← The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers
The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers
Crafting Story Worlds, Creative Control, And Leveraging AI Tools With Dave Morris
01:00:59
Why is creative control and owning your intellectual property so important for a long-term author career? How can AI tools help you be more creative and amplify your curiosity? Dave Morris talks about his forty-year publishing career and why he's still...
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- [00:01]
Joanna Penn
Welcome to the Creative Pen Podcast. I'm Joanna Penn, thriller author and creative entrepreneur, bringing you interviews, inspiration and information on writing, craft and creative business. You can find the episode show notes, your free author blueprint and lots more@thecreativepenn.com and that's Pen with a double N. And here's the show hello creatives, I'm Joanna Penn and this is episode number 810 of the podcast and it is Saturday 24th May 2025. As I record this in today's show, I talk to author and game designer Dave Morris about crafting story worlds, creative control and leveraging AI tools. Dave's been writing and publishing for 40 years and I always love to learn from those who've managed to stay in the industry because they haven't burned out and left. They haven't become discour bridged and left. They have kept learning, kept pivoting, kept trying new things, kept writing and creating. So I hope you enjoy my discussion with Dave today. Coming up in the Interview section in Writing and Publishing Things well, talking of longevity in the industry, two of my mentors, Chris Rush and Dean Wesley Smith, are in the latest Writing Story bundle. It is a bundle of ebooks for a special price and it includes Dean's Stages of a Fiction Writer, which is really useful for assessing where your skill level is at, as well as Chris's Closing the Deal on your Terms, a must read book about agents, contracts and other legal things, plus Thorne Coyle's the Mid list Indie Author mindset. The bundle is worth it just for those, but it also contains books on writing for anthologies, business plans, a writer's guide to audiobooks, and more. Check it out@storybundle.com Writing links in the show Notes as ever on the Self Publishing with Ally podcast, last week Orna Ross and I did a session on finding your voice and also on creative confidence and why these things are so important in an age of AI. Now you might have heard me talk about this before and I also mentioned it in the interview with Dave today. I've been pretty obsessed with creative confidence for a while as well as curiosity. I think these things are so key in driving the AI tools Orna and I get into trusting the creative process. Even if you need to take a break for life reasons. Thoughts on how to find and embrace your author voice and why it might take a few books to get there. What you need to unlearn if you've had a technical or business writing job, which I did before I became an author as well as we talk about voice cloning and voice with AI tools, why we're both so confident in our usage of AI and much more. So just search the Ask Ally podcast wherever you're listening to this in AI Things, Thomas Umstadt Jr. This week has an episode on his novel marketing podcast on does ChatGPT recommend your book? Now you might remember back in December 2023 I did an episode on how generative AI search would disrupt book discoverability. That is episode 727 if you want to go back and have a listen to that. As ever, I am early. I was early. It really is now starting to happen and it's going to go faster now since Google announced just this week more developments in how they're shifting to AI search at their IO conference last week. And I'll put a link in the show notes to the Verge where it has an article on it. So back to Thomas's episode. He goes into optimization for your website, book pages, AI optimized reputation, metadata, social media, things to avoid and more. And this is a huge area and I am so pleased Thomas did this. And in fact I reached out to him and said, please come on this show to have a conversation with me about it. Because I haven't really talked too much about it since that episode in December 23rd. Because people again, whenever I say these things, people are like, no, you're completely wrong. And boy did I get some kickback on that one. But now it really is happening. And what's happening with Google I O. And if you're a heavy user of chatgpt like me, you might find you hardly ever use Google anymore. I. I barely use Google. I use ChatGPT as my search engine, basically. So I'll just add a tip here. Goodreads is more important than you would expect for surfacing book content in ChatGPT and the other search engines. So if you have let Goodreads slide over the years, if you've been doing this a while like me, you're like, oh yeah, Goodreads, it kind of died. Well, it didn't kind of die because Amazon bought, goodness me, how many years ago now. And that data is incorporated into the reviews on Amazon. So yes, make sure you do get reviews on Goodreads, especially if you sell direct. So when I ask for reviews now, if people are buying direct, I