32 - Balancing Creativity, Systems, and Technology with Elana Johnson

In this episode of Brave New Bookshelf, we’re joined by the prolific author Elana Johnson, who shares her incredible journey of integrating AI into her high-output writing career. From outlining and character development to social media content creation and gamifying her workflow, Elana reveals how she uses tools like Notebook LM, Plotdrive, and OpenAI to streamline her process and make writing fun again. Visit our website https://bravenewbookshelf.com to view the full episode notes, links and apps mentioned in the episode, and the full transcript.

[00:00:00] Welcome to Brave New Bookshelf, a podcast that explores the fascinating intersection of AI and authorship. Join hosts Steph Pajonas and Danica Favorite as they dive into thought provoking discussions, debunk myths, and highlight the transformative role of AI in the publishing industry.

**Steph Pajonas:** Hello everyone and welcome back to an episode of the Brave New Bookshelf. I'm Steph Pajonas, CTO of Future Fiction Academy, where we teach authors how to use AI in any part of their process. I've been doing lots of writing with AI recently and my big thing lately has been social media posts with AI.

I've been rocking Notion AI mainly, and getting it to write up all of my social media posts and stick them in my scheduler and get them going. And that makes me feel very productive when I can't sit down and actually write a book. 'cause there's so much going on right now, so much going on.

And I'm trying not to get drowned by it all. What are you gonna do? You can't do much. I'll call on my BFF [00:01:00] over here, Danica to help me out. Maybe she can fish me out of the ocean that I'm drowning in of work.

Danica, can you do that? 

**Danica Favorite:** I would love to, although I sat there listening to you say, I'm using Notion for social media posts. I'm like, wait, what? Steph. Give me this magic. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Yeah, I just put the stuff in that I'm promoting and I have a prompt set up in Notion and I just, I hit the space bar to bring up the, the AI tool and I find my prompt in the list because I favorited it. And all right, make those social media posts and it does a really great job.

So I'm pleased with it. 

**Danica Favorite:** That is awesome. Yeah, we're going to chat more about that one. And I know Steph does not, when I say this, she's always like, no I'm not. But seriously guys, Steph is a Notion ninja. Anytime I'm stuck in Notion, I'm always like Steph and she's like here which is a beautiful friendship.

**Steph Pajonas:** Like I'm telling you what I mean, we're friends for other reasons, but she is my notion guru. So, love that. Love having Steph. For those of you who don't know, Steph Pajonas is the [00:02:00] COO, right? No, CTOI 

am CTO For a long time I did both roles because we were so short staffed at the FFA, we were all doing many roles.

**Steph Pajonas:** So I was doing the technology and I was doing the operations and I recently in, in the past month, handed off all the operation stuff to wonderful Stacey Anderson, and she's handling most of that. So I'm handling a lot of the technology stuff, I'm pitching in on the software. I do a lot of just being the face and being out there as much as possible to help people with AI and to bring them into the Future Fiction Academy when they can.

I'm glad I was able to hand off some stuff to Stacey, so that was nice. 

**Danica Favorite:** Yes. So anyway Steph Pajonas is the CTO of the Future Fiction Academy and they do a lot of great writing instruction for authors in using AI. We were just bantering back and forth about Notion.

Oh my goodness. If you have not taken the Future Fiction Academy courses on Notion, they're fantastic. [00:03:00] And I don't know how many of those are available for the public to purchase, but definitely follow along Future Fiction Academy for stuff like that because so many great classes, so much great knowledge.

They've also got some really cool AI writing tools as well as they've just launched Plotdrive, which Steph talked about just briefly in conjunction with Realm Chef and the folks over there. It's an amazing writing tool. 

That is Steph, that's Future Fiction Academy, and I am her co-host, Danica favorite. I am the community manager over at Publish Drive, where we help authors in their publishing journey from every step of the process to getting those blurbs, metadata book covers, distributing your book, splitting your royalties. We even do some things with your ads. So basically between our two companies as an author, we have got you covered with every stage of your journey, which is super awesome and I love getting to work with such great, amazing people.

[00:04:00] And speaking of great, amazing people, we have such a treat for you today. We have Elana Johnson. She has been a good friend of both of us, actually for a long time. We love Elana. She is a wonderful human being, wonderful author, also a great teacher on writing stuff. She is a prolific author. Even prior to ai, this woman was writing so many amazing books.

And then AI comes along and I, and we were just talking about this before we started, where Elana's like, well, I'm not sure. Maybe, oh, wait. Oh, this is cool. Ooh, now I'm using this. And then all of a sudden we start seeing Elana, well, I used AI for this and I used AI for that. 

To me, this is the perfect example of somebody who starts out a little unsure, but says, okay, well let me look deeper and starts looking deeper, figures out the process that works for them. And so we really wanted to have Elana because we want [00:05:00] people to see that it isn't an all or nothing thing. You can take what you want, leave the rest. And use what works for your process. Elana is a successful, talented author in her own right. She was a successful author prior to AI. She's gonna continue to be a successful author. And that's what I think should be inspiring to all of our guests today.

So with that, I'm gonna hand it over to Elana. Elana, why don't you tell us about yourself and what you are working on and all of that great stuff. 

**Elana Johnson:** I'm Elana Johnson. I write under three different pen names. I've had multiple pen names, like 10. When I was in my KDP dashboard today, I was trying to isolate down to one specific product that I started ads on and I was like, wait, what are all these names?

I've started lots of names that I don't use anymore or, anyway, it's an exciting time to be alive when you can just assume any name you want. But my public names, [00:06:00] I did start a new name yesterday that I have not made public yet. So my public names are Elana Johnson. She writes Clean and Wholesome, sweet Beach Romance Contemporary.

I write under Liz Isaacson. She writes Christian Cowboys. Romance and family saga. And then I have a sweet women's fiction pen named Jesse Newton. So those are my names that I write under. I typically only release two to three Elana books a year, about two or three women's fiction books a year, and I'm closer to nine cowboy books a year.

I release a new book every month, direct first on my website. And then that book comes out four to six weeks later, the second the following month. So I just had a release in February. That book came out in January on my site. I hope that makes sense. There's like these ladder releases. So February 1st, the book comes out.

Later in February a retailer release comes out. Right. So that's what I do. That sounds like 12 books a year and you're like, but Elana, you just [00:07:00] said nine plus three plus three and that's more than 12. You're correct. It's more like 14 or 15. This year I'm doing 14. I have two books out in June and there will be two books out in September.

We normally, there's only one, so. 

