiculous fear, especially if you look at the history of artisanship. Everybody and their brother used to have an artisanal business, and now we’ve got machines that weave socks and make just about everything in our world. So people like me, who spend half my day every day in a blacksmith’s forge making hooks that you could just make by machines way cheaper, are kinda crazy. But there’s a market for that. Humans like things that were touched by other humans, as long as they can afford them or justify making a luxury. On the other hand, the people that adopt tools early and figure out how to make them work for them, those are usually the people that win at scale over the long haul. So, AI is coming for our jobs, guys, but you know what? You can keep it out of your creativity and build agents that help you deal with your scheduling and your bookkeeping and your marketing, all the other stuff that takes up your time as an author. Then instead of threatening your creativity, it gives you more space to be creative. Jo: So it’s reframing things a lot of the time. Dan: A lot of the time, yes. Jo: I think that’s true of everything. Reframing can help you learn. Reframing things can give you a reason to learn, I guess, when in the past, maybe at school, you hated learning… Dan: Yes. Jo: Now by reframing it into a reason why. Dan: That really helps, and it also helps the second big problem with learning, which is worldview threat. I think I open the book with an entire section on how worldviews work and how that limits us, and how we can’t get away from them even though they limit us. Your worldview is the matrix through which you experience everything around you, and it’s not a window, it’s like a lens. It distorts everything, it filters everything, because it’s the reflexive layer that helps you make sense of the world, and it’s built out of your experience and inflected by your personality and other things like that. There are things you can learn, and for everyone it’s going to be a little bit different, that threaten everything about your worldview. That’s a problem, because your mind experiences your worldview not as an interpretive matrix, but as a survival tool. As far as your deep mind goes, your worldview is perfectly okay because you’re still alive. Its job is to keep you alive. So if you learn something, or come close to learning something or thinking something that could unspool a big part of your worldview, you’ll just emotionally go blank. You’ll shut down. The information you’re encountering will not register, or it will make you angry and you’ll steer away from it. This isn’t very good if you’re wanting to learn things or grow. So there’s a set of metacognitive tools you can use to help you push past that and navigate the existential crises that can sometimes ensue without crushing you entirely. I spend a section of the book talking about that as well, and detailing what some of those tools are. Jo: Better give us a tool. Give us one useful tool. Dan: All right, so one of the basic tools is one that anyone who’s a developer in the audience will be familiar with, and it’s basically sandboxing. You create a little playpen where it’s okay to play with this dangerous idea, and you make yourself the promise that until you’re really familiar with the dangerous idea, you’re not going to connect it to anything else in your worldview. Then you’ve got the option later on to decide whether to integrate it or not. But you’ve got to play with this scary tool. For someone who comes out of a fundamentalist religious background like I do, one of the big ones here was textual criticism, where you learn about all the manuscript traditions that make up the New Testament especially, and the development of Christian scripture. I had to know about this stuff because I had a paid writing gig that required me to know about it. But I was a biblical literalist and believed that it all came straight out of God’s mouth, and I couldn’t even go near it without going, “Ah,” because intuitively some part of me recognised this could be a threat to what you believe. So I made myself a sandbox. I said, “This is a literary project. If I actually believe in the doctrines of my religion, then this can’t be a threat, because even if the words themselves were changed all over the place, the Holy Spirit would h

How can you use AI to research, edit and handle admin and marketing tasks while still writing every single word yourself? How can you double down on being human and reach readers on a personal level? Anna McPhee shares her perspective as a software engineer, author and creative technologist. In the intro, How to Write, Publish, and Market Short Stories out now. This show is supported by my Patrons. Join my Community and get articles, discounts, and extra audio and video tutorials on writing craft, author business, and AI tools, at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn Anna McPhee is an author, software engineer, professional speaker, and creative technologist. Her latest book is What Machines Can’t Replace: Why AI Makes Us More Human . You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Note s Why writing code is creative work, and what it shares with writing books How AI changed Anna’s job as a software engineer without taking her employment The difference between AI assistance and generation How to use custom skills for editing reports, research and repeatable tasks Why the rise of AI makes us crave slow, imperfect, physical things Responding to a negative review by showing up as a human You can find Anna at Anna.kiwi and her new book at WhatMachinesCantReplace.com . Transcript of the interview with Anna McPhee Jo: Anna McPhee is an author, software engineer, professional speaker, and creative technologist. Her latest book is What Machines Can’t Replace: Why AI Makes Us More Human . So welcome to the show, Anna. Anna: Hi, Joanna. Thank you so much for having me. Jo: Oh, this is going to be a fun conversation. First up— Tell us a bit more about you and your background in technology, as well as how you got into writing. Anna: I have been in all of these things my whole life, as long as I can remember. When I was just a little girl, writing