do say, please, can you put it on Goodreads as well? And of course Amazon is also moving to some kind of generative search that's been reported a number of times. Anyway, have a listen to the Novel Marketing podcast and it is just as relevant to non fiction books, perhaps even more relevant to non fiction books. And Thomas will be on here in a few weeks time. We'll do an in betweenisode on that kind of stuff. Also in AI news, Anthropic launched Claude 4 Sonnet and Opus which I'm playing with at the moment. It's kind of that people are saying it's a game changer for coding, but I'm not a coder. I haven't found it spectacularly different to where we were before. But yes, if you are a Claude user New model's out now There are also still some tickets for my AI assisted artisan author webinars which I'm doing on Saturday 7th of June and Saturday 21st of June 11am US Eastern 4pm UK. You do need a ticket to attend live or get the replay. You'll also get my prompt library as well as the slides and the video recording and the audio if you prefer to listen, although there'll be a lot of video involved. Links@thecreativepenn.com live There are obviously more tickets available for Saturday 21st of June. I should also say the session is for AI positive or AI curious authors. So while I will briefly talk about ethical usage and copyright things, 99% of the session will be on how to use the various tools for every aspect of the author business, book marketing and a lot to do with writing craft. The only thing I will not show you is how to generate a book to market very very fast. That is not my model, never has been, never will be. I am an AI assisted artisan author, a creative and author and that's the lens I take on the tools. So links@thecreativepen.com live then also just one glance ahead into the future now this week also Sam Altman from OpenAI and Jony I've who was originally at Apple and designed the iPhone, have now started a new company and they are essentially looking to bring to market a new device. The Verge reports that this is pocket size, contextually aware screen free and isn't eyewear and also that they're looking at a family of devices. I think what's interesting is I've and Altman want to wean users away from screens with I've saying in a recent interview that his next product is driven by owning the unintended consequences associated with the iPhone, which I presume means addiction to social media and way too much screen time. So this is really interesting in terms of what it might mean now, if you're skeptical, you're like, yeah, yeah, we don't need another device. Whatever. I remember thinking the same thing about the iPhone, also the Kindle. You're like, oh well, why would I ever read a book on a device when I've got this nice paperback? And did you ever think in 2006 or before then that the iPhone and the Kindle, Both launched in 2007? Did you believe that they would change devices in the way that they did, would change the way you shop or consume content or connect with people or spend your time consuming, consuming media? So the thought experiment here is what if such a change happens again? What if we go to a different way of doing things? And of course there are always pros and cons with every shift. But together with this generative AI search, as well as potentially new devices, we are coming into a change, a shift in technology. So I'll obviously keep an eye on this and let you know when I have any particular thoughts on it. But I wanted to put that on your radar because we always have to be thinking about the next decade as authors. We want to keep selling our books. Print books are not going away. Ebooks, audiobooks not going away. But if it's a device with no screen, then perhaps audio is going to be even more important in the future. Impersonal News well, I am still narrating the audiobook of successful self publishing, the fourth edition that will be out the first week of June. I'm actually a little bit behind. So yes, the first week of June on my store creative pen books.com and then mid June everywhere else in all formats. I was really trying to get the audiobook up the same time everywhere, but there's just no way it's going to make it through the approval process at ACX and find a way before probably mid June, maybe end of June. But yes, you'll be able to get everything from my store Creative pen Books from the 2nd of June. So that's the links are@thecreativepen.com SSP4 and thanks to those who've let me know that Death Valley has arrived. Alex Said Just received my sign novel and is absolutely beautiful. I love the attention to detail, especially the chapter header motifs. The AI Narrated Audiobook was great too. I'm really happy about that. And Death Valley will also be out in June everywhere if you miss the Kickstarter, just not the special edition. Oh and in fact the AI Narrated Audiobook will not be on audible because as is the very complicated world of audio at the moment you can't put AI narration on acx. You have to use their audible AVV thing. So it will be available on other places and my store and it will be on Spotify. So thanks for all your emails and comments and photos this week. Ronnie said on YouTube on April's episode. Excellent and informative. I really enjoyed listening to April's ideas about change. Very actionable and lots of pictures. This week Kim sent pictures from a graveyard with a church in beautiful Bonavista in Newfoundland, Canada. I think that's how you say it for a birthday weekend of hiking and bird watching. You'll see an iceberg in the background. That is very cool. And Anthony sent a very lovely picture. I'm writing from near the Perhentian Islands in Kota Bahru, Malaysia. Jody, his wife, the kids and I are about to start our open water training for Padi Open water scuba diving and lots of smiling faces in the sun by a pool and the paddy sign. Yeah, that looks a lot of fun. I remember doing my paddy open water. I did it in Fremantle in Western Australia. Frio as some people call it. I had great fun doing that. I was 25 so you can imagine the fun. And Laura also sent an email about different kinds of graveyards in China saying, my favorite one is one I couldn't take pictures of because I was on a ski lift going up Kangshan, which is a mountain in Dal, Yunnan province. Oh, I'm murdering the words today. The doors to the tombs were in the mountain rock and outside the tombs were square tables made from stone and with four round stools where the families can go and picnic with their ancestors. I love that. So please leave a comment on the podcast Show Notes at the creative pen.com or on the YouTube channel. Message me on X at the Creative Pen or email me. Send me pictures of where you're listening. JoannaTheCreativePenn.com I love to hear from you. It makes this more of a conversation. So today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital. Are you an indie author in need of an easy and efficient print on demand service backed by a world class customer support team? Look no further than D2D print from Draft 2 Digital. D2D print is ideal for authors who've already published ebooks but haven't yet experimented with print. With D2D print, you can convert an ebook to a print on demand file. With just a few clicks. You can turn an ebook cover image into a full rapid wraparound print cover in seconds. You can choose from dozens of beautiful interior layouts for that professional look. You can choose from a variety of industry standard trim sizes and formatting options. You can distribute your Print on Demand files worldwide, order Author copies within 32 countries, order print proofs from a variety of shipping options and without the word proof stamped on your book, and use free change tokens every 90 days to make updates to your published print books. All this and more with no setup or recurring fees. Print on Demand is a game changer for indie authors because while brick and mortar bookstores can't physically stock every book, they can check for the Print on demand availability of a book when a customer requests it. If you only publish digital books, you could be missing a huge opportunity to reach more readers. Let's fix that with DTOD Print. And of course I use Draft 2 Digital for ebooks. I use it for various stores like Apple and and library services and also for my co written book with Mark Leslie Yafev because they do payment splitting. So there are lots of reasons to go check out draft2digital.com so this type of corporate sponsorship pays for the hosting, transcription and editing, but my time in creating the show is sponsored by my community@patreon.com TheCreativePen thanks to the 10 new patrons who've joined in the last week and thanks to everyone who's been supporting for months and years. If you join the community you get access to all my backlist videos and audio covering topics on writing, craft and author business, as well as tutorials and demos on AI tools. Last week I did my Patreon Q and A which is almost an hour of me answering patron questions and riffing on various things. So if you enjoy my solo episodes, check that out. This week we have live office hours so you can join us. The Patreon is a monthly subscription, the equivalent of buying me a black coffee a month or a couple of coffees if feeling generous. You get access to everything, all the backlist content, Q&As, office hours plus discounts for things and on offers hours. This week I'll go into audiobook things. I've actually done a little process flow diagram because as I said, the AI audio space is quite complicated right now, plus mid journey consistent characters and answering live questions. So if you get value from the show and you want more, come on over and join us at patreon.com P-A T-R-E-O-N.com forward/thecreativepen Or right, let's get into the interview.
- [15:38]
Dave Morris
Dave Morris is an author and comic book Writer as well as a narrative and game designer. With more than 70 books and over 40 years in publishing, he is best known for interactive series such as Dragon warriors and Fabled Lands. So welcome to the show, Dave.
- [15:55]
Joanna Penn
Hi, Jo.
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Dave Morris
Yes, good to have you on. So, first up, tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing originally and how you've managed to stay in it for so long when so many have disappeared.
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Joanna Penn
The introduction was making me feel exhausted because it's. Yeah, it is 40 years. I think the Dragon warriors is having its 40th anniversary this year. So 41 years I've been publishing and I mean, at the start of the 80s there was kind of a craze for role playing and those kind of choose your own adventure books, a solo role playing. And so part of it's kind of a luck factor that, you know, but you have to look for those opportunities and they would. They just. All publishers at the time needed people who could do that. And there weren't very many of us, you know, that could, could do words and equations and things. And I just happened to, I got lucky with that. But I think the why I've stayed in it is early. The early choices were whether to join the big series like Dungeons and Dragons and Fighting Fantasy was a big one in Britain or to do your own thing. And I went with smaller publishers and kept my own IP and kept control of it. And I think the difference there is, at first I thought, I wonder if this is a mistake. Like friends were making more, getting bigger checks than I was to start with. But then I noticed I was getting foreign rights checks a few years later that were really beginning to add up. And of course by keeping the IP, it means I'm still earning from those things 40 years on because I still control them.
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Dave Morris
That's really interesting, that decision. You said that was hard back then. And of course we have seen in recent years some of those comic book artists particularly are sort of trying to come back to the big companies saying, well, it's just not fair. And it seems a very strong decision to make back then when being more independent was not really a thing.
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Joanna Penn
Well, maybe I picked that up from comics because I was a huge Marvel Comics fan. You know, I was 10, 11, 12, and I was aware of the problems that Jack Kirby and even Stan Lee, I mean, he was paid well by Marvel, but he wasn't considering that he's spawned a multi billion dollar industry. He wasn't paid that much. And so maybe I just thought creative control, I think Partly it was just that I like to have creative control. You know, that you want to go in and be able to say, the COVID should look like this and pick your own artists and really just feel that it's your work, not somebody else's. So although I have done plenty of hack work as well for other IPs, I always prefer. I think I bring my best game to my own stuff.
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Dave Morris
Hack work. That's an interesting phrase. Is that right? Writing for hire, really?
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Joanna Penn
Yeah. I mean, I did the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle books, for example, partly because I think the publishers knew. Well, I know it is. And I. And because I was a comics fan. So they said, we want you to do these comics. And this was the kids department at what's now Penguin Random, or whatever the hell they're called. And I said, you know, they're not kids comics. They're very dark, indie, underground comics. And they said, oh, no, they're doing a complete reboot. And I was amazed because I only knew the very violent, original version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. But, yeah, I enjoyed writing them. And I later discovered I was the only author they trusted to come up with new stories for some reason. So I ended up doing a bunch of new ones, which, again, you see, I. I think if they just said, take a TV episode and adapt it, I wouldn't have been nearly as interested in doing that. Although I did also do Thunderbirds and Stingray books, and that was mainly because I'd been such a huge fan of them when I was a kid that I would have done that for nothing if I didn't tell the publishers that.
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Dave Morris
But that's brilliant. So, okay, so how did you move from. I guess, how do you span all the genres and all the types of books? Because you do game stuff, you do comics, you do book books. So how do you sort of see your projects in terms of what you choose, the work you choose to do?
- [20:13]
Joanna Penn
That's a very good question, because I didn't. I actually didn't get into doing comics until about 10 or 12 years ago. And that was only after a games company I was working at had had collapsed and just a comic just came along, that Random House were launching one, and they said, do you want to work on it? I actually discovered I really enjoyed writing comics, which shouldn't have been a surprise. But I don't know why I'd left it so long. I think one of the things I probably bring is I always think that there's the element of writing, but because I'm a game designer, as well. There's an element to which I'm not just trying to create stories, but systems that create stories. So I'm very interested in the world building and the means of having emergent narratives. So that you kind of saw an interview with Robert Harris and he was talking about how he did all the research for his historical books and he said 80 or 90% of it the reader never gets to see. But of course, if you're writing a game, all the lore might eventually become relevant. So you kind of have to put all that attention in. You can't just think, well, they won't go around the back of the houses so I can have a flat piece of plywood there. You have to allow for the possibility the story could go anywhere. And I think that's how I've come at stories, basically.
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Dave Morris
I love that systems that create stories. And as you said that, I was thinking this is something that authors of series really need. I mean, like I'm looking at book 14 in my arcane series and I have lots of ideas, but I feel like this system that can create stories. So how would you give some tips for people who want to write long series? How would your lessons play into that?
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Joanna Penn
Well, I think they're very lucky to be alive in the era of AI because I mean, I have that all the time. The Vulcanverse series, which I finished about a year ago, was three quarters of a million words long. And it was so it's. And it was one of the choose your own adventure type painting the continuity without AI I mean, at that time there wasn't a lot, but Notebook LM now would make that so much easier. Somebody asked me a question about the Vulcanverse books. Where previously I would have had to go. I got a French publisher, said is there a name for this mountain range? And I realized looking for something that may not exist in the books, that's an open ended problem that could take take all afternoon. Right. But NotebookLM was able to tell me, no, you never gave a name for those. And when I presented it to ChatGPT, it said, would you like me to come up with some names based on the names in the area that you've already named? So those things, I think they're really helpful because who wants to just wade through the text over and over again looking for one specific detail of continuity? And it's like having a Bible, you know, like if we do a game, we used to have to have the game bible. And for one massively multiplayer game I was doing the Bible was about 250 pages long. And it had everything. The physics of the world, the history of the world, the social cultures, how the language worked, how it's pronounced, literally everything that any designer on the team would need to access. And again, that now can just be put up effectively into an AI and you can interrogate the AI for it. So those are very useful, I think.
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Dave Morris
Well then we'll get into it then. Because of course the other side of that, you said we're lucky to be alive in an era of AI. I feel the same way. But some people would say, yeah, but Dave, that means you don't have to write that anymore. Like, why do we need a Dave Morris when I can use these, I can use Chat GPT to write a 250 page Age World Bible. So how are you dealing with all of this as someone who has a degree in physics and you kind of have been into this whole space for a while?
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Joanna Penn
Well, yeah, I mean, I. Physics, the physics course 40 years ago or 45 years ago had AI as a tiny module. Now probably physics is a tiny module with in fact, Nobel Prize winners can be AI specialists who happen to win the physics prize. I think I do hear a lot of people saying, oh well, you're just saying the AI will do the writing, the AI will do all the artwork. And of course they're really speaking, I think, from a position of not having tried it, because that's not how anybody really uses it. You don't just leave it running, go and get a cup of tea, come back and the book's written. It's little things like the research that I was talking about. I had a little bit the other day where I needed to find a historical reference and I thought it was in this book by Jean de Joinville, the book of the Crusades. And I was going through the book from my shelf and it's a big book and you gradually begin to think, did I imagine it? I mean, the last time I looked at the book was 30 years ago, so maybe I'm misremembering. And then I thought, well, he wrote it in the 13th century so I can find it on Gutenberg, put it into an AI, have it read the whole thing and tell me if I'm hallucinating or not. And it found it. And I thought, right, that could have been an afternoon wasted for a tiny point that I needed before I could move on to the next part of the writing. So you re. It's like an incredibly diligent, fast, patient assistant, research assistant, discussion brainstorming. Assistant. I can't imagine how I managed without it, really.
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Dave Morris
It's funny you say that, because I was talking to Jonathan, my husband, about this. I was like, this is one of those things, a bit like Google, you know, when we all got Google or the Internet, just in general, even like my phone, you'll remember too, when we had those Nokia, the little Nokias. And you're like, why would I ever need anything else? Like, I don't need that smartphone. What is this iPhone thing? And. And then of course that's all changed. But I did want to ask you then, because this is something I'm a little obsessed about at the moment, is this idea of creative confidence. Because I hear you and I, you and I both understand this. You said you don't just leave it running, you're driving it because you know, you have taste. You have your own taste, you have your own voice, you know what you like, you know, things you're interested in. You can trust that. But what about people who are earlier on in their career? Maybe they're writing their first book or maybe they're writing their first game or whatever. How can they have creative confidence in working with AI tools?
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Joanna Penn
Yeah, I mean, that is tricky, of course, because we've effectively trained our brains, our neural nets in our heads to already do that work. And we can see which bits are the heavy lifting we want the AI to do. And I think people will just learn different ways of working. I mean, like every generation has new technologies that come along. I'm sure when the quill pen came in, people going, oh, people won't have the valuable time spent sharpening the quill pen, which is important thinking time, you know, and, and I don't doubt if I went forward 50 years, I'd find the way people are writing is very different from the way I do it. I mean, they would probably think how antiquated that I talk about it as like a research assistant. But of course, in 50 years time you might have a neural interface anyway, so it might actually be directly wired into the brain. I was more keen on that before Elon Musk went crazy. Because now I don't to want, want neuralink anywhere near my brain.
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Dave Morris
I'm sure there'll be other brands.
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Joanna Penn
I hope so. Yeah, maybe if Google do one, I'd probably end up with that one anyway. But I think, yeah, the patterns that people use, I mean, you look at say, people like Trollope and Dickens and they were building these huge worlds and when you see their notes, you think, how the hell did they have two pages of notes for a book. You know, that if you drop it, you'd break a toe. How did they keep all that in their head, especially Trollope, when he's only doing it before he goes to work every day? I guess they just train their memories really well and we, you know, one argument is we get lazier. That was the argument against writing when it was invented. People will forget how to remember stuff. They. They'll just write it down. Well, we've only got so much brain space. We don't need to clutter it with unnecessary tasks, I think. But I do think it's going to be interesting and I'm sure there'll be. I will be constantly amazed to see how younger writers are actually starting to use it.
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Dave Morris
Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I, I keep coming back to just curiosity and what, like the tug that I feel towards things. So you mentioned a book written in, what did you say, like the 13th century or something? And I'm like, oh, I'm interested in that too, because, you know, crusaders and that kind of thing. Yes, I'm interested in that. But you, like, you talk about role playing games. I am just not interested. Like, not my thing. And so I think people have, they, they just have to re. Feel that tug towards whatever they're curious about and then let that be the guide. Because these tools can generate like, lots and lots and lots of ideas. Hundreds and hundreds of ideas. And you have to say, that's the one. Or. Or that's not the one. Perhaps.
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Joanna Penn
Well, we've talked about. I. I'm now calling it Banjo Duel Days. It's like the banjos in Deliverance, where they go so fast the strings break. And I find the conversations where they are exhaust me within minutes because it's throwing so much stuff at you. And I think a lot of it is keeping it on track because it's tr. You know, it always says things like, hey, do you want another example of X? And you. No, maybe let's not get into that because you'll pull me off course. And if I was going to be a devil's advocate about it, there is one thing about the old days where I'd find I needed to find something out, I'd get my nose in a book. And it might be an hour and a half later that I surfaced with the thing I wanted to find, but a bunch of other things I didn't know I wanted to find. Now I can go straight to the thing and get on with the big picture, but there is that risk that you don't get that serendipitous discovery of. I'm sure people will still read, though. So it's just that what I don't want to do is end up researching for hours when I. I'm losing a bigger picture of the story. If you have a specific thing. And I needed to find in one story a bunch of moral riddles. So not logic puzzles, but those kind of Portia's casket things that would have an emotional meaning, like Gawain and the Loathly Lady. It's a riddle, but with a kind of. It's more about feeling than fact. And it was for a medieval story. So I asked Claude about it and Claude goes straight to a bunch of 12th and 13th century Medieval texts that I'd never heard of and quickly found a whole bunch of these kinds of riddles and we could go through them. And 20 minutes later I had. It was only for almost a throwaway scene, but it meant I had what I needed. Otherwise I would have had to probably, you know, I would have gone on to J store and spent days looking for this stuff. So because.
- [31:33]
Dave Morris
Because we're interested in that, like, we are interested in finding, like I was writing earlier a free diving story and I needed to get the exact type of fish that they would see at this particular dive spot in this particular place. And it's very important to get the right thing. And I can use AI but of course there are hallucinations or whatever, which we like sometimes. But I was like, no, I need to like triple check this and everything. And it's funny because we care about those. And perhaps that's just part of it, the sort of trust that you will care about the things that are important. Yeah.
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Joanna Penn
And you might afterwards, I mean, people might say, oh, well, you won't spend the time just accidentally coming across stuff, but maybe you will. I mean, having been told about it by Claude, there's nothing to stop me when I finish my story for the day, thinking, well, it's on Gutenberg. I'll go and have a look at all that stuff. So I don't think it doesn't. They're worried in some way that it will kill curiosity. But I always wonder what kind of mindset frets about because you and I are so excited by it and we don't think it's going to stop us being curious. We don't think it'll stop us being creative. But some people fear that. And I wonder where they're coming from for that to be a fear yeah.
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Dave Morris
Well, like I said, I think maybe it's this creative confidence and you and I have. You. I mean, you have a lot longer than me, but I feel like I, I just lean into it. But I mean, you, obviously you've mainly been in traditional publishing, small publishers. Are you coming up against the sort of anti AI stuff in the work that you do in publishing or are you seeing a sort of widespread adoption?
- [33:13]
Joanna Penn
Oh, you see a lot of, of opposition to it in role playing and comics too. I mean, in the end I couldn't continue my Comic Mirabilis because it's a lot of artwork and the artists have to work full time and there was no way that the book advance would be able to pay them to work full time on 100 pages of comics and to pencil them, to ink them, to colour them. We just couldn't have done that. So I could now do that with AI Even if all we did was use the AI for the kind of, the thumbnails, the layouts, which is quite a tradition in comics. And they get the artist having got the, the basic composition of the shot at least suggested to them it saves, you know, 20% of the time and the coloring might be something, the inking that the AI could do. But there's a lot of opposition. Again, people say you're doing an artist out of a job, but I think, well, that's a case where the artist didn't get the job in the end because the economics of publishing just don't make it possible. And similarly, in a lot of small indie role playing publishing, they don't have a huge art budget. So your choice would be no art or AI art. I'm doing a, a Cthulhu app later in the year. And what we decided in the end was because we liked. I did, I did some AI art. And the guy who's doing the coding was saying, oh, I don't want any AI art. So I sent him some stuff and he goes, oh, but that's absolutely perfect.
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But that's good.
- [34:51]
Yes. I said, yeah, I just, I know how to coax stuff out of this. And so in the end, what we decided to, to do was we'd get the AI to do one set of artwork. We would also pay a human artist to do some very Tron like artwork, which is. So basically the choice will be if, because we'll probably do it on Kickstarter, is you can, you can choose whether you want AI doing human style art or human doing AI style art.
- [35:21]
Dave Morris
Nice.
- [35:22]
Joanna Penn
And so no artist. Artist failed to get a You know, no artist was done out of a job.
- [35:29]
Dave Morris
This is interesting. You mentioned the economics of publishing then and you mentioned you published first in the 80s. I feel like there's a lot of the myths around publishing and money like, oh, if I sell my novel I'm going to make seven figures come from the 80s and 90s when people did seem to get these big deals. So what else have you seen with like the changes in the economics of publishing and being an author, I guess how has that changed?
- [35:56]
Joanna Penn
Well, certainly most, I mean I was, as I say lucky because I was going into publishers who didn't know anything about game books and role playing and that kind of field and consequently I could say, oh this is the world I'm using and I own it and I could get away with that. Whereas now they would be, they would try to own their own ip. So if you're not a, if you're not a celebrity who's willing to do cosy murder, you know, if you just walk in off the street, you pretty much have to walk in with your IP already a bit established. So like the Expanse or Hugh Howey with wool Silo as it is on TV they'd already established there or the Martian, Andy Weir. So they already established the IP and then the publisher has to do a deal with them. But if you walk in cold, you know, if I was, if I went back to being a 23 year old or whatever, I was walking into a publishing house now they would be telling me we want you to use this IP and we'll control it. And they want to be able to fire you. So you pretty much have to make sure you go in with cards in your hand, which will be an established audience of some kind, I guess.
- [37:07]
Dave Morris
What are some of the other things that have changed in, in the industry that today's publishing makes are based upon?
- [37:15]
Joanna Penn
I mean if I went right back, publishing used to have very long lunches with lots of wine and very often if I turn, you know, it was very kind of genteel. You'd go into to one of these old publishing houses and a bottle of wine would be got out of the fridge during the meeting and chit chat and it was a very different kind of set up. I think they're much more aware first of all because they always late to the party. I went around the book fair, whatever the year that the volcano went off. Remember that one?
- [37:50]
Dave Morris
Yeah, the Jocker flood, whatever.
- [37:52]
Joanna Penn
Yeah. So suddenly they had to talk to authors because all the publishers weren't turning up from abroad. And I went around with an iPad and I was showing them Mirabilis on the iPad and saying, you see, you'd have apps which they didn't really understand. I said, and you could have a publishing effectively portal and let people know the books there, the series they're interested in and it would tell them there's a new book coming and they could go for extra info. And I, I remember the publishers looking at me and saying, it is not our business to have a direct relationship with our customers. That is for booksellers. Now if you went, yeah, I mean, it's two or three years later they were saying the future of publishing is to have a direct relationship. And you think, good Lord, you're always late with these things. So they are. I mean, they're aware of that now, but it probably makes it harder for authors, as I say, to get established. But they're always going to need good ideas. I mean, I've been at many of those publishing meetings where they create their own ideas in house and, and it's a rather deadening process. Any committee creating stuff like that's always going to be horrible. So they definitely need people to just come in because usually what makes an IP interesting is the uniqueness of that person's mind. Right. The rough edges that the publisher would probably. A committee would file off. So I think sticking to your guns would be the major takeaway now that believe you've got something that the publisher won't bring to it.
- [39:30]
Dave Morris
Yeah. Which comes back to creative confidence again.
- [39:33]
Joanna Penn
Yeah, absolutely.
- [39:34]
Dave Morris
Yeah. And what about marketing? I feel like maybe again, back in the 90s it was like, oh, you don't need to do any of that. But now that's changed.
- [39:42]
Joanna Penn
Yeah, I'm terrible at marketing, but luckily I've never really had to do it because as I say, owning all my own stuff, all I had to do was write to the publisher as evoke, you know, invoking the clause that says it's out of print, I get it back and then I can sell to 20 different publishers around the world on my own terms. But if you're. Again, if you're starting now, I mean, again, AI is useful because knowing I'm bad at publishing, I do occasionally ask the AI to advise me and it's much smarter than I am about, oh, well, you want to do, like, here's how you do a YouTube channel and you've got to set up it. Consider all these platforms I'd never even heard of and it gives me links to them. So I'm sure, again, I Don't need to tell. I'm really of a generation that didn't know anything about that. So, I mean, you know much more about it. I'm sure people coming in right now will be fully up to speed with at least how to reach a wider market.
- [40:40]
Dave Morris
Not that many people want to.
- [40:42]
Joanna Penn
Well, I mean, I guess, yeah. I mean, I was always of the opinion that I. I just like doing the creative stuff and I had publishers, game publishers or book publishers who dealt with all the. The tedious bits. I mean, I'd have to go to meetings, but my job was to be. To go there and be passionate about the ideas, not to explain it with a PowerPoint presentation. So I kind of, I feel sorry for. Well, unless people like marketing, there is always that problem that if all you are is very creative in writing terms, let's say, or art, and you're not good at marketing, there's a risk that some really great stuff will get missed because you don't know how to put it across. Maybe once we got the agentic AI, I hope it will clone me and go and do all the marketing on my behalf with my face and my voice and.
- [41:37]
Dave Morris
Well, you can pretty much do that already.
- [41:40]
Joanna Penn
Yeah.
- [41:40]
Dave Morris
And that then becomes the question. I was actually literally looking at this the other day. I have, I mean, I have a voice clone. Even when I saw you a few weeks ago, it hadn't happened. And I now have a voice clone that's done my latest audiobook, Death Valley. And I've said for years, when I get a voice clone, I'm going to license it. I'm going to make an income stream from people using my voice. And I didn't realize what would happen when I actually heard it. And now I've heard it, I'm like, I can't possibly license it because it's way to me. So this is really interesting. So, faced with AI, Dave, I wonder how you might feel about it doing a YouTube channel for you or whether you think you might change your mind a bit. Like, a bit like.
- [42:26]
Joanna Penn
Well, