53 - AI Automation and Creativity with Steph Pajonas and Danica Favorite

In this episode of Brave New Bookshelf, hosts Steph Pajonas and Danica Favorite share personal insights and experiences on how AI is reshaping their workflows, from task automation to creative processes. Steph discusses her use of AI tools like n8n.io for streamlining repetitive tasks, while Danica highlights her journey with dictation and transcription through AI. Together, they offer valuable takeaways for authors navigating the evolving landscape of AI in authorship. Visit our website https://bravenewbookshelf.com to view the full episode notes, links and apps mentioned in the episode, and the full transcript.

Speaker 2: [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: Hi everyone. Welcome back to the Brave New Bookshelf. I'm one of your co-hosts, Steph Pajonas, CTO of the Future Fiction Academy, where we teach authors how to use AI in any part of their business. And I'm also the editor-in-chief of Future Fiction Press. Been doing a lot. 

I've been doing a lot. I actually like, hurt myself with RSI, lots of copy paste, copy paste, copy paste, over and over again. And because, prior to this I was working on the couch on a la on my laptop, on the couch, which is not ergonomically correct, like at all. I moved to a desk in our house that had an old iMac on it for a long time.

It was like the family computer. The kids always like printed out their homework with it, but now they're older. One's in college and the other [00:01:00] one has their own computer can print from. So we don't need it anymore. And I took over the desk, and it's been a lot of fun of like buy an ergonomic chair, and now I'm gonna get a nice ergonomic keyboard.

It's coming in tomorrow. I'm hoping that I can stop being in pain constantly from all the work that I do. It's funny 'cause I was just talking about this with Danica, my lovely co-host who's here too. We're just gonna do a little duo show today. I'm glad that I'm not gonna be in pain all the time.

Danica Favorite: Me too. I am glad for you. I'm glad for you. You know, and it's funny that you say that, because that's actually 10 years ago, what led me to dictation is... 

Steph Pajonas: Right. 

Danica Favorite: Because ergonomically speaking, I just couldn't, my body couldn't handle all the repetitive motion and all the stuff, and so I actually moved to dictation, which I know the stuff you're doing can't really be dictated yet.

So we'll, we'll talk about that in the show too. Some of the... 

Steph Pajonas: Absolutely. 

Danica Favorite: Stuff that I do as well. 

Steph Pajonas: Yeah, so why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself for all the people who are just joining us. 

Danica Favorite: Yeah. So for [00:02:00] those of you who don't know me, I'm Danica Favorite. I am the Community Manager at Publish Drive, where we help authors on every stage of the journey from getting their manuscript formatted to finding the right book descriptions and metadata, to getting the book out into as many stores as possible. And then finally, if you've got co-authors or people you're sharing royalties with, to do the royalty splitting. So between us and FFA, every possible task you need for your writing journey, we both have it covered. So yeah, so we decided to do a duo show.

Um, we were talking when we were recording the next, or the previous show, or... 

Steph Pajonas: Mm-hmm. 

Danica Favorite: I didn't know how these orders... 

Steph Pajonas: Whatever. 

Danica Favorite: Yeah. We were talking about the fact that I was getting ready to go to NINC, or no, we were recording from NINC, and now I'm back from NINC. So, Steph was like, oh, we should do a little update on NINC.

And so, what we are gonna do today is I'm gonna give you a brief update on NINC. We're gonna talk about Author Nation. And [00:03:00] then, one of the things we're gonna do is, number one, some ah-ha's that the two of us have had about AI and using AI. And hopefully we'll have some time to go into some of the nitty gritty details of how we are actually using it.

I think people are finding it really helpful when we go into some of the little steps and tips and tricks. So. 

Steph Pajonas: I like that plan. 

Danica Favorite: Yes. So first up, NINC. So NINC was interesting because, some of us had heard that they weren't gonna do anything with AI, and then one day it seemed like they had almost an entire AI track, which was cool.

And I was really happy to see, you know, some of you're like, oh, no, fomo, fomo. No, don't feel bad, because all of the people there that were really great AI experts are all people we've had on the show. So like, we've had Spoken, we've had Kevin McLaughlin, we've had all these people who are doing cool things.

The person we haven't had, and this is really a cool teaser, is we tried to get Scribe Shadow [00:04:00] on, but because of some technical difficulties, that recording didn't work. I'm happy to report she is rebooked and, we are gonna be talking to Scribe Shadow here. I don't know, in a, I think probably like a month or so is when that recording will come out.

But yes, we finally have it. She has assured me that her recording stuff is better and so, very excited about that. But you know, the one thing that I wanna say that was the big takeaway, other than yes, they were talking about it and, how cool is it that, it's all stuff we've already given a lot of great coverage on, I wanna thank the people who approached me. Many different people were just like, hey, we listen to the podcast, blah, blah, blah. Love the podcast. Love you and Steph, thank you for that. Like, I hope you also do that when you see us at Author Nation, because Steph wasn't there to hear it.

I would just like message her and be like, Steph, guess what? Those comments mean a lot to us, so thank you for that. and yeah, let's give Steph lots of love 'cause we adore Steph. 

Steph Pajonas: Thank you. [00:05:00] 

Danica Favorite: And the other thing is that in this panel on AI and how authors are using AI, there were about 50 people in the room...c ould go either way, 10 people or so, but they asked, how many of you are not using AI for anything? Only two hands went up. 

Steph Pajonas: Wow. that's big actually. 

Danica Favorite: It is huge. I was like, this is pretty cool to see that out of everyone, only two people said they didn't use it for anything.

There's so much AI hate out there and people who are anti AI and all of that, and say, oh, I'll never, I'll never, I'll never. And I'm telling you, it's changing. And yeah, there was still a lot of people who said, I'll use it for marketing, but I won't use it for writing. I'll use it for this, but I won't use it for that.

That that's cool. And that's what Steph and I have saying all along. Use it for the pieces that work for you. Don't worry about it for the rest. And guess what, we're going into detail on [00:06:00] that very topic for today's show. What are you using AI for? What can you use it for? And the biggest takeaway I want you guys to come away with at the end of today's show, I want you to recognize where AI doesn't serve you and stop worrying about it. 

Steph Pajonas: A hundred percent. 

Danica Favorite: Yeah. So, that is kind of my NINC summary. Author Nation. There's a few AI things happening, so check out that schedule. Publish Drive is going to have a session, so please come to the Publish Drive session at Author Nation. I would love to see you. we also will have a booth on Vendor Day.

So, both of those places you can grab me, see me. If you wanna chat, please reach out to me. I would love to sit down, have a cup of coffee, a tea, a drink, whatever floats your boat. And then I'll let Steph talk about FFA and her folks. 'Cause you'll get to see her there, but they're not necessarily going to be speaking.

Steph Pajonas: Yeah, yeah. So at Author [00:07:00] Nation, we're not doing any kind of the speaking engagements, neither me nor Elizabeth Ann West. So what we'll be doing is we'll be doing some smaller sessions up in the suites in Paris. We'll have a signup sheet that we're going to pass around, so you can give us your information, basically email address, phone number, that sort of thing.

'Cause I wanna put together a WhatsApp group that I can broadcast any information that we have plus a Google document that people can go and check out, so they know where we are and what we're doing. And basically up in the suites, we'll be doing lots of hands-on work. We'll be showing people like on our laptops right next to them, how to do things.

We can even help you figure out how to troubleshoot some prompts, troubleshoot some automations, whatever it may be. We have lots of ideas of kinds of things that we're gonna do, including some small sessions. So we're excited about that. We've got two suites up in [00:08:00] Paris that we're gonna, where we, we have some people who are actually driving into Las Vegas, so I'm like, great, you have a car, let's go pick up some stuff for the suites and so that there's like snacks and drinks there and everything. I'm just really looking forward to it. There are definitely some sessions I'm going to go to at Author Nation, but I definitely will be spending a lot of time up in the suites and, helping people there.

So if you are interested in that, definitely come and find us in the AI Writing for Authors group. I'm sure I'll be circulating a signup sheet at some point, so, just look for my posts. I'm sorry I can't be more specific yet, because I don't have it all put together. It's one of those things that I'm probably going to get going at the beginning of October, and we are recording this at the end of September, so I still have another week or so before I put together that information.

So I'll put a link in the show notes when I get it. How about that? That will make it easy. 

Danica Favorite: I think that sounds good.. You know, it's hard because we do record these episodes far in advance and so sometimes we miss the boat, but I know we [00:09:00] really wanted to talk about that and 

Steph Pajonas: Mm-hmm. 

Danica Favorite: We were not sure how else we were gonna fit it in.

Yeah, like, I think that's really great that we still are trying to give people as many opportunities as possible to get out there, learn about AI. And for me, the big ah-ha that I had, which is what's going to be the main topic of the show, is this ah-ha about AI and how we're using AI. Because I really loved in the session like all these people and, and some of them I will just say, not calling anyone out individually, but there are individuals who told me that they will never, never, never use AI. And they were up there using ai.

Again, not for writing. Totally cool. You do you. But, I was, Steph and I both were featured in an article about how we're using AI. And as I was writing my little piece to send in about it, I realized that, you know, even though I'm very much pro [00:10:00] AI writing. Guys, I'm not using it to write right now.

Um.

Steph Pajonas: It's okay. 

Danica Favorite: And It's okay. And it was really funny, because I was like, wow. I'm like, AI writing AI. I'm like, but I'm not. Because for me, my writing passion and what got me back writing again after the horrific couple of years that I've had is, dictation. Because I am a verbal processor. And what I realized that I love to do, is I love to go on a drive and dictate my books, and I have an hour drive each way to my chiropractor every week, and so it's, rather than being in traffic and being pissed off, I have such a much nicer time when I am dictating a book. And so that's when I started writing again. Again, by the time this goes out, it will already be out. But my first piece that I've published since all of my life fell apart, is coming out in anthology in October.

And I, [00:11:00] I dictated the book and so when we were talking earlier about me dictating, I started dictating about 10 years ago because, like Steph, I was getting some repetitive stress. I had also been in a car accident on top of that, that was supposedly not that serious, but I lost a lot of cognitive function.