was my favourite thing, writing stories. It was the whole reason I went to school, to be honest. I always pictured myself as a writer before anything else. My dad was a lecturer in software development, so when I was little, he would teach me how to code. So I’ve always done both, for as long as I can remember, and my mum is an artist. That’s been my upbringing, at the intersection of technology and art, and then writing is my own personal passion. It’s naturally flowed throughout my life. I’ve been in and out of some other careers and chased all the things that have made me feel interested and passionate, but writing has always been there in the background. It’s something I do, whether it’s been for a hobby or for a profession, so it’s always been there. Jo: But you work in software, right? Anna: I do. I work in software, which came to me by chance. I set out as a digital nomad about 15 years ago now. I sold everything I owned and started travelling. The way I thought I was going to fund this was through freelance writing, which I was very optimistic about. We all know now that’s a very challenging way to make an income, especially when you don’t have a background in it or a portfolio. I did have this childhood background in software engineering and coding. So I set out to be a writer and travel the world as a writer, and actually what I ended up doing was building websites and writing software, because that’s what people would pay me to do. So I fell into both at the same time through this chance I took. Jo: I think sometimes people think that programming and software development and these more technical fields are not creative. My husband was a programmer for a long time, and essentially programming is a language. Well, there are lots of languages, but you are creating in a language with computers, right? So is there that much difference? How do you fix these two things in your mind separately, or are they the same thing? Anna: They’re so related. Many people might put writing into more of an art, and computer development and programming more into a maths or a science, but I just think there’s so much creativity in writing code, in how you choose to structure things, in the language you select for something, the way you approach it. It’s very similar to writing a book, I think. I’ve found a lot of things that are very similar about it, to do with architecture even. When you look at the basics, some people might write a book with no idea where it’s going and see where it ends. It’s the same with software. People might go into it and not have a plan. Most people will architect their software, or they’ll architect their story in the same way. I think there’s a lot of crossover between the two. Jo: And there’s editing, and doing the “does this do what I want it to do?” I think with software perhaps it’s more obvious when something doesn’t do what you want it to do than with a book. Anna: Perhaps. Although with AI now, it’s becoming a little more vague, because you can think your software’s doing what you want it to, but it might not be. It might just look like it is. I think those lines are getting a bit blurrier as technology changes. There’s a lot of things in software development that are very similar to writing. We don’t have an editor, but we will have unit tests or code reviews, and maybe the CI tests, and we’ve got all these structures in place that are very similar to writing. Jo: I also think what’s interesting, and this has been in the last maybe decade really, is that it used to be you would get a job in the old way, but— Now it seems like your GitHub page, which is almost like your author platform, your programmer platform, can make a real difference in how people find you and your work. So maybe talk a bit about that, because you have a GitHub page, don’t you? Anna: I do have a GitHub page, and I’ve spent a lot of time on it, because you can set up your README file and make it a bit like a website, and introduce all of your projects and what you’re working on. Just to combine it a little bit, actually, I use GitHub for my writing. I use it for version control so that I can go back and see the changes that I’ve made to the things that I’m writing. Even with my book, I had a copy of it backed up in a private repository on GitHub where I could track changes and never lose a backup. I have so much faith in GitHub that it extends beyond the software I write and into everything I do. I keep a copy backed up in GitHub. Jo: That’s actually quite funny because, coming into AI in the author community, one of the things that’s now talked about is how do you prove that your book is not a one-click generated book? And what you’ve actually got there is evidence of your process. Anna: Exactly. Jo: Which is kind of hilarious in many ways. Well, let’s get into this, because there’s so much fear and witch hunting right now and negativity in the author community. As somebody who’s grown up with both art and the software side, where do you think those attitudes come from, and how have they changed in different ways? Anna: Oh, people are really afraid. I’ve got a very moderate perspective, and I think I sit in a very similar position to you. A large number of people that I hear from are either incredibly pro-AI, let it do everything for them, everything, everything, do it for absolutely everything you can think of. Or they’re completely terrified and very, very negative about it, and won’t use it for anything at all. I can only assume this is going to stabilise with time. There’s been a huge amount of outrage against other technologies in the past, even calculators. All technology has come with scepticism and people scared that it’s going to take their jobs. I think there’s a lot of misinformation out there as well, people who think that AI is trained on books, which it is, and that’s a totally valid concern with the copyright and things. I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding around what training an AI model actually means in that regard. It’s not taking someone’s prose and reusing it. It’s looking at the underlying mathematical probability of, if you have this word, what is the probability of the next word being this? It’s broken down into numbers. I’m not 100 percent sure, but from my perspective of seeing it, the witch hunt comes from a place of fear. I saw an author in a group I’m in recently who said, “Oh, I’ve written so many novels, and I’ve run out of ideas for names for my characters. I’ve used every person I’ve ever met, I’ve used their name. That’s how many books I’ve written. How do I get more names?” Someone suggested, “Well, why don’t you ask AI for some other names?” “Oh, no, no, no. I could never let AI take over my work like that.” And it was just over the idea of using it to ask a question. So I think there’s a feeling that if you let it do one thing, next thing it’s going to be doing everything, and it’s going to erase you, and your ideas, and your way of doing things. Jo: Just on that, it is interesting, though, isn’t it? Because I am trying to use it, like I use Claude Code, and I’m trying to use it for more, and more, and more. I started off using ChatGPT the day it came out in 2022, and have increasingly tried to give the AI tools all the things that will free me up to do the things I love to do. Making lists of names is not on my list of things I love to do. Anna: Yes, exactly. I feel the same way. Jo: So that’s the thing, isn’t it? The fear is really interesting because we all have fear. One very visceral time I remember feeling very scared was in the pandemic, in those early days when there wasn’t a vaccine. That’s really the only reference I think I have for it, because like you, I feel like I’ve grown up with technology, and so I’ve never felt it that way. I’m hoping that as with COVID, as with things developing over time, and obviously again, misinformation is rampant, but— I guess we got used to it. Is that the best we can hope for with AI? Anna: I hope it’s better than that. I hope we can hope for better, that people can learn how to use it in a way that supports them. As people become less fearful, like with COVID, they experiment a little bit here or there and start to see that there are ways to not let it take over. In general, people are really bad at identifying AI-generated content. There are so many studies done on it, and it’s 50/50 at best. Good AI now produces stuff that a lot of people don’t recognise. So it’s more about the idea than the reality of it. There’s this whole idea around it that AI will take our jobs, and I get asked all the time, “Well, when do you think AI’s going to take your job? You work on a computer.” Well, it can take my job, and it has. I used to write code all the time, and now I write almost no code. I work for a very large software company, and we use a lot of AI in our development protocols, and I don’t write any code now, more or less, and a few years ago I did all day. So my job has changed completely, and AI has taken my job, but it hasn’t taken my employment. I found a new way of being, which is I’m more of a project manager. I review code. I make sure nothing bad gets put out into the world. My role has changed, but it hasn’t been taken away. I hope that as people start to see that this new technology is not taking their jobs, it’s taking the parts of their jobs off them that are so repeatable, and giving them more room to do more with the things that they are uniquely good at. Jo: Absolutely. So let’s get into that, because you did just say there that you’re not writing any code, which is different to your writing for books. In your book, What Machines Can’t Replace , you talk about how you used AI assistance and how you did things in different ways. I’ve been explicit about being AI-assisted since May 2023, so I absolutely am on board with the difference between what is assistance and what is generation. One-click generation of a complete book, while some people might choose to do that, that’s not what you and I are talking about. So tell us— How did you use AI tools and these assisted processes for this book? Anna: Right. So I used AI extensively for this book. However, I wrote every single word. I don’t want AI to take over my voice, and that is one area where it differs from writing code in a big way. One-click generation, maybe one day AI will actually be very good at it, and we won’t be able to tell the difference. But currently, I definitely can. If I start reading something that is one-click generated, it becomes very obvious to me very quickly. I use AI extensively in my day. I use a Claude plan which is the Max 20x, the biggest allowance plan, and I run out of limit every week. So I spend a lot of time seeing how it forms sentences and the kind of thing it says, so I think I’m quite sensitive to when I see it. So for now, it’s not good for that, and I don’t think I ever want it to be. When I put something out in the world that is software, the thing that’s uniquely me is the concepts behind it or the way it functions. It’s not the code itself. When I put writing out there, when I put a book out there, the words are the thing that’s me. They’re my signature, they’re my style. So I used AI assistance for everything else. I used it to help me research, but then I would verify the sources myself, but it was so good at finding things. I used it to transcribe my words. I would go out for long walks, and my ideas come to me when I’m out walking, like so many people. So I’d just pick up my phone and voice record, “Oh, hey, I was thinking, years ago I heard about this study, and I think that would be really interesting, but I don’t really know the details of it. Can you make a note of this?” Then my AI could go and research it, come back and say, “Oh, I think you’re talking about this research paper, and here’s a link to it.” It could add it into my notes, and I could still verify it and read it, but it saved me hours of manual trawling through Google Scholar looking for things. So as a first step I used it for research, but I also used it all the way through the writing process. I’ve set up a lot of custom skills for all the different editor types. I’ve got a developmental editor, a line editor, a copy editor. None of them are allowed to make any changes. They are only allowed to create reports of what they find. So I could check for consistency, or did I