I write full time and I always try to make sure people understand that I'm not the CTO of a big company that does amazing things. I'm not going live once a week or twice a week. I'm not doing podcasts. I don't have any children at home, like I'm an empty nester.

I have a young adult children who live nearby who blow my schedule up sometimes, but for the most part. Every minute of every day belongs to me. I can do whatever I want. I can work as much or as little as I want. And I always try to tell people that like, I have very few demands on my time. I get to just do whatever I want.

So it's really like, this sort of first world author life. 'cause there's so much comparison in the author world and people just don't live the same life. Nobody lives the same [00:08:00] life. I do have two dogs that are like toddlers. And they require the most of my attention.

They have to go to the park every day. If I close the computer, they're like right here in my face. I can't eat by myself. So I, I, I have some hardships.

**Danica Favorite:** I just, but that is really a hardship. Like we have to acknowledge that those dogs who are little hawk ears sit there and they're like, oh, wait, wait. I, I don't have dogs anymore. But I had that same problem. If I shifted in my seat, it was like, oh, mom, what are you doing? What? She might 

**Elana Johnson:** be getting up. She might be getting up. Is she going the kitchen? Can we go to the park? So 

**Steph Pajonas:** my husband, my husband has beats headphones and he uses them during the day throughout of all of his meetings. And when they close they, they make a snap sound. Lulu Lulu's head goes up, are we going out? We gonna the park? Where are we going?

What's going on? Every single time, every time. 

**Elana Johnson:** That's how it is. Mm-hmm. Sometimes I have cramps in my feet [00:09:00] because I have two dogs, a little dog who's only about 15 pounds, and a big dog who's 60 and he thinks he's little and he just lays my feet down and I'm like, dude, I am dying. So, we do have some hardships even though, not very many.

**Danica Favorite:** I think it's good for people to know because again, I, I think that there is just so much out there about, oh, well, Elana puts out this many books.

She must be using AI. Well, dude, she's been putting out this many books for years. And even though now you have this really lovely life and freedom, you were doing this even when you were teaching full-time. 

**Elana Johnson:** Yeah, I, I did, I did do that. So 2019 was my biggest wasn't my biggest production year, but it was my biggest publication year.

I released 42 titles in 2019. And they're not the books that I write now, so that should be made very clear. A lot of them were between 30 and 35,000 words, where the books I'm writing now are typically 75 to 80. [00:10:00] In my women's fiction contemporary romance, my cowboy family sagas are a hundred, 110, 120.

So when you look at the word count, the word count might be very similar, but the number of titles that I'm actually producing in terms of having to edit, have covers for launches, all that kind of stuff, I'm not doing nearly as much. I do 12 to 14. I think I did 15 last year. This year will be 14.

Those are some of my lowest years since I started in 2015 in earnest in self-publishing, I did some self-publishing way, way late long ago. In 2012 when I had trad contracts with Simon and Schuster, they allowed me to put like a short story adjacent, short story out with my world. I had to make it free.

So I did that on KDP in 2012, but I didn't really start in earnest in self-publishing until 2015. That's when Liz Isaacson was born. I am a typing teacher. I taught typing for a lot of years. And I'm a really good typist and I think you just figure out systems that work for [00:11:00] you in terms of your own workflow.

I had all kinds of things that I would do to make sure that the limited amount of time I had between teaching and raising my kids and having to drive them different places and all the different activities and things they had going on, that if I only had 10 or 15 minutes that I could write during that time.

So that was just something that I learned to do and I'm actually still really good at writing in 15 to 30 minute chunks 'cause it's just something that I trained myself to do. I always tell people, play to your strengths, man. If you're good at writing in short bursts, do that.

If you have a certain system or ritual that you need to go through, try to make it as quick as possible and get it done so that you can be ready to go whatever it takes for you to do that. 

When AI came on the scene, my first introduction to it was through Sudowrite I was not super impressed. I did not like anything that it was doing.

It went off the rails way too often for me, but I thought, every once in a while it would give me an idea of where to go [00:12:00] in my manuscript and then I could write it. And then when I ran outta steam and I first used Sudowrite in this way where I would feed it some of what I had written and say, give me like, what can happen next?

Or whatever. Just let it generate three or four ideas of what could go next. And almost always, I would find something that I liked, I didn't like what it necessarily did. But I was like, that's an idea. They could go up to the top deck on the cruise ship, And so then I could do a little bit of research.

I had never been on a cruise at the time, figure out what's on the top deck. Why would they go there? What could happen? And I would write that. I didn't wanna write this book, which is why I was using Sudowrite. It was like a chore. I didn't wanna write it. I'd never been on a cruise. It wasn't something set in my own story world. It wasn't anything that I really was passionate about. It was this, side project that I had agreed to do in a shared story world. And so I was like, this isn't fun for me. I don't wanna do this. So I had the AI help me come up with things that I could do.

[00:13:00] And then I'd go, okay, I can do that. And I would go write it and I would come back and be like, okay, now what? And it would give me some ideas. And I may or may not have used them, but it would at least spark something so that I could then go back to my manuscript and write it. So I wrote that book very similar to that.

Sometimes I could write three, four chapters before I ran outta steam, and other times I'd literally write a scene or a chapter and I'd be like, and I hate this again, so I need more help. Right. 

So I started with that and then I didn't touch Sudowrite for a long time. That was a women's fiction novel. To be clear, they're quite emotional for me. They take a lot from me. I needed that for that book. 

My cowboy romances, contemporary romances. I don't feel like I need that. And so I don't take it. And even when Steph and Danica were talking about Notion and like, oh, I wanna learn more about notion, I'm super proud of myself that I did not have the thought that I needed to figure out how to prompt in Notion. Six months [00:14:00] ago, I would've been riddled with anxiety that I needed to know every piece of AI, every tool, every single thing everyone else was doing so that I could use it too. And I think that's a dangerous place to be. 

Because Steph's drowning for a different reason. But AI can drown you. There is so much out there and so many different ways that people are using it, which are all incredible. And when I read about them in various Facebook groups or blogs or whatever, I'm like, this is incredible.

I should do that. And I've done that and I've tried to use someone else's system and it's just never really quite a fit for Elana Johnson. So I've gotten to the place over many, many experiments. It's not like it just happened overnight where I go, this is how I use it, this is what works for me, my systems, my brain, the way I set up my books before I start writing them. All of that. 

And how things work for me. [00:15:00] And so I think that's a really valuable thing that AI can do for us. 

That was January, 2022. When I was using Sudowrite to write that book and then Chat came on the scene in November. 2022, right? 