And for me typing, not only was there the repetitive stress thing, but my brain just didn't work anymore. And I still, when I type, I transpose numbers and letters and things like that, and it's jumbled. And so dictation for me is how I can write and how I can be productive. And what I learned is, this is what works for me and this is the process of writing that I love.

And so for me to sit down in front of a computer and type, type, type, type, type, that's never gonna happen for me. And that's okay. And that's where I think we're talking about accepting your process. And so I'm just gonna share my dictation process, which I've shared in other places. We may have shared it in the group, [00:12:00] but this also talks a lot about how AI has changed.

Because I used to dictate and use Dragon dictation. I'd have to do it straight into the program. Then I got to use my little mini voice recorder that I carried around and dictated into, and I'd plug it in and Dragon would transcribe it. But I still had to go through and manually edit everything. And now what I do is I dictate into my phone and I have an app.

It's the native app Google Recorder, and it goes directly to the cloud at recorder.google.com. It's completely synced to my account. It's all there. I don't have to think about any of the transferring stuff that I used to have to do. Now, my pain point, which I've tried to automate. It's not possible to automate right now because Google doesn't let you and it doesn't have the web hooks that you need.

But I figured out 'cause I just did an update, I can go in my phone to my recording and I can, [00:13:00] instead of, it goes to the recorder.google.com. But I can also, I have to still manually do it, but I can send it to my Google Drive. And now I can, from my Google Drive, I can get a little more of the automation because it's not perfect.

You still have to put it in ChatGPT to clean it up. 

Steph Pajonas: You could put it into Gemini. I think that might be one of the next steps that they allow. Like natively within drive 

Danica Favorite: Right. 

Steph Pajonas: Is that Gemini will just come in and clean it up for you. 

Danica Favorite: Yeah, and that's the thing I'm hoping for, because again, like I use it in ChatGPT. Mostly because ChatGPT is already set up to clean up my transcription the way I want to, and I haven't perfected Gemini to the point of doing that yet.

But it was so great because today, while I was waiting for something, I just started moving all my recordings to Google Drive, and then I used the summary function in Google Drive because, like all it does is, is the recordings are labeled with dates and [00:14:00] times. It doesn't tell you. So I just like clicked on it, got the Google summary, then I could rename the file to whatever the topic was, and I have the Google summary.

So now, rather than guessing, when did I record this thing? No, it's just all right there in my Google Drive and all of that is because of AI. 

Steph Pajonas: Oh, I love that. It's so nice. It's, it's, It makes it, uh, so much easier to find things. I'm, really pleased with the amount of work Google has been doing with AI and automations. 

Just the other day I was wondering like, oh, if I have to put together a presentation, can I just, go into Google Slides and tell Gemini to put it together for me? Guess what? You can. Now, it does a pretty good job of putting together individual slides. It can't do a whole slide deck yet, but I'm saying yet, because I think it'll be six months and you'll just tell Gemini the kind of presentation you need to put together and the main points and it will probably just do it for you. 

Danica Favorite: Right. And that is the yet part. Because like I said, like with the, being [00:15:00] able to share it with my Google Drive, what was really great is I can remember, like, I don't know, a month ago, I was really pissed off about this. Because I had been doing a bunch of dictation for this book that's coming out in, in October.

I was so mad, and why isn't there an automated way to do this? Like even, because before I would have to download it from recorder.google.com to my computer and then upload it. And I didn't like that step, so I was like, what the heck? And, there it was a month later, and it had that functionality.

And part of that, I always encourage people, even if it's ridiculous feedback, please go ahead and send that feedback to Google. Because you don't know how many other people have that problem and how many other people need that information. And Google's gonna be like, oh yeah, we didn't think of it.

I remember. A long time ago, Steph, when you and Elizabeth, early days of FFA, Elizabeth was [00:16:00] on the forums for, Anthropic, right? 

Steph Pajonas: Yeah, I remember that. It was their Discord server, I think. She was in there, and this was when Claude 2.0 came out, and I think that they were moving to like 2.1 and like it lost all of the ability to be creative, to write creative writing.

And we went in there and we were like, Hey, this is not good. Like, what is happening? Or it was the 2.0 to 3.0. Some, somewhere in there. I've lost track of all of the different versions. Yes, we did go into the Anthropic server. We talked to them about the fact that we were using it for creative writing and it had suddenly not been creative anymore. And they actually gave us the ability at that point to roll back to an earlier version of Claude. This was at a time when the Claude Chat would just have the latest and greatest version, because that was what they thought everybody wanted. They just wanted the latest and greatest.

But when we [00:17:00] told them that, Hey, it's not performing the same way with creative writing as it had been in the past. Can we just roll back to the to the earlier version? They actually gave us that dropdown menu on there, and now that's a thing on most of the chat tools. If you haven't noticed, if you go in there, you can actually roll back to an earlier version.

It costs less. it's a great alternative when the new one is just not working for you. 

Danica Favorite: And I think that's really important for us to remember, is that we are still, believe it or not, in the early days of AI. And so the more we put out what we want and what we need from these toolmakers, the better chances we are of getting it.