reference the right thing for this chapter? Does this flow okay? I could ask it questions about my work without it actually touching the words. Another way I used it is I’d make more voice recordings, and then it would transcribe them and suggest where in my book they would fit best, and then copy and paste my exact words, word for word, into the right spot, and then I could edit it in. So I used it for almost everything except the actual words, which remain mine, and the design as well. I value designers a lot, so I paid a cover designer to design my cover. Jo: Yes, and all those things you were talking about, I also do. How do you explain skills? Because I have like 100 skills now. I do skills for everything. I’m struggling to explain what that is to people who don’t really understand. Anna: Yes, skills are amazing, and it is difficult to explain. It’s like a little package, and it can contain prompts, it can contain scripts, it can contain information, and it can be called only when needed. So if I created, for example, my developmental editor skill, it might be a folder that’s consumed by Claude and Claude Code, and only when it’s asked for, then it uses all of the stuff in its context and follows a set of instructions. They’re just more powerful than a prompt because they’re reusable, and they live there, and it can be clever and know when to use ones without you invoking them directly as well. I have another skill that’s just me, about me, and I keep it up to date with information about what I’m working on and who I am. If I’m doing something, I can say, “Well, don’t forget, check the About Me before you answer this.” Or, “I’m working on this project I haven’t worked on in a while, but I created a skill to reference it. Before we start work on this, can you go and check in with the skill?” Kind of like a library. Jo: It’s interesting, you’re talking about quite expansive skills, and I do have some of those, but a lot of my skills are really quite specific. Like, do a Shopify product in the way that we did Shopify products last time. Or, this is how Joanna Penn wants the sales description for Amazon, so write the Amazon sales description for this. And then, say, on ChatGPT it’ll be like, right, do A+ content for this book. That kind of thing. So it can be really, really specific, almost like a little program, right? Then it can be, as you say, with memory and all this different stuff. Anything you want to do more than once, I think. Anna: That’s a really good way to describe it. Also, because of my technical background, I trust code a lot more than I trust AI at the moment. I really love AI, but the results vary, and you can run the same thing five times and get five different results, whereas if you run a code function five times, you will always get the same result if it’s a well-written function. So for anything like that, I add code into my skills so that I can say, “When this is called, run this script,” and I know it’s always run the same way. You can get quite complex with skills and build some real programs inside them, or it can be just a few lines. Do this, this way. I’ve got one I really enjoy at the moment I created called Research Me. I have so many ideas, always hundreds of ideas. So many of them are terrible. Some of them are good, and some of them are already done. I just type Research Me, and then I just put my thought. It might be a word. It might be a line. It might be more than that. Then it goes away and looks it up and sees if someone’s done this thing, and if it’s valid to me, and then creates a report and saves it in my knowledge base for me to look at another time. Jo: I guess it’s not really a skill, but it’s more like part of the memory. I just say, put that in the backlog and bring it back in a month. Anna: Oh, that’s so nice, too, being able to set schedules and reminders. Like, right now is not a good time, but I don’t want to let this idea go, so can you bring it back to me at this time? And it will. It’s wonderful for that. Jo: It is good. Oh, and we should also say, you don’t have to write a skill. If you do something with Claude or ChatGPT or whatever, you can then say, “Create a skill for this,” and it will write it, and you can have a look at it, but you don’t have to sit there typing out how to do stuff. I think often people think that you have to drive it a lot more, where it’s just so much of a conversation now, isn’t it? Anna: Yes, it can be done completely with conversation. You don’t need to write out any instructions or any code, anything at all. You could have a really positive experience doing something with Claude Cowork and then get to the end of that process and think, “Oh, that was wonderful. I definitely think I’ll do that again.” So you just say, “Oh, that was great. Can you make that a skill so we can do it again the same way next time?” And it’ll create it, and you just click a button, say Add the Skill once it’s done, and that’s it. Jo: There are so many things. Now, just coming back to your book, you do have at the end of each chapter some prompts, although I don’t like the word prompt anymore, because I feel like prompt is from the old way, when you would type in a certain prompt and then something would come back and that would be done. Whereas now it’s much more of a conversation. So a prompt is almost a starting point. So you’ve used questions, I guess. What are your recommendations for authors who want to get more into this but are still apprehensive and are worried about getting it wrong somehow? Anna: Ok

How can you redesign your author business for the publishing environment that actually exists, rather than the one you wish you had? And how do you decide which marketing efforts will still bring readers to your books in ten years’ time? Tracy Cooper-Posey shares her solar sail theory after more than 25 years as an author. In the intro, reviving your backlist [ The Indy Author ]; AI as a medium [ Tim O’Reilly ]; How to Write, Publish, and Market Short Stories – Joanna Penn. ProWritingAid Storyteller sale : Thursday, 3rd September until September 13th 2026 — 25% off all annual licenses as well as Story Critique credits. Today’s show is sponsored by ProWritingAid, writing and editing software that goes way beyond just grammar and typo checking. With its detailed reports on how to improve your writing and integration with writing software, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 15% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn Tracy Cooper-Posey is the multi-award-winning author of over 200 novels and works of nonfiction, science fiction, fantasy, romance, and historical fiction under three pen names. Her books for authors include The Indie Author Survival Guide and The Productive Indie Fiction Writer . You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes Learning to write again after chemo, one sentence at a time What enshittification means, and why it is the environment rather than you The hallmarks of an indie author business that persists over time The solar sail theory of long-term discoverability Why social media and paid ads have such a short half-life How to find and reduce the operational drag on your business You can find Tracy at ProductiveIndieFictionWriter.com or StoriesRulePress.com . Transcript of the interview with Tracy Cooper-Posey Jo: Tracy Cooper-Posey is the multi-award-winning author of over 200 novels and works of nonfiction, science fiction, fantasy, romance, and historical fiction under three pen names. Her books for authors include The Indie Author Survival Guide and The Productive Indie Fiction Writer . So welcome back to the show, Tracy. Tracy: Hi, Jo. It’s great to be back. Jo: Yes. So you were last on the show in October 2023 talking about The Productive Indie Fiction Writer , and we went into depth then. So give us a bit of an update on your author business and also your life. Because it has been a bit of an up and down. Tracy: Yes, it’s been a very interesting three years, because I had just gone into remission with cancer when we were talking last. Now I’m out of remission again and facing treatment in the next few weeks. My husband got cancer and went through treatment, and he’s cured. So life has been pretty interesting. All that has made me do a lot of deep thinking about the indie author business and my own business and writing in general. So I’m still here. I’m still publishing, 200 plus books now. I had to learn how to write again. But the writing has shifted a lot towards science fiction and fantasy, including cosy science fiction now, which is the new genre that’s just creeping in. All three pen names have been Aurealis Award finalists, which is nice. I’m still continuing the nonfiction work, which is something that you said the last time that we spoke. You said, “Now that you’ve written one, it’s likely you’ll write more nonfiction.” And I did. Jo: You did. They’re excellent books. Just on that, you mentioned cosy sci-fi. For anyone who might not know, where is that genre? What’s in that genre of cosy sci-fi? Tracy: It’s not really officially a genre yet. It started off with cosy fantasy, which was where the cosy started. Actually, technically it started with cosy mystery, and everyone understands cosy mystery. The body and the murder are off stage. There’s a lot of tea drinking. There’s lots of friends, and it’s all very polite and mannered. You’re focusing more on the emotions and the feel, and they’ve picked up that cosy aspect of mystery and put it on fantasy. So you get books like, I think the primary one is Legends and Lattes . It’s about an orc that’s running a coffee shop because they got sick of fighting, and the adventures that they have trying to run their coffee shop. So if you pick up that same cosy sensation and put it on science fiction, that’s cosy science fiction. But it’s so new that it doesn’t have a category on Amazon or anything like that. Cosy fantasy does now. Amazon just created a cosy fantasy category a while ago. But cosy science fiction is so new that people are still arguing over which books are cosy science fiction and which are not. Jo: Oh, that’s interesting. You’re incredibly prolific. You always have been. You mentioned there that you had to learn how to write again after cancer. What do you think happened, and how did you relearn? Because there are people listening who go through these similar things. Tracy: I think a lot of what happened was, well, life just became incredibly complex and challenging, and just getting through a day of pain took a lot of the energy, what they call the spoons. I didn’t have the spoons to write anymore. Also you get chemo brain, which is the really interesting one. When I was going through chemo, I would look at a spreadsheet and just couldn’t figure out how it worked. It just didn’t make sense to me, so I had to hand over the finances and everything to Mark, which was rather interesting. The way I got myself back into writing again was, it was such an alien idea that writing wasn’t even on my radar from day to day. I just didn’t have the energy or the concentration to do it. So I started off really, really small. The first thing I did was read a lot of favourite books from other authors just to remember why I loved reading. Then I started reading my own books that I had written, just to remind myself of what I used to love about my own work. Then I just cracked the manuscript one day and read as far as I had written and thought, “Okay, what’s the next sentence?” And that’s the only thing that I would let myself do, was just write the next sentence. That’s it. So I wrote the next sentence, and sat there and thought, “Do I want to write the next sentence?” On that particular day, no, I didn’t. But I just kept opening the manuscript and looking and thinking about the next sentence, and eventually I wrote a few more. I think it was that coming back to the manuscript over and over with no pressure, just look at it, can you get the next sentence written? Very slowly I started building up, and now I’m pretty much back to the speed that I was at before the diagnosis. Jo: So I guess we could think about it in the same way that your body is physically recovering, your mind is also recovering. It almost feels like people want to disconnect the two. If you get a physical injury, that shouldn’t affect your brain. But as you mentioned, having chemo, that in itself is difficult and has impacts on your brain. So if people think about it more as an injury you have to come back from, rather than day one you’re back in, I guess. Tracy: Yes. It’s really a rehabilitation-style process, and I think the key is you’ve got to take all pressure off yourself. I know that, for me in particular, because I was such a workhorse, I could feel this stress because I just wasn’t getting things done. Once I gave myself permission to just take as long as it takes and just keep coming back to it, that helped enormously. It still took time for that rehabilitation process to actually work. There’s a lot of forgiving yourself, and it has to be a gentle process, I think, because situations like cancer and chemo and whatever the situation is that’s pulled you away from your manuscript, they’re big life events, and there is a lot of stress involved with them both physically and mentally. So you have to give yourself time. Jo: Yes, it’s so important. Okay, well, also in these last three years, as you said, you’ve got back to writing, and one of the books you have also written is The Anti-Enshittification Field Manual for Indie Authors . You also use Cory Doctorow’s enshittification concept around the mature indie author industry. So just talk about what that term [enshittification] means? We think it is now established in the industry, in terms of what is going on there. How do we recognise it and adjust? Tracy: It’s a very interesting term. The first time I heard it I raised my brows a bit. I was thinking, “Well, that’s a bit cheeky.” The more you think about it, the more appropriate the name is. Basically, Cory Doctorow’s idea is that any platform, so for the sake of this discussion, let’s say Amazon, starts out serving its users extremely well because it needs them. When everyone first got into indie publishing, Amazon was open doors and you could just publish a book and it would sell, because they would push the book and they would do everything they could to make sure that readers saw your book. Then slowly and increasingly, the platform extracts value from those users for somebody else’s benefit, usually shareholders, and ultimately for itself. You can track this process where it starts off really great for the users and then slowly shifts so that it becomes a less than stellar experience for the users. For indie authors, we’re particularly exposed because our business sits on top of these platforms. So recognising that a lot of the platforms that we use now have enshittified, excuse me, or are in the process of doing that, that really helps. Because I think for years we were treating everything as a separate problem. We were worrying about organic reach, we were worrying about advertising becoming more expensive. There’s subscription creep, there’s deteriorating customer service, algorithm changes. Visibility was increasingly pay to play, and it’s so much more than that now. The platforms keep removing features or changing the terms. Individually it just looks like a mess, but as soon as you put them together and say, “Oh, I understand now. The platform is enshittifying,” you can see the structural pattern. It actually applies to so many platforms and services. Once you see it, well, for me in particular, that was an enormously positive realisation, because until I saw the pattern, I thought I was failing, and nothing I was doing seemed to work anymore. Once I understood the environment itself had changed, I could stop trying to fix myself and start redesigning the business for the environment that actually exists. Jo: Yes, and that is the point. Redesigning your business for the environment that exists. Because what you mentioned there, I feel like some people still think that organic reach exists. I guess some people will say, “Oh, well, at the moment you can still put a video on, say, TikTok, and it might find an audience there.” Are people still building an audience in these newer platforms? But I think that’s the point, isn’t it? I guess Substack would be another one. Although we already see that heading in the same direction, with various things. As soon as you go in there thinking, “Yes, I’m going to get organic reach,” even if there is any, it follows this way, doesn’t it? Tracy: It does. And this is what’s so great about it, is once you recognise this pattern, you see it everywhere, and you can actually track a new platform through that process, and you can anticipate that, okay, maybe we’re going to get organic discovery right now, but that’s going to diminish. That way you’re not disappointed, and you’re all set up for when that happens. That means that you can reduce your dependency on these platforms and not expect them to behave like they did in 2011. Jo: It’s interesting, though, with Amazon, for example, we’ve definitely seen that as authors. But on the other side, as a customer, as a reader particularly, I used to find a lot of books on Amazon directly. I’m almost entirely now finding books elsewhere, often through AI, actually, often through Claude. Tracy: Yes, exactly. Jo: And then going on Amazon to maybe get the book. It feels like for readers it’s changed too, right? Tracy: Exactly. I mean, indie authors are particularly vulnerable because their entire business is built on these platforms, but this applies to everyone. It’s not just indie authors. As you say, it’s readers. They’re noticing too that the decay of these platforms is starting to impact them as users. I’m exactly like you. I tend to buy my books from Kobo, but I will buy my books from anywhere, and I learn about those books from a dozen different places. I don’t rely on just one platform anymore. It’s really great once you understand this because then you can build an independent mindset that lets you flex around issues. Jo: Yes, and obviously we like to dwell on the positives here. So given that this is just a reality of the market and various platforms— What are the hallmarks of an indie author business that is more likely to persist over time given the reality of this? Tracy: Okay. Well, I think that the biggest part of it is, as I mentioned before, it’s the mindset. Recognising these patterns is really a big one, recognising where a platform is in the process. Also developing a very independent mindset. I mean, we’ve been saying we’re indie authors since 2011, but we were still really relying on those platforms to provide most of our business. I think these days the new indie author is much more independently minded. Even though you’re using the platforms, and we’re all using them, you develop a flexibility. You understand the industry, and you’re making plans ahead of it, so you’ve got the flexibility there, and the business thinking, which really helps. You deal with any problems that come up. Every time there’s an algorithm change, you’re not going to wake up in the morning and just go through mourning because half your income has disappeared. You’re ready with alternatives, and you’ve got different things that you can try. So that mindset, that thinking about and recognising patterns and how the industry is going, is critical. Once you’ve got that in place, then there’s a huge number of strategies that you might want to incorporate. This is the thing, every indie author’s business is different. We’re all in different situations. I have health challenges, someone else may have a day job. I write a lot of books. Someone may be only able to produce a couple of books a year. We’re writing in different genres. If you’re writing literature, that’s different from the sort of science fiction that I write. So the business and how it responds to the conditions out there is going to be different as well. So what you do as an author and for your business will be different. There’s a lot of strategies that you can try and see which are most effective for you. One of the biggest, for instance, is something that you say a lot too, diversify your income. Have a durable backlist. Work to get your backlist built up. Direct sales is another strategy that I would say is almost mandatory for every indie author these days. I know a lot of indie authors are going, “Oh, but I’ve only got two books.” Doesn’t matter. If you can sell from your site using just a PayPal link, that’s direct sales, and that works. That gives you a lot more independence and agency. Owning your reader relationships, making sure that you keep the readers close, I think that’s another critical one. Making sure that you’re resilient for the platform so you can adjust when there’s changes. And on and on. There’s a lot of things that you can do to adapt. Jo: Yes. I think it’s interesting just thinking about when you said, for example, direct sales is good for every indie author. I would say every indie author who wants to have a long-term business—and I think that’s a really key thing. Because I feel like it’s still important to have a difference between people who are writing primarily as a hobby or are not looking for the financial income that you and I think about. So I think that’s one thing. I totally agree with you that just having a PayPal button or even selling some physical copies at a local fair or something, that all counts. I think it almost proves something and gives you that more independent mindset. It’s like, “Yes, I can actually do this.” That is such a powerful reframe rather than, “I cannot do anything except upload my book on Amazon.” Tracy: Yes. And actually, funny you should mention the live markets, because we experimented over the last year with attending a few live markets and selling books, and there is a genuine power, a little thrill that you get when you sell a book, and you can sign it on the spot for them, and the reader is right there and you’re face to face. That process is suddenly not this anonymous process, where you find that you’ve sold a book overnight and you’ve got no idea who it is that bought it. That person’s right there in front of you, so you can sign the book for them and you have a little exchange. It’s really empowering to build that independence into your business. Jo: Yes, and then you also mentioned the durable backlist. Do you think that having books in multiple genres, including nonfiction, is part of how you can make a living? As in, I think people often think, “Oh, maybe if I just write 20 books in one series.” I mean, maybe that works in some genres. I guess thrillers, actually, that can sometimes work, but you do so many things. Is it the 80/20 rule, that 20% of your books make 80% of the income, or does it literally vary from year to year? Tracy: Well, it does swing from year to year. But yes, generally the 80/20 rule holds. It’s different from year to year, which 20% is making the 80% of the money. As I mentioned, I’m moving into science fiction and fantasy more, because that’s actually more successful for me right now than the romance is. The other thing is, I think it really comes down to the individual author too. Some authors do very well just doing the one genre or even just the one series, and for them it’s great. I always worry that that’s putting all your eggs in one basket. I think, though, to counter that vulnerability, if you’re just doing one series or one genre, go wide. Sell as wide as you can, and that gives you a bit of a hedge against vulnerability. It’s a different situation for every author, and it’s very hard for me to say, “Well, here’s a 15-step list that’ll give you all the answers,” because that 15-step list doesn’t exist anymore, if it ever did. Just because everyone’s business is so different. You need to do a lot of experimenting, I think, and find what works for you. That sounds like I’m waving off the answer, but I’m really not. You really do have to figure it out for yourself. If you do adopt that experimental mindset and say, “Okay, I’m going to do this for six months and track my statistics and see if there’s any results there worth pursuing.” Jo: See what happens. Yes, and it’s interesting you’ve also moved more into the nonfiction. Let’s get into your solar sail theory, because I’ve followed you on and off since we met, like a decade ago. Tracy: It was 10 years ago. Jo: I know. It’s crazy. It’s really crazy. For those listening, we met in Oregon, at the Oregon Workshops with Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch. I’ve been reading your blog pretty avidly around this solar sail theory, which I love, and now you’re talking about writing science fiction, I can appreciate it more. What is your solar sail theory and some of the ways to build it? Tracy: Okay, so solar sail theory is a theory in science. Well, I was going to say science fiction, but there’s solid science behind it. Solar sails are a way, they think, because it’s

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<p>How can you get your books surfaced when readers ask an AI what to read next? What are the hallmarks of authors and businesses that last more than a decade in the indie author industry? Ricardo Fayet gives his marketing tips after more than a decade at Reedsy.</p> <p>The post <a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2026/08/19/book-marketing-ai-book-discoverability-and-resilience-with-ricardo-fayet/">Book Marketing, AI Book Discoverability, And Resilience, With Ricardo Fayet</a> first appeared on <a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com">The Creative Penn</a>.</p>

<p>How can you tell where the real innovation in publishing is happening right now, and why is it emerging from the indie side first? How do you market your own book when you've spent 35 years marketing everyone else's? John Bond talks about Going Indie and what he's learned about authors who last.</p> <p>In the intro, my thoughts on writing with AI, Charles Dickens and encouragement for the 3-year-old dancing to K-Pop at the wedding, UK copyright law, The end of an era — Hugh Howey; Notre Dame, Paris</p> <p>The post <a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2026/08/12/going-indie-publishing-innovation-and-the-challenges-of-book-marketing-with-john-bond/">Going Indie, Publishing Innovation, And The Challenges Of Book Marketing With John Bond</a> first appeared on <a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com">The Creative Penn</a>.</p>

<p>How can content marketing in a tight niche build the audience that launches your book? And how do you decide whether to hand your self-published bestseller to a traditional publisher. Suzanne Smith shares what she learned in four years of going from blog to book deal.</p> <p>The post <a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2026/08/05/from-blog-to-community-to-book-a-non-fiction-authors-journey-with-suzanne-smith/">From Blog To Community To Book: A Non-Fiction Author’s Journey With Suzanne Smith</a> first appeared on <a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com">The Creative Penn</a>.</p>

<p>How can building an audience in advance help your stories reach the people who make movies? And how can you prove there's demand for your book or screenplay before you've written it? Brooks Elms shares his advice after more than 20 years as a WGA screenwriter.</p> <p>The post <a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2026/07/29/how-to-prove-the-demand-for-your-stories-and-get-the-attention-of-hollywood-with-brooks-elms/">How To Prove The Demand For Your Stories And Get The Attention Of Hollywood With Brooks Elms</a> first appeared on <a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com">The Creative Penn</a>.</p>

<p>How can organic writing and leaning into the pivot help your stories stand out? And how can you pitch a story as a discovery writer if you genuinely don’t know what’s going to happen next. Steven James gives his writing tips after more than 20 years as an author. In the intro, Better Than Free […]</p> <p>The post <a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2026/07/22/organic-writing-and-the-power-of-the-pivot-in-fiction-with-steven-james/">Organic Writing And The Power Of The Pivot In Fiction With Steven James</a> first appeared on <a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com">The Creative Penn</a>.</p>

<p>After more than a decade of releasing this show on Mondays, I’m moving it to Wednesdays, and this is the first episode of the new time slot. </p> <p>On the one hand, this might sound like nothing at all, but it’s also a big deal, for you and for me, and in this episode, I explain why I'm making the change, and past guests give some tips on sustainable creativity for the long term.</p> <p>The post <a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2026/07/15/why-the-podcast-is-moving-to-wednesdays-and-7-tips-for-sustainable-creativity/">Why The Podcast Is Moving To Wednesdays, And 7 Tips for Sustainable Creativity</a> first appeared on <a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com">The Creative Penn</a>.</p>

<p>What's the difference between a bundle, a box set, an anthology, and a collection? How can being part of an anthology be creatively interesting and useful for marketing? With Jamie Ferguson</p> <p>The post <a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2026/07/13/bundles-box-sets-and-anthologies-with-jamie-ferguson/">Bundles, Box Sets and Anthologies With Jamie Ferguson</a> first appeared on <a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com">The Creative Penn</a>.</p>

<p>What happens to your creativity when you’re in pain or sick, and can you ever get it back? How can you find and sharpen your author voice? J. Daniel Sawyer talks about voice mastery, writing with chronic pain, and building an eclectic author business. In the intro, leaning into your Strengths and deciding what you […]</p> <p>The post <a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2026/07/06/author-voice-mastery-and-rebooting-an-author-business-with-j-daniel-sawyer/">Author Voice Mastery, And Rebooting an Author Business With J. Daniel Sawyer</a> first appeared on <a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com">The Creative Penn</a>.</p>

<p>How do you write about the most painful experiences of your life without being overwhelmed by them? How can timed writing and a braided story help you untangle your hardest stories? With Nicole Walker.</p> <p>The post <a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2026/06/29/writing-the-hard-stuff-turning-difficult-subjects-into-meaningful-prose-with-nicole-walker/">Writing The Hard Stuff: Turning Difficult Subjects Into Meaningful Prose With Nicole Walker</a> first appeared on <a href="https://www.thecreativepenn.com">The Creative Penn</a>.</p>