**Steph Pajonas:** Yeah. November, 2022. 

**Elana Johnson:** Yeah, so I didn't do a whole lot between January and November.

I wasn't super interested in Sudowrite. I joined their discord. Or maybe it was a Slack something.

**Steph Pajonas:** It was Slack. Mm-hmm. 

**Elana Johnson:** It was a thing I had never used because I am over a certain age and we don't have the, like, we don't use those technologies. What is Slack like anyway? 

**Danica Favorite:** Well, okay. To be fair, Slack is more of a corporate thing or in the case of like the Sudowrite people, a computer nerd thing.

So if someone says, Hey, join us on Slack, it's because they're either computer nerds or because they're corporate people. It's a certain industry thing. Yeah. 

**Elana Johnson:** Yeah. And like my son's on Discord 'cause he's a gamer. I'm like, I have to join Discord.

I'm like, give me a break. Like I have this [00:16:00] initial resistance to that sort of new stuff. Right. When Chat came on the scene, I was like, let's give this a try. I signed up for the $20 a month and it, it didn't take me long to realize that I was simply using it as glorified Google. Which is nice, and it's what I needed at the time. I still use Open AI as glorified Google, I'm not gonna lie. I just don't pay the $20 a month. I just use it in the Playground so that I'm only using, between, I usually use between five and $11 of credit in the Open AI playground a month. And that's me asking it questions. It's me asking a lot of translation, foreign language stuff.

And it's me doing a lot of my dictation formatting. So I use the Open AI Playground extensively for that. 

But at the time I was like, let's start dabbling and figure out what can go on, right? I started doing that using it as this glorified Google bot type of thing where I didn't have to comb through the answers.

The answer was just brought to me. And I liked that because Google at the [00:17:00] time was still a bunch of links and I could find myself down this rabbit hole of this professional paper on corn production in Oklahoma, when really I just needed a little fact for my cowboy book about a corn farm, right?

But I have to read through this huge technical agricultural paper. I really found that chat could bring me that answer far easier than me clicking on a link and trying to figure it out myself. So I used it a lot for research. I still use it a lot for research because it's just easy. And of course now, Google has their AI overview that answers your questions anyway.

No one's really Googling anymore. We're just asking AI. We're just asking a chat bot the question. So 

**Danica Favorite:** I think that's a great point. Like no one really is Googling anything anymore. Your first results are this AI summary. And if you wanna learn more, then you can look down further.

But you're right, we're asking AI for everything now. 

**Steph Pajonas:** It's true. 

**Elana Johnson:** We, we really are. So even authors who are like, I would never use AI, I'm well, did you Google today? Because that means you used AI. I don't [00:18:00] wanna be combative, but I'm just like, but you're using it, like you're using it.

Because, I'll just speak for myself. 99% of the time I take the AI overview and I'm like, okay, there's my answer, because that's what I've been using it for, for over two years, is bring me the answer I need so that I don't have to sift through everything else.

I don't want to sift through everything else. And if I think it might be wrong, because. We know sometimes AI is incorrect. Then I go, okay, maybe let me look a little deeper or let me ask a different AI and see if I get matching answers or not. 

There's different ways you can, make sure that you're getting things correctly. But for the most part, me putting something in my fiction novel is I'm just trying to give it some sort of flare that makes it stand out, something cowboy-ish or whatever. And I don't really need to be super technical on, on the actual corn production on a corn farm in Oklahoma. I don't really have to detail that for a reader.

I started using it a lot like [00:19:00] that, and then I would try to get it to generate things for me. I, I was never super satisfied with it. I moved into the private chat bot when they introduced that and made it my own assistant so that it would write social media copy for me. It knew not to put emojis in Facebook posts, but to put them in Instagram posts.

I would feed it that, train it that, and I could then just click a button or say, write me a Facebook post for this, this, this. I was using it a lot for that, and that was all done through the $20 a month Chat GPT. I had a private feelgood fiction assistant, is what I called it. And then, I used that for quite a long time.

I never really moved over to Claude. I never really used Gemini. I never really did anything beyond that. It was fulfilling my needs and I can't remember when I found the Nerdy Novelist 24 chapter outline. I can't remember when I found that, but it's been a while. Maybe a year, maybe a year ago now.

Maybe late [00:20:00] 2023. And the Nerdy Novelist. I should know his first name. Maybe one of you knows it. 

**Steph Pajonas:** It's Jason Hamilton. 

**Elana Johnson:** Okay. I was gonna say Justin, but that was wrong. 

**Steph Pajonas:** You're very close, Jason. 

**Danica Favorite:** And just for listeners to know, we do have him coming up as a guest on an upcoming episode, so 

**Steph Pajonas:** Yeah, and he's very big on YouTube, so go check him out there too. 

**Elana Johnson:** Awesome. I, again, take from the AI what I need when I need it. I have only used his 24 chapter outline. He published a blog article on his website, whatever, 24 chapter outline. If you Googled it, you 24 Chapter Outline and Nerdy Novelist, you don't even have to know his name, but it's Jason. Then you can find it.

And I took that and he had a whole thing on how to prompt Chat with it. And I started using that to outline my women's fiction books, which again, were difficult for me because I understand romance plot structure. I've written 180 romances. I get it. I have a feel for where the beats are, what goes where.

Women's fiction was [00:21:00] new and different. I couldn't understand where the pieces went. So I started using that to outline those women's fiction novels. And sometimes they'd end up 30, 35 chapters fine. But at least I had a structure for what to do with the novel. And I got that all through Chat. And I would sit and talk back and forth between me and him and be like, I don't like what you have in chapter seven.

Can you redo that and make sure you adjust the following chapters? I'd edit, edit, edit, edit. Until I got to the point where I had something that I liked. That I actually did run through multiple AIs and I was not a member of the Future Fiction Academy at the time. And learned later on, I think you guys call those people bakers where we like multiple.

**Steph Pajonas:** Yeah.

Yeah. You do. You bake many different muffins. Right. Until you find the one that you like the most. And that is the baker. Exactly. 

**Elana Johnson:** That's what I'd started doing with the women's fiction outlining. I didn't know that's what I was doing because I, again, wasn't a member. But I started running that through [00:22:00] Gemini.

I started running that through Anthropic, and I would take the three, and I would compare them because they would give me different things and I would pull this out of this one and this out of this one, and create my outline as a kind of, Frankenstein monster mash of the different things that I had gotten from the different AIs.

And then I would write the book. 