I had a conversation with Elizabeth the other day on the phone, where we were just talking about where I was at with my AI stuff, and, and going back to why I am not using it for fiction right now, is I do see a time when I might, I probably will. Because I, I really think some of the stuff is cool, and I've played around with it.

I've actually written a [00:18:00] few books using AI. I just got bored at the editing and, and didn't wanna do anything with it after that. So they're just sitting there. But it's a good lesson, because what I told Elizabeth is this, for me, using AI for fiction is not now. And we're gonna talk a little bit later about automations and Steph is gonna share about automations, and I was expressing to her my frustration at trying to learn automations.

And I was even, before the call started, talking to Steph about some website issues I was having, and I was mad, because I was trying to learn how to do it myself, and I had a deadline and it wasn't working. And what we have to remember is that the AI is always gonna be here. It's always gonna be advancing, and maybe your time is not now. The truth is right now I don't have time to learn how to write a good book with AI. I can write a book. It's not gonna be good, and that's okay. I'm not publishing it for [00:19:00] that reason. I don't have time right now to learn how to automate the tasks that I want to automate, which Steph and I are gonna talk about more.

And I don't have time right now to learn how to do my website. And I just hired out the website piece and, be okay with that. I think sometimes we think we have to learn to do all the things right now, and the truth is we don't. And you know, when I first started experimenting with writing with AI, that was a couple years ago.

AI writing is much better now. Elizabeth was telling me, she's like, well, why are you wanting to do this so bad? Because you know, the automations break. And I'm like, yeah, but if I learn it, I'll know how to fix it.

And she's like, well, yeah, that's a good point. But then I realized how much bandwidth do I have to learn how to do all those things? Right now I don't. But you know, 3, 4, 5, 6 months from now when I have more bandwidth, the AI automations are gonna be so much better. So for those of [00:20:00] you who are like, hey, I wanna do this and I don't have time, it's okay.

Don't worry about it. Let it go. Take it off the AI stuff list for you. Use the AI stuff for what you need to use it for right now, that's relevant to you. The rest, just let it go, and you can pick it up when you have time. And so that's where I landed with me and AI automations. But Steph does so many cool things with AI automations that I want Steph to talk about what she's doing, and what her process looks like. Because I do think some of you are eager for that information, because I'm a not right now. Some of you listening are like, no, I need this right now. So for those of you who need it, I want Steph to share. 

Steph Pajonas: Right. So I think that sometimes we need, a task that is urgent to come along to force us to make the time for the things that we need.

Right? Okay, so. I love AI automations. I love automations in general. [00:21:00] Even the ones that don't include, an LLM in the mix or anything like that, because of the fact that I'm a woman who only has so many hours in the day, right? We're, we're all stuck there. We only have 24 hours in every day. We don't have a time turner.

We can't go back and just redo things if we need to. I wish that that were different, because I could really use more hours in the day. So what happens is I usually come upon a task that I could do just by myself, right? Opening up webpages, cutting and pasting, moving things around, uploading them places, that sort of thing.

But those tasks become incredibly repetitive, and they are time consuming. And they're hard on my body, especially all of the cutting and pasting. Copy pasting, copy pasting. And a lot of that is because we work with so much text as authors, you know, chapters worth of texts, blurbs, log lines, all of this that needs to go into different places, whether or not you're publishing.

[00:22:00] So you're uploading things into like Publish Drive or wherever you may be going. You know, you gotta copy that blurb and paste it in, and then you gotta copy that log line and paste it in. All of these things take time, right? So I learned how to do some automations, and the main thing that I'm using for this is a tool called n8n.

It's not a very good name, I'm sorry. It is n8n.io if you wanna go check it out. It's very similar to make.com. One of the reasons why I like n8n is that you can, you can actually download it and self-host it.

You can, it takes a little bit of doing. There are a bunch of tutorials out there for it, but, um, at the FFA, we have our wonderful software developer, Joseph. He actually downloaded it, installed it on a server for us. And so I use that, which is great. So, what happens is, it is, it's an automation tool that allows you to hook up tasks in sequential order.

They can do loops and whatnot, so that it can run through tasks [00:23:00] and do it in a way that makes it easy for you to just press a button and get it done or, fill out a form and get it done. I've been using it for the last year or so to do random tasks, because it can hook up to pretty much any kind of tool.

It can hook up to all the LLMs. It can hook up to Google Drive. It can hook up to Gmail, WordPress. Jira, if you're doing software development. It has so many different ways that you can hook up into other applications. So I have been using, it mostly started with Google Drive, right?

So it was like, let me upload all the transcripts from Brave New Bookshelf, and then have it run through a series of prompts and give me my show notes and my episode notes and pull quotes from the episode, social media posts, WordPress excerpt. I have like a whole line of prompts that it runs through whenever I give it a transcript, and then it gives me this document on the other side. And that stops me from [00:24:00] having to go into ChatGPT and do those things one at a time.

So you can see how that could save time. I just uploaded a transcript. It does the thing, it gives me an output on the other side. Those are the kind of tasks that I've been using it for. I'm now using it for work at the FFA and at the FFP, the Future Fiction Press. We're gonna be doing a lot of cool stuff with the Future Fiction Press in the next year or so, including, an upcoming subscription service to all of our books.

We're gonna be publishing a lot of books, and we thought, you know what, let's just make a subscription service of all of our books. But that does mean those books need to end up on the website, like by chapter, by chapter, and who wants to copy and paste chapters from, you know, a text document or, if you're using Word or Ulysses or whatever it may be, wherever you're housing your text, copy and paste them into WordPress and then publish them.

No, I was like, Nope. I'll automate that. I will automate that. Just drop a book in and have it parse [00:25:00] out all the chapters into separate things and then post them all into WordPress, because there's an API. I find ways along the way to make things easier for myself. Anything that's going to be a lot of cutting and pasting, anything that's going to be a lot of repetitive work, I try to automate it as soon as possible. Like sometimes I will do it all myself at least once, so I can see what the process is like, and then I'm like, okay, now I can automate it, because I understand what has to happen here. So I use n8n mostly. I find ways now to get around using Google Drive, because Google Drive credentials expire after a while and you're like, ugh, now I gotta go back in and rehook it back up and get it all going.

So I try to find ways to work around Google Drive. Um, that's kind of like my, my thing now. I try to just make text documents and upload them to servers. That makes it easier on me, but otherwise, I'm using it as part of my process to automate anything that is repetitive. I'm not [00:26:00] using automations to do things that I don't think are gonna bring value to me.

A lot of people will think, oh, well, I'll just automate my social media, because I don't like using social media. It doesn't really do anything for me, but I'm expected to do it, so I might as well automate it. Well, I'm gonna tell you, don't automate it.

Just don't do it. Right. I was just listening to Becca Syme. We love Becca Syme. Becca is great. And she was talking about how we just can't do it all. We can't, and we shouldn't do it all. You should question the premise, her lovely QTP question that premise. Do I need to be doing it? Do I have to do it? No.

There's a lot of things that we don't have to do. We may like to do them. That's a different thing. So it's like, think about the Eisenhower Matrix, you know, and I've talked about that on my Substack article, Eisenhower Matrix. Is it, is it something that is going to serve you and do really well and actually really help [00:27:00] your business, then that's a yes. You're gonna work on that really hard, but if it's something that does not serve you, it doesn't really help your business, people expect you to do it, but it's not something you have to do, then put it aside. You don't need to automate those things. But like I said, if you do love social media and you're doing really well with it. But there are some things that you have to put on social media like repetitively, posting about book funnels or posting about a book launch or any of these sorts of things, and your social media is already doing really well, but those are repetitive to you. That would be a great case for automation, right? Find all these tasks that are repetitive and find a way to automate them as quickly as possible so you don't end up like me with a repetitive stress injury.

Danica Favorite: And I think part of that too is, is even going back to why you're choosing to use AI and what you choose to use AI for. You know, like it was really interesting when I [00:28:00] realized I'm like, wow, I should be using AI, because it for writing, but you know, like, and I will, because I do have a lot of cool stories I wanna write that I think would be helpful with AI.

But right now I don't have the time for getting that done and doing it. And I have this other process that's working for me, so I'm not gonna change my process. And I think that's what everyone needs to look at in what they're doing with AI. You know, we just had Michael Evans as a guest. 

I love the idea of AI movies. I know Steph is super geeked out about it. And that's on my someday plate. That's like not something that's a priority for me right now. I purposely take that off my radar, because I need to focus on what I need to focus on. And so when you're looking at the cool AI tools and you're looking at all of the AI stuff, go back to that Eisenhower matrix of, okay, is it something I need to do right now?

Because. you know, I'm working with Russell [00:29:00] Nohelty. If you go to Russell Nohelty's Substack, he talks about it a lot on his substack about, you know, this idea as creatives, t here's all these things we think we should be doing, and you have to get really good at only doing the things that makes sense for you, and that's not something we can tell you. He gave us this challenge that I'm taking him up on, which I'm kind of saying, dammit, Russell, for those of you who are Becca Syme fans, he said, you know, take a quarter. In that quarter only focus on one thing and don't do anything else. And so I made a commitment for this quarter of what I was gonna be doing this quarter and what happened? All these pretty shiny things pop up. And I'm like, damn it Russell, I can't do it.

But it's given me so much more peace, and that I think is also the approach that you should be taking to AI is, look at this quarter. What is it that you wanna accomplish with AI this quarter or learn about? I was telling Steph [00:30:00] that one of the things that I have decided to do with this whole website thing that is a whole ordeal, you guys, it's an ordeal.

'Cause I'm not a techie person. I have a website and this person was taking care of it for me and then she retired and gave me instructions on how to do it myself, and I have not been doing that very well. So I determined I was gonna learn it, because I do think it's important for me to at least have the skill to do the basic stuff on my website.

But the time to learn it is not during an urgent season. And so now I can look at my calendar, where do I have time? Where do I have bandwidth to learn about doing my website? And I can put that learning piece into my calendar. I can say, okay, I do wanna learn automations, which I do. Where in my calendar can I put that, so that it's just a learning piece of something I'm going to learn about and extend my education on.

Just like you would do continuing ed for your writing or for your job or [00:31:00] any of that, schedule those things and have that as a thing you're going to learn about during that time period. Don't do it when it's urgent, but just say, okay, I really would like to learn, and I, I can write. AI fiction just fine.

I just, there's a little hump I wanna get over with it that I haven't gotten over. And I can put that on my calendar to learn about. But it isn't this quarter. 

It's not. 

Steph Pajonas: Not this quarter. 

Danica Favorite: Not this quarter. That's what you have to do, figure that out. Sarra Cannon does some really great planning stuff.

I highly recommend her in terms of just sitting down. And that's actually what she does. She does her HB 90 is planning by the quarter. 

Steph Pajonas: Absolutely. 

Danica Favorite: Figure out what you wanna accomplish that quarter, for your writing, for all of the different things you wanna do. If learning about AI is one of those things, put that in your quarterly calendar and say, maybe this quarter every Friday, I'm gonna take an hour or two or whatever time you have, I'm gonna learn about AI on this particular topic. [00:32:00] Don't say I'm gonna learn about AI. There's too many topics. Pick one thing, one thing, and do that. 

Steph Pajonas: I love Sarra Cannon. Her HB90 series is fantastic. People manage to plan out their quarter and then get the stuff done and then move on to the next quarter. 

Yeah, it has really been a game changer for a lot of people. That's nice. I, uh, I agree. I think that it's a good idea to pick something that you're interested in and that you wanna learn about, but like, try to niche it down a little bit, to one particular thing. Like if you do wanna learn about automations, pick an automation tool that you're interested in.

If it's make.com, great. And maybe spend those hours doing that sort of thing on the days that you specified, niching down and figuring out like one particular task that you wanna automate first. Whether that's grabbing something from a website and posting it someplace else, just so that you can understand the mechanics of how it all works.

That [00:33:00] is definitely a great way to get started. So we're big fans of like trying to find the task that is causing you the pain point and figuring out how to use AI in that process to make it a little bit easier on yourself. 

Danica Favorite: Yeah, and that's the thing too, to think about, you know, because when I was talking to Elizabeth about the automation pain point for me is.

As I began niching down, she's like, well, what do you want to use automation for? And I told her and I went through it. The more I think about it, I'm like, wait a second. As Steph was saying, this is a task I don't want to do, I don't like to do, and I don't really need to do it, I just feel obligated to do it.

And so that's going, that, that has suddenly moved into the distant, the very, very far distance of maybe someday when I have all the time in the world, I'll take a look at it again, but right now it's not. It's not for me. And there's a lot of power in saying it's not for [00:34:00] me. But understanding why you're saying it's not for me, because these people who say, oh, I'll never use AI, or I don't wanna do this for AI.

Well, okay, but why? Understand that, but also when you come to that why, I'm not gonna sit here and say people who automate are terrible people, or, oh, you're making a bad decision. No, it's just not a decision that makes sense for me and my business right now, and that's completely okay. 

Steph Pajonas: Yeah, I see a lot of people trying to make moral or ethical, decisions or like guidelines for their lives surrounding AI. And I just think that, it really does not have to be like that. This is just technology. It's just like deciding to use a phone, use computer. It's the very same thing. I realize that a lot of people have problems with the way that it was trained or those sorts of things.

But you know, those are getting worked out in court, and eventually there's going to come a time where we kind of forget about the way that [00:35:00] it was trained, 'cause it was just gonna be in the rear view mirror, because so many new things are happening. We are coming into a time where early adoption of AI is pretty much over, like we're, we're working on early majority now for the, for the progression of a new technology. That's what usually happens. It's like the, the early adopters come in and they're using things before other people are, and now we're in the early majority phase where people far and wide are using it. Like somebody was telling me about their grandmother who was just was talking about ChatGPT. Look, if your grandmother's talking about ChatGPT, then you gotta know that like this is past early adopter phase, right? More and more people are using it every day. It's ending up in so many companies, so many apps, so many places that you wouldn't necessarily see it.

And so now's a really great time to learn the basics and figure out the ways that it [00:36:00] can help you in your process, and see if it works out for you. There's really no reason not to at this point. 

Danica Favorite: Right, and it, again, getting started isn't the, okay, I'm gonna dive in and do everything AI. Figure out what your main pain point is as a writer, what is your pain point?

Like For me, the biggest pain point has been transcribing my dictation and, again, I've done this for 10 years and gosh, it's so much easier now and AI has made that so much easier. My biggest problem now is I'm dictating so much. I have, like my, my Google Drive is really full, but eventually it'll be great, because then I can just sync it all to Notebook LM, and Notebook LM can organize it for me, and that will be even more amazing, and I'm really excited for that and...

Steph Pajonas: I love it. 

Danica Favorite: But see, that's the thing is, is that figure out what your pain point is and do that one thing. Just pick one, one pain point thing. And here's the other [00:37:00] cool part. Because like FFA has so many cool classes on this. I'm pretty sure there is not a single AI topic that authors use that isn't covered by FFA.

So you can always go in there, because there is a temptation, and again, I was talking to Elizabeth about this, where I was like, you know, this person came out with this course that sounded really cool and I really wanted to take it, because I thought it would be interesting, and I could learn all the things.

And then I was like, but FFA already has a class on that, so I don't know why I would take this class. That's just silly. I already have my FFA classes, I'm just gonna take it. And so, so really like think about, you know, when you see a pretty shiny thing out there about what you wanna learn about and trust me, if you're interested in AI, your Facebook feed is probably full of this AI class or this AI article, or this whatever. Like go to, if you're already in the FFA, go and see what FFA has already [00:38:00] done. And rather than getting caught up in every single cool, pretty shiny thing that you're seeing, pick one and just do that one, even if all your friends are talking about this other cool thing.

Stick to your one thing. 

Steph Pajonas: Stick to the one. 

You can go check out the cool stuff later, once you've figured out a little bit how it works and where it's gonna fit into your process. 

Danica Favorite: And the cool stuff will still be there. And by the time you get around to it, it will be even better.

Because I remember the first book that I wrote with AI, which was two years ago. It, the AI has obviously advanced so much since then, and I kind of wanna like redo this book and re-look at it just to see how much better it could be. Because it's probably gonna be amazing. 

Steph Pajonas: Wow. I love it. You can just go back and you could probably run it through an LLM again.

Danica Favorite: I'm gonna do. I have like this whole list and, but again, like I have this list of, here are my AI projects and here are the things I wanna work on. They are not this quarter. so I am not allowed [00:39:00] to touch them unless I finish the other project, which I don't think I will.

But, it's okay. 

Steph Pajonas: I will say that I'm hardly using AI for writing right now, because I've been doing so much programming. I've been creating tools. I have been creating workflows. I used Claude the other day to help me troubleshoot my website because I had accidentally turned off all comments on my website in April. Couldn't figure out how to turn them all back on. It was a very strange thing. Even Claude was just like, huh, this is weird. How did you manage to do this? I was like, I don't know. There was a crash, and things went wrong and I don't know what to do, Claude, help me.

So it actually did, we worked on it together. It took about four hours for me to fix this problem with Claude, and I have a pretty good extensive knowledge of PHP and WordPress and everything, and we ended up writing a script to go in and fix this problem. Which took a long time [00:40:00] to fix, but I am happy with it now.

Like I, I've been using AI pretty extensively for all the programming stuff that I need to do. I mean, I am CTO, so a lot of the things I do are technical. I'm using AI a lot to make images and animate those images in Kling and put together quick reels with some music, and that like feeds the artistic side of my, of my life. I'm not necessarily writing a lot right now. I'm like playing, playing with multimedia and doing all those kinds of things. And then sometimes I will sit down and write a little bit of flash fiction about whatever I just generated, because I've generated a really pretty picture and I'm like, ooh, what's happening in this picture?

I might write a little flash fiction about that, so I'll do that. But really, I'm, I'm using AI for just like lots of coding and lots of programming lately. And so, you know, you can use AI for just so many things. You can use it to help you with your French homework, which I also do. 

Danica Favorite: I know. Yeah. But [00:41:00] yeah, like I was thinking about that as you were saying that, you know, oh yeah, I'm just doing all the coding and stuff and, and then you talked about the images and the video generation. And everyone says, you know, AI, oh, it doesn't let you be creative, blah, blah, blah.

Which is so not true. Like I find my creativity. I do have my creative AI outlets and things that I like to do that make me feel more creative, more productive, doing AI. So one of the things that I was thinking about today, is that I know that Steph is a pantser, but I'm a plotter. And so one of my weird writer quirks is, no matter where I'm at, I will come up with a plot for a story.

And so, you know, I could be sitting in the grocery store, and there's a man and a child and I'm automatically curious and I can make up a story about them. I will come up with the whole plot, by the way. In fact, seriously, if anybody ever is like, ooh, I do [00:42:00] wanna plot with a real human, please call me.

'Cause this is my favorite thing to do in the whole wide world. And, and this is actually where the dictation has gotten outta control for me, because now I'll be out and about, and I have a plot for a story and I just open my phone 'cause it's so easy now. Boom. Push the record button. And I'm like, and what if this happens, and this happens, and blah, blah, blah.

And I have a whole story outline. This is where I said eventually the AI writing is going to be my lifesaver, because I have probably about at least 20 different stories plotted out completely on my phone right now that I was just, I saw something cool and made up a whole story about it. And then what I do, 'cause I really, this plotting thing is really something I love, is then I do stick it into ChatGPT and say, hey, are there any plot holes?

And then that tells me the plot holes. And I'm like, and half the time I'm like, oh yeah, there's a plot hole. And then so then I'll go back and I'll re-plot it. And that for me is my creative fun. Find a way to use [00:43:00] AI to bring the joy back in your life.

And I think that's something we talked about with, Joanna Penn, is how are you finding joy? The publishing business is hard, guys. It can be a slog if you let it. And the more places where you can find the joy, even if that is like Steph making up cool images and then animating them, because it makes her heart happy.

Or if it's me and I've just made up this really cool story, and I don't wanna forget it because maybe someday I'll write it. Boom, there it is. And all of us have that in us and have that creativity. And I think about how many stories I've lost, because I couldn't get it down fast enough. I'll wake up from a dream, and if I can catch it, 'cause I dream a lot of my stories too. Total big weirdo. But it's fine 'cause this is my process. And somebody else, some other writer was saying their process, they also dream parts of their stories. But if I wake up from a dream that's about [00:44:00] a story, and I don't get it on paper, like right away, I'll forget it and I'll lose that part of the story. And now what I can do, I'm half asleep, and I will open up the recorder, and I'll be like, yeah. And he said something. And then they went into this place. And, and it makes no sense, but I can put it in the AI, and at least the recording is down and then I will transfer it into like ChatGPT. I did this the other day. I put it in there and I said, okay, do you have any idea what I meant by this? And nine times outta 10 ChatGPT's like, yep, this is, this is it. Holy crap, you did. But I've been using, like, I've been on paid ChatGPT since it first came out. 

I allowed it to learn from me, and so now it just knows me. And I can go in there and I can say, Hey, what did I mean when I wrote this?  It will be like, this is what you meant.

It's scary, but it's good. You know. 

Steph Pajonas: It knows us now.

That's a [00:45:00] little creepy, but kind of cool too at the same time. 

Danica Favorite: I know. I know. 

Steph Pajonas: I love this 'cause we've both found the joy. We've both figured out the ways that we wanna use AI in our process. And that is continually evolving over time, because something new will come out, or we'll decide that it's not something that is actually worth spending time on or whatever.

And then the process just keeps going on and on. And that's how we use it to find the joy, find the extra time in our lives so that we can do lots of the other things that make us joyful as well. 

Mm-hmm. 

Danica Favorite: Right? Because you know, before all this AI, Steph, there's, I wanted to do Duolingo for a really long time, and Steph would talk about it and I'm like, I wanna do that.

And now it's like, okay, now Steph could be on the podcast saying, hey, go do your Duolingo, which is also mostly AI, but, how cool is that, that I now get to [00:46:00] do something I've always wanted to do, but didn't have time for, and it's helped out by AI in so many ways. But also look at how cool that Steph and I have one more thing that we can connect on as friends.

Steph Pajonas: I love that. Yeah. I poked you the other day. I was like, go do your Duolingo. I think this is a good thing to wrap up the conversation on. We've gone over the upcoming conferences and the things that we're using AI for. And I think that this is a good way to remind our listeners that there's a lot of different ways that we can use AI.

It does not have to be for writing. I use AI for writing. I use AI for everything pretty much right now. But you can find those things that are giving you problems, and you can help alleviate those pain points with AI, but you can also take the time to look at it and decide whether or not it's even worth spending the time on.

Danica Favorite: Absolutely. And I think, again, you know, going back to what I've, I've [00:47:00] said before, what you're saying no to, is just as important as what you're saying yes to. I don't like the blind no. But if it's an I can't do it right now, it's an I can't do it right now. And that's okay too. 

Steph Pajonas: That is definitely okay too. Okay. 

Danica Favorite: Yeah. So, yeah, it was good to get to chat with Steph today about all the cool things we're doing. I think when we were talking, like I said, we just realized we hadn't shared a lot of our personal AI stuff lately, and so this was a good chance to do it. I really hope we'll get to see some of you in Vegas at Author Nation.

Come hang out with us, come see us, and tell us how you're using AI. Because we always wanna hear what everyone else is doing. And, if you've got some guest ideas, make sure you let us know because, we definitely wanna showcase them as well. 

Steph Pajonas: Exactly. Yeah. So let us know what you're doing, because that also definitely helps us decide what new topics we wanna talk about here too.

All right, so come by and check out the show notes for this [00:48:00] particular episode. I'll, put them all up on the blog at the same time as usual.

I'll let Danica do all the closing out good stuff. 

Danica Favorite: Yes. So, make sure that you are liking and following us on all the social media stuff. Brave New Bookshelf, Publish Drive, Future Fiction Academy. Make sure you're liking and subscribing us on YouTube. And we also have the newsletter, so sign up for that. Lots of ways to stay in touch. Of course, make sure you're subscribing to us if you're listening to us on your favorite podcast channel, because we have all these different ways to access this. Keep liking, sharing.

We want to see more and more people having this as an education tool, as they start to get more curious about AI and are wondering, what is this AI thing? We're here for you and we wanna help you. 

Steph Pajonas: We do. And we wanna see you at Author Nation too. So definitely snag us and say hi. Okay. And, when the time comes, definitely check out the [00:49:00] AI Writing for Authors group on Facebook and look for posts from me about meetups and all that kind of stuff, there as well.

All right. So from both me and Danica, we're gonna say goodbye now, and we will talk to you guys in the next episode. Okay. Bye bye.

Speaker: Thanks for joining us on The Brave New Bookshelf. Be sure to like and subscribe to us on YouTube and your favorite podcast app. You can also visit us at bravenewbookshelf.com.