As my family sagas, starting getting bigger and bigger and bigger. I started using AI to build my family trees, pull out all characters, descriptions, all of that to create... I create pretty massive story bibles on my own, but I'm also a discovery writer.

So, I would write a chapter outline like I just said, but it had be three to five sentences. I'm not a mega outliner. In romance, I do the 20 beats and that's it. I don't outline, I'm very much still a discovery writer, so I'm a pants and a plotter, and I exist in the middle there.

And so I use AI really heavily. In the planning of the book, and then I discover where I go from there [00:23:00] as I write it. And so there's, I'll just make up dogs and horses and new kids. Oh, I forgot they had this. And so by the time the book is done, there's a lot of things in the book that are not in this character bible or the story bible.

So I started using AI to give me those things, and I realized over time that it wouldn't do very well with a long piece of writing. So I would feed it certain chapters where I knew the big family was together, or I knew the cowboy had gone out to talk to his horses. And so I would probably have the names in there, but it saved me time because I don't have to read those chapters.

I can copy, paste, give it to chat and tell it to pull everything out of it for me, which now my all time favorite tool for that is Notebook LM. I freaking love Notebook LM. For me, massive game changer in terms of not having to go in to my 130,000 word book and A) try to remember a name, can't remember the name. So then I'm searching by something super common and 45 minutes later [00:24:00] I finally find what I'm looking for. Not anymore. Notebook pulls that out in like, as fast as you can upload it and ask it for it. Right? So fast. I'm using Notebook LM a ton for social media content as well. And I'm not sure if that class is a public class outside of FFA.

I know Stacy did some classes on Notebook LM that I did that were fantastic. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Was it the character marketing with Notebook LM? Yeah. That is the standalone class with the FFA. And lots of people have said that it blew their mind. Notebook LM is great. I love using it too. 

**Elana Johnson:** So character driven marketing, it pulls things out for TikTok videos, for teasers, for Instagram, for all that stuff that we're doing.

If, you could have it pull tropes and then all those arrows that we see, it's just everything is so fast with that Notebook LM. So that's definitely one of my favorite tools, and I'm not sure it's my favorite one, but it's real high up there. So now, I just use Notebook today to outline, to help me work on stuff because I can get everything I need in one [00:25:00] place.

I started using, different things outlining, blah, blah, blah. I still wasn't super happy with the output. Really struggled with it writing anything for me that I would use at all in any capacity. 

And then I had heard Elizabeth Ann West talk about Rexy lots of times, and I thought, you know what? I wonder if this can help me generate actual words that I can use. 'cause I had really struggled to find anything up to that point that really worked for me and the voice I was trying to create, mimic my style of writing or not loop a million times, all that stuff. So I, and then I discovered that in order to have access to Rexy, you had to be a member of the FFA, which I'm ashamed to admit, I did not know even existed until I Googled how to buy Rexy or use Rexy.

And so I joined FFA, I believe I joined in June of 2024. So not that long ago. I don't know when this is gonna air. It's been several months. And at that time I was like, okay, let's see what's [00:26:00] going on. Almost immediately the classes that were being offered at the time was a fine tuning class, and I thought, this is perfect.

This is what I want. I wanna fine tune the LLM to write like me. So I took all the fine tuning classes, I did all the fine tunings, all the fine tunes through Chat and through Gemini, and I created those to see if I could get closer to a product that would at least be editable that I could use some of. Because before I would feel like, I can't use any of this, maybe a sentence, right? It just wasn't something that I personally was happy with but I felt like if I gave it a sample, it should be able to do it and it wasn't doing it. 

And of course. If you don't know, AI is also rapidly evolving. And so at the time it probably wasn't capable of that. And I'm sure there's listeners going, but it does that. Now. I can get it to do that.

I'm very happy for you. It does do that. Now I can get it closer to [00:27:00] what I want, even without my fine tunes, but through that process of learning fine tuning, learning different models, experimenting with more prompting, because I truly believe the magic in AI is learning prompting. I have developed prompts. I have massive prompts that I also have learned that I am a mega prompter. And I think you have a name for that person in your academy too. Architect. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Yeah. Yeah. Well, an architect definitely has all of their pieces, every part of their house, and then they just put it all together.

**Elana Johnson:** That is what I do, and I do not leave anything to the AI's imagination. Nothing. I'm going to tell him exactly what I want, how I want it to be done. I'm gonna give you examples of what I want, and then I want you to do it. And so I make a prompt. Crazy. Like I would never just say write a blurb. I have three steps to blurb writing.

Then I will finally say, now you may write it. I've learned that I'm very much want to [00:28:00] have all my pieces in place before I let it do anything else. And then I have found, it will do what I want, it will give me what I want. Very, very close. And so then I was like, oh, well let's see how you are with writing.

And honestly using the AI, since it's been about, since September, that I've really started using generative ai, not just social media. And I don't mean to say just because those are huge, huge ways to use AI as well, that can really save you a lot of time and energy. But outlining, character development, pulling things out that I've already written, blurbs, all that social media stuff, I was using all that and I continue to use to this day.

But then I was like, let's see if you could write today. Because I knew things were evolving rapidly in the last six months, and that's about how long I've been using generatively. And it 100% gamified writing for me. It made it fun again. And so for [00:29:00] someone like me who's high output, and we have a high creative output, we also have to do business tasks.

This is your only livelihood. There's a ton of pressure. And you've been producing for a long time. Like the burnout is real. The burnout is hot and fast. I've had a lot of health problems in the last three years and I'm just like, writing is not very fun. And before the writing and the creating were what was fun and it wasn't anymore.

And AI created a game for me where it was now fun again. And I literally would sit down and I do my little wrist exercises and I'm like, who's gonna be better today? Are you gonna be better than me? And I would tell it what to do and I'd be like, oh, you're still not better. But I like this and I like this and I like this.

And I found myself keeping 10% of what it wrote and then 20% of what it wrote. And depending on what I'm writing, I will keep anywhere [00:30:00] from I would estimate at this point in my AI career. I'm keeping between 30 and 50% of what it generates. The other stuff I'm not happy with. It brings in characters that are not in the scene.

It still does stuff that I'm like, oh honey, bless your heart. Not today, right? But it's fine. I think, well, maybe tomorrow you'll be able to do that. We'll see. I'll meet you here. 

So it really gamified it. Like, who's gonna be better? You or me? Who knows what's going on in the story? You or me. I'm giving you the same stuff outta my brain. Can you do it? And over time of using it like that, I've really identified for me what it doesn't do well. So I know what I'm gonna need to bring to the table and add to it. I've tried prompting it to do those things, and I just don't think that it's ready for it.

And it might be one day. But there's definitely some like what I call lacking areas that I know it's just not gonna do, but other things that it will do are amazing. Like it's pretty good at [00:31:00] dialogue, and so people who like writing from like a framework of dialogue and then filling everything in else later, man, Google Gemini creates some amazing dialogue for me.

I also learned by doing this and practicing with different prompts and different models, which models are good at what, so I use different models for different things and for different genres. So I mishmash all of my own self-learning into what works for me on a daily basis. 

And I use it every single day in some capacity, sometimes just asking questions. This morning I worked for about two hours and went from zero, two paragraph blurb, no idea what's gonna happen in the book. To fully fleshed out characters. Full character Bible, full setting Bible. It's book 11 in a series. So I use Notebook LM. I'm using Plotdrive. I'm using Chat and I'm using Anthropic Claude is who I was, who I'm using for all of those [00:32:00] full Romance Beats. Edits. I go through all the edits. 24 chapter outline, nerdy novelist, full 25 chapter outline in about two hours. 

For me, that's fast. Normally I would take four or five hours to develop characters, another couple of hours to go through romance beats, get things set. Then I need to write the full blurb so that it's more like what I want. That includes all my tropes. We're talking a couple weeks of work that I do an hour or two a day of probably 10, 20 hours of work. And I'm doing it in a single day, in two hours because I have this system and process. All of my prompts are saved. I just reuse them. I set all that stuff up once, which I'm a huge fan of. I have a book called Writing and Marketing Systems. If I can systemize something, I'm gonna do it because then it is just me using that system over and over again, which makes it fun and it's easy, and I don't dread doing a chore that maybe I wouldn't want to do before.

It's fun. It's fast. It's just something that I've made into a [00:33:00] system and a game for myself. 

**Danica Favorite:** I love that. I love this idea of gamifying your work with the AI. To me, I'm like, oh, wow, that does sound fun. Oh, who's gonna be better today?

And really make that into your process. And so I love that you've given us this journey of Elana with AI, because like it really does show how that process evolves and what Steph and I always tell people, take what you want and leave the rest.

And so I love this approach that you've described as this is the Elana approach to AI. Take what's working for you, use it, and, oh, can I use it here? Can I use it here? And to me, gamification is just this ultimate approach to AI and AI success. Steph, I know you look like you had something you wanted to say, so... 

**Steph Pajonas:** no, I just, I just wanna say that I was on the edge of my seat through that whole thing.

'Cause I was like, what is she gonna talk about next? Because I think it's so much fun. I think it's fun. This is the reason why I got into AI [00:34:00] was because once I saw what it could do, that it could understand context, that it could give me ideas surrounding things I had already given it?

I was like, oh, I'm sold. This is gonna be so much fun. And it is. And I feel like every day is fun now. Certainly I, I'm doing a lot of work and I'm drowning in work, but you guys look at me here on this YouTube channel, I'm smiling and I'm having a great time. It is just so much fun. And I was talking with Elana and Danica before we started about how I tell people who wanna start using AI, but they don't know where to put it in their process. And I always say, just choose a pain point in your process because everybody's got a pain point in their process. Everybody has something that they're doing that they freaking hate, right? And I'm like, get AI to do that. Make your life more fun. This is where it excels and where it can pick up that part of the process and just make your life easier.

And I see so much of that in Elana. She was like, oh, I found [00:35:00] this other thing that I struggled with and I made AI do it, eventually. You still wanted to try it with writing, even though, and it kept failing, and it kept failing and it kept failing. But you thought it was fun and so you kept going.

And I think that that is where that whole curiosity comes in and it just makes everything so much more enjoyable. I love it. 

**Elana Johnson:** I totally agree, and I'm like, I wanna enjoy my job. I love writing. The writing is the funnest part, and it was really upsetting to me that the writing wasn't fun anymore.

I was like, well, I've gotta do something. Like, I still wanna keep doing this. I want to write, I want to have a long career. I've gotta figure out how to make this fun for myself again. 

The pain point is a great, great point for me. It's like I don't really like writing blurbs. I'll do it and I'm good at it. I used to do it for a business for other people. I know how to do it, I'm good at it. I don't like it. It's not fun. Writing social media for your series that you've done multiple times? Not fun. So it's like just [00:36:00] so much easier to get the help with that.

Outlining a book that's like the other 125 books you've written? Not that fun. So it's nice to get some different ideas and brainstorm back and forth with it. 

My big one right now is I've moved a lot to dictating. So I dictate on my phone and it gives it to me in a great big block of text, which is super not fun to format, but I just developed AI prompts and I have Open AI format that for me, and it can get close.

It's not exactly right, but it gets really close and I can dictate, five chapters a day, which turns out to be about 10 to 15,000 words depending on how long they are in about two and a half hours. And I can format those and edit them in another two hours. And I would never be able to write that many chapters in four hours, four, four and a half hours.

My fingers aren't capable of it. I just am not capable of doing it physically. That's been a huge pain [00:37:00] point that's been relieved by AI as well, is using it to format my dictation. 

**Danica Favorite:** Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that because I know you and I have also talked about this online because I'm a dictator. I love to dictate. It's how I write so much. And so you even shared some of that process, when we're talking online about it, and I think that's so important for people to realize. 

I didn't know you used to be a typing teacher. Actually, this is something new. I learned about Elana and I'm like, wow, she's a typing teacher, so she knows how to do this like a ninja. And yet. She's also dictating and using AI in that dictation process. This is fantastic because again, you're taking something, yeah, I know how to do this, but this is a pain point for me.

Here I am finding a way to make it work. And I love that. And that should be encouraging for anyone listening that whatever your pain point is in writing, what you're struggling with, what's hard, even if it's something you think, well, I used to be good at it and now I just can't. And I've outlined this many books and I'm tired [00:38:00] of outlining books. Okay. I have help. I think that's really wonderful. So I'm glad that you shared that. 

The other thing I wanted to touch on, which leads us into that second question or idea that we like to talk to our listeners about is you were talking about how you love to create systems, which I think is really important and so what kind of workflow, what, what systems have you created for AI? What does that AI workflow look like for you? And I know you've got lots of pieces, so if you wanna pick and choose something that you think would be helpful for the listeners that would be fantastic because this is what we want, is helping people find those workflows that are gonna be useful to them.

**Elana Johnson:** Sure. So again, I do semi outline my books. So you know, Panthers might not find the same workflow that works for them. I like to have a general idea of like where I'm driving and then how I get there is up to me. So I set up all of my beats and all of my, like, this is where I'm going. This is my turning point. This is my midpoint, [00:39:00] this is my pinch point. This is the dark night of the soul. This is the black moment, this is the climax, this is the ending. And it mirrors the beginning. Like I, I do all of that. I would really like to know all of that upfront. 

Some books, I don't have to, because I know the characters well enough. Others, I feel like I need to know these characters a little bit better. It helps me if I have my signposts in place. So typically when I am setting up like a new book, and to be very clear, I don't write every book with AI. Some books don't have any AI in them. Not outlines nothing. It just, it's a very open process.

It's hard to describe because I write under different genres. So like my cowboy romances almost never have AI in them. A lot of them I will use AI to pull characters, story bibles, and stuff. The actual writing of the book is typically not done with AI at all.

I have a ton of experience and knowledge in how to do that, so I just do it. 

Women's fiction is much [00:40:00] harder. I find myself using AI a little bit more there. I'm trying to be more literary. I want it to match a certain type of tone, so I will feed it more of my own writing and try to get it to match it a little bit better.

I also include mystery elements in my women's fiction, and I am super, super bad at mysteries, so I rely heavily on the AI to help me place mystery elements in appropriate places in my book, in the beginning stages of crafting the book. And then I rely on it heavily throughout to make sure that it gets in the right place.

I don't do that in cowboy romances. The my beach romance in rom-coms. I haven't written a beach romance with AI yet because I haven't published one for a couple of years. I've been doing romcom. I do a lot of dialogue with Gemini for romcom because he is funny and witty. Gemini for me is the funniest AI.

So I will use him for 

**Steph Pajonas:** I agree with that. Gemini was trained on so much YouTube data. [00:41:00] Like you think about all the banter that happens in YouTube Shorts or their videos and everything. And so it is just, it is super, super funny and, my tip for everybody, and it was brought out by Amy one of our previous people on the podcast.

She said that if Gemini just doesn't wanna work for you, some days you just threaten to take away its cat videos and it will start working again. 

**Elana Johnson:** I 

**Steph Pajonas:** love 

**Elana Johnson:** that. I. I also didn't know it was trained on YouTube data. So that makes sense. That makes so much sense. 

So I have certain things that I like. I actually use Plotdrive a lot.

I was using Raptor before, but similar process. I have things that I have created with AI that tell me what the genre is, so that goes at the top. So I have made in Plotdrive a master list of buttons, prompts, and order of documents so that every time I wanna set up a new project, I can use that.

And I don't have to start from scratch and remember what [00:42:00] goes here, what goes there. That's what I mean about systems. 

So I open this one, my master list, and I open a new Plotdrive. So I work right next to each other. You can do it in Raptor too. I did it in Raptor for months, because Plotdrive has only been out for, less than a month.

So I have plenty of these in Raptor as well. The first one is always. What, whatever it is you're writing. What Insta Love is, what Christian Cowboy Romance and Family Saga is. What Sweet Romcom is, and I have a definition of what it is. This is just me telling the AI what I want it to know. So I copy it from every, like if I'm writing an Insta Love, it's that if it's a women's fiction, it's that, and I might change some things in it.

I might edit it to make sure that it knows what I'm really going for, who the main characters are, all that kind of stuff. 

The next thing I put in is the setting. So I started creating settings with AI. I would feed it things and be like, give me a robust setting so that I have it. Because I write these enormous series of 10, 12 books all in the same small [00:43:00] town. And I find myself making up more restaurant names. I'm like, why? Why are you making up new restaurant names? That is a lot of work. Just use the ones you've already made up. Like, duh. And so anyway, I have a setting that goes second. So I have what we're writing, what the setting is, and then typically after that I start to feed it what I want.

Romance Beats. 24 chapter outline. That usually goes there. And then I have a premise or a blurb. Sometimes I have the AI generate that for me, especially in my Instaloves. These are the couple of the tropes I'm thinking of. They're 10,000 words, so you're not really doing a lot of angst and drama, and there's only a couple of tropes, anyway. Generate a premise for me.

Characters go next. Sometimes I feed it the characters that I have from other chapters. Sometimes I'll put in, I'll insert, I just did this this morning. I inserted five more documents between the blurb and the character Bible, and I just copied and pasted over from previous [00:44:00] book the chapters narrated by those characters.

I put in three female and two male and said, generate, I have a massive prompt to generate character profiles, but say, generate these characters, include all these things and it does it for me. And I'm like, oh, yep, there they are. I know them, but I don't have to read their chapters. So I didn't read five chapters. I copied and pasted five chapters, and the AI created the profiles for me from the chapters that I wrote.

Then I start to tell it to outline, now that you know what you're doing, what your setting is, your structure. So I do romance beats first in a romance, and we move to outline second. Or you could just do your chapter outline and your characters. And the basic premise for the book I did this morning, I just used a blurb. 

So I just used the blurb from Amazon, which I also had AI generate for me using my blurb generator, which I set up in Plotdrive as well. It's a three step process. I feed it characters, tropes, and sample blurbs from the same series. So I'm generally, I'm telling it what characters I want. Today I actually [00:45:00] had it generate the characters first and then I fed that into the blurb master. So I'm just going back and forth using it however it works for me. 

I think I go through the tropes I want it to have, I typically type that all out myself. These are the different tropes. This is what I want, this, this is what I want between these two characters. Then I feed it the three sample blurbs and I say, now you may write your blurb. So I give it three things and then say, you can write your blurb.

That went in my premise today, my characters, and then I say, give me the romance beats. And then I edit that. I go through it and I change what I don't like, or I ask it to say. Today. I asked it for one change. I said, I really don't like what you did in pinch point two. I don't like this "overheard her dad say something." They're adults. She should just go talk to her dad. That's stupid. Fix that for me. And it generated a new pinch point for me at the end of the book. I was like, I like this much better. Fixed it up, put it all in there. That gets turned on. And then I say, here's the 24 chapter outline that gets turned on. And I say, now it's time for you to outline the book and it outlines the [00:46:00] book. 

At that point, I would then edit the outline also. If I'm gonna generate from that, I use the outline to generate from, this is a cowboy romance. I'm planning to dictate it. So I probably won't use generative AI to generate any chapters from it.

But I come back to that outline on a daily basis and it changes. It's like a live being. It changes every day based on what I wrote that day, because again I know I'm here and I need to go here, but how I get there, I don't know. And once I arrive there, everything after that is now changed. 

The outline is a living, breathing document that changes on a daily basis while I'm writing it. But I always try to be five chapters ahead so that I can do those five chapters the next day. If I'm binge writing, which I am binge writing right now. So I am behind on deadlines, and that means I'm binge writing. 

I just finished a book yesterday that is 105,000 words, and I did a hundred thousand of those words through dictation [00:47:00] in seven working days, That's binge writing for me. That's a lot of words. But I have to have the story really at the front of your brain to do that. And to do that, I have to have my system in place to generate what I need. 

So I did that work today. I'm not planning to dictate until Monday, so I'll be thinking about that book, tweaking the outline, going through the family saga, thinking of what needs to go there.

I move all of that from Plotdrive into a spreadsheet. I really like spreadsheets and I'm going over it constantly until I start dictating it. Otherwise, I can't binge write it. And if I can't binge write, then I'm writing on the computer or typing. I'm trying to do two or three chapters a day. It's just a much slower pace. It's a different way of discovering the book. Normally I do that with characters that I don't know very well. 

So my process with AI is to get it to a point where everyone knows what we're writing, we know where we're writing it, we know who we're writing it about, and we're gonna generate all the way to chapter one, ready to [00:48:00] write. And I use AI for that, for every book at this point.

**Danica Favorite:** I really love that. I feel like we just went to masterclass with Elana Johnson. 

**Steph Pajonas:** We did, we did. 

**Danica Favorite:** Because really, when we first brought Elana in and when I said, Elana, we want you to do this, and Elana's like, well, I don't know what I can say or what I could share. And even when we were talking before we started recording, I'm like, no, you have so much to share.

And right here I'm like, this is the masterclass, and I'm gonna go back and take some notes on this because holy cow. Did I learn a ton? What I, I know Steph's just nodding along going, yes, yes, I did. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Yeah, I love it. I love seeing other people's processes because you can just learn so much from it just even tiny little things that can level you up big time.

You also are one of those people who, you've sat in on Future Fiction Academy classes. You've watched Nerdy Novelists, you've gone through and you've found all the little pieces that work well for you, and you put them together into a system that keeps you [00:49:00] writing and keeps you happy and keeps you from blowing your deadlines, whatever else it may be, right?

**Elana Johnson:** Yeah. All of that. All of that. 

So, yeah, I have buttons that I've created for characters, outlines, setting, writing the chapter, create the premise, blurb it out and beat out an outline. So I have created those seven buttons for myself, for the things that I want it to do inside Plotdrive. And then all I have to do is feed it what I want and push the button.

And then I go through that and I'm like, well, you got close on this. No, that's not right. Edit it all up and make sure that it's what I want it to be. And sometimes I don't know until I see what it's given me.

Today I turned down two outlines flat. I'm like, Nope, not that. Nope, not that either. And then it finally got to the point and I realized what I had done wrong. I had set it to Anthropic. I don't like Claude outlining my stuff. I don't think he's very good at it. So I'm a much bigger fan of the more technical reasoning LLMs. 4o or [00:50:00] o1. I like those far better inside the Open AI models. They're just, in my opinion, far better. And I'm an analytical, mathematical brained person, so I like what they bring to the table far more than what Claude does in terms of outlining and generating that kind of content for me based on something that I've given it. 

So I realized, oh, you dummy, you have anthropic doing this. No wonder you don't like it. So, moved over to 4o latest, and he gave me what I wanted. 

**Danica Favorite:** I love that you're talking about this because, I think it is important to realize that as you get to know the different models, you find that they do different things.

And so our final question is usually to ask you what your favorite AI tool is, but obviously throughout the whole conversation you've talked about, well, I like this for this and this for that, and that, that for that. And so, I know it's probably hard to pick because depending on the job that you wanna give it, it's gonna be a different result.

So could you give us maybe like a few jobs and a few AIs that [00:51:00] go with those? Like a top job and a top AI or something like that to share with our listeners? 

**Elana Johnson:** Yeah. So. I really love Raptor Write. When Raptor Write was introduced, I was like, okay, this is it for me. I did not connect with Rexy. I watched a lot of Rexy videos. I tried Rexy. I like, I just, I just lied to you. I said, I'm mathematical, I'm like analytical brain, but I am not a computer science brain. And it felt very computer sciencey to me. So I was like, oh, I don't really like this that much. I could get it to do a little bit, but a lot of it was just too hard for me.

And there is a steep learning curve with AI. That's also why I'm like, I felt like I was drowning a lot of times because I felt like there was so much to learn and not enough time to learn it. And it would be faster if I just went and wrote my book because I'm spending all this time on AI education.

But I realized that if I put in that time and figure out what works for me and make something fun and make a system for myself [00:52:00] and a key point, save the things you make that work, because I wasn't doing that in the beginning and then I found myself having to like go find a prompt or something. Hope I didn't delete it to use again later. I was like, you idiot. 

So I do save all my stuff in Notion. If you're looking for a great place to save things, I use Notion for that. But that's not really AI. But I have your AI master list, and all of my prompts go in there. And then that way I'm not reinventing the wheel every time with something that I have already found to work for me.

I love Raptor. It took me a minute to move over from Raptor to Plotdrive. I wrote a novel in Raptor in January, after I signed up for Plotdrive. Simply because I love it so much. So I think it's a great place for people to start to see if they like that type of format in their construction. Because it is free and you can get a really good idea if you [00:53:00] like the toggling on and off and being able to feed the AI different things and all of that. 

So I would say that's was my top tool. I like Plotdrive now for the same reasons, and I'm shifting everything I'm doing over to Plotdrive and building all of those buttons and things over there. I've been doing that the last month or so, so that my systems are in place and ready for me to use. 

So I love Plotdrive. I do like being able to create the button so that I don't have to megaprompt as much. I can make a prompt once, make it a button, and I'm ready to go. 

My top tool for generating any type of content for social media, teasers, pulling, teasers out, finding information in your books that you haven't read in six years is Notebook LM. Hands down.

Those three are my favorite that I use every day. And I'm using Open Ai, the Playground in open AI every day as a chat bot. I'm using it every day. I use it a lot for translations. I use it a lot for [00:54:00] just general questions. Like I said, the dictation runs through that, so I'm using just lots of different things for different places, different jobs.

But. I, it's hard to beat Notebook LM. It's just really hard to beat. 

**Danica Favorite:** I think all of us who use Notebook LM are just in love with it. So I'm right there with you. I know Steph is too. 'cause we both are like, yeah, notebook lm, 

**Elana Johnson:** Because you can give it a document and then ask it questions about it.

It's just like a chat bot, right? It's just like using a chat bot, but it has your book and so it will pull anything out that you've asked it about. And I don't have to search for stuff. And like I said, I did my entire family saga tree in Notebook LM today. Give me everything, every named character, all dogs, horses, cats, everything.

It will do it. It's an amazing tool. 

**Steph Pajonas:** It is an amazing tool. I'm coming up on writing another book in a series this year, and it already has five books in it. And so, I put them all into Notebook LM, and I need [00:55:00] to know what all of their animal pairs are for each one of these characters. Because there were times when I'd mentioned the sister, the younger sister, I mentioned her like once, and I mentioned her animal pair, once in like five books. I don't remember even which book I mentioned it in, but Notebook LM found it . And I was like, you just saved me so much time. Just even that little thing. 

**Elana Johnson:** Little things and it makes it like, oh, I remember that. Or, oh, now I know, and you're just moving on to the next thing, which is fun. You haven't slogged yourself down in trying to open all these different files, find out where it is, find and replace, search, all that. It's just not fun. So it's just more fun to upload 'em all to Notebook LM and be like, tell me all this genius stuff I already did. Right. It's just, please. Mm-hmm. Please. It's just really nice. 

I have a plethora of books and we're trying to create evergreen content this year. So that's my, my main focus [00:56:00] for my assistant, I have a full-time assistant for the social media, is to create as much evergreen content as possible so that we do not have to be content creators for the rest of our lives. 

Now, when I write my books, I set up a Canva file and pull teasers over to them. Well, I haven't done that for, 90% of my books, I have no teasers. So if we want to choose something that's a teaser or a sneak peek or whatever you wanna call it, we just use Notebook LM for that.

And she can do it. She just drops 'em in, she pulls stuff out, she puts 'em in a spreadsheet, and then I have to go through and say yes to that one or no. And now we have three or four or five for every book, and that's evergreen content that we don't have to do for the rest of our lives.

Because the thought of having to create content, social media content for the rest of my life, it's like, I would rather not, I don't wanna do that. I'm never gonna do it again, in fact, because I hate it so much. So it's another pain point. Something that you really dislike can just be [00:57:00] made much easier with the right tool.

**Steph Pajonas:** I love that because, I'm also the same way. I have a blog. I try to keep evergreen content there, and then I try to make a lot of social media posts that point back to that blog post. I'm, and I can run that through like every six months, eight months, because it's always a new audience.

Or that audience has totally forgotten that I pimped that book six months ago and now it's time to talk about it again. The evergreen content is so important and it's so much easier now to make with AI. I'm really grateful. 

**Elana Johnson:** Yes. So I think that would be my top tool if we're talking like, actual ease of use and the things you can get out of it fairly easily with just simple prompts, simple questions is Notebook and it's free right now, so I hope it's free for a while.

It's so nice. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Yeah, me too.

**Danica Favorite:** This was amazing. This has been a masterclass with Elana Johnson. This [00:58:00] should be encouraging to anyone listening that really wherever you're at in your journey as an author, there's something in AI that you can use. And that starts with what is that pain point and how can you figure out a way to use it. We have to remember that no matter where you are in your journey or in your process, that you have to be able to find a way to handle it. 

And I also really loved what Elana said about making it fun again, like finding those places that aren't fun and gamifying it, and just really turning it into a way that you can love what you do. 

Yeah. Elana has the AI write things for her, but notice her direction as an experienced author to say, this is good, this is not. She just threw out two outlines and said, why aren't these working?

**Danica Favorite:** I used the wrong AI model. All of that comes from A) experience using the [00:59:00] AI and B) experience as an author and her knowledge as an author. And that's really important for people to understand is that, yeah, the AI is doing things for her, but it can't do it without Elana. 

**Elana Johnson:** For sure. And I think one of the biggest fears is people think you can sit down in front of the computer and type up a few sentences and push a button and have an 80,000 word book.

And even though I did just say I tell it everything I want and then I push a button, 'cause that's what Plotdrive is, is you make the buttons so that you can push them. But you have to make the buttons. You have to know what goes into the button to make the button, and you still have to give it all the ingredients to make the button.

And then even then when you push the button, you get stuff out that you're like, I don't know about that. And you fix it, you edit it, you change it, you make it fit what suddenly you have ideas for. Or you may not have had an idea before and now you do. 

So, that's great. It enhances the ideas that I have. It adds to [01:00:00] them. If I decide it fits, I keep it. If I decide it doesn't, I'm like, Nope, not this time. 

**Steph Pajonas:** That's a great way to end this podcast. Go out there, take the stuff that you like, use your experience as an author to get the things that you want out of the AI.

Discard the things you don't like and go forward with the stuff you do. Excellent advice, Elana. 

**Danica Favorite:** Yes. I think that is perfect. We've talked about wanting Elana on here, and I think this is like beyond our wildest dreams of what we got. So thank you Elana, for coming and being with us today.

**Steph Pajonas:** I'm so glad that we got a chance to talk about all this. I'm super buzzing now to go hit buttons in Plotdrive, which is one of my favorite things to do. I even taught a whole class on making buttons and Plotdrive and it's, it's just fun. 

**Danica Favorite:** I did your class on making buttons over the weekend.

**Elana Johnson:** I did your class on making buttons too, so I know.

**Steph Pajonas:** Everybody loves making buttons. 

We're gonna take everything that Elana taught us today and told us about, and I'm gonna distill it down into an awesome blog [01:01:00] post and make sure that I pull out all these key things that she talked about.

And it will be on brave new bookshelf.com for anybody who wants to come by and check out the show notes. We'll also have the full transcript up there too. So if she said something during this and you just wanna go find that little piece, you can just open up the page and hit command F and find whatever she had been talking about during that time.

But it was great to have you here. I'm excited to go play and I'm sure everybody else will be too when they hear this episode. 

So, I believe that we're good to sign off. 

Danica, usually this is the time she comes on and says, don't forget to like and subscribe us on YouTube, like our page on Facebook. All that good stuff. Is there anything else you wanna say before we go Danica? 

**Danica Favorite:** No, that's it. Good job, Steph. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Thanks. I'm trying to be better about it. All right. 

So from all of us here we will see you all next week . Okay. Bye 

Thanks for joining us on The Brave New [01:02:00] Bookshelf. Be sure to like and subscribe to us on YouTube and your favorite podcast app. You can also visit us@bravenewbookshelf.com. Sign up for our newsletter and get all the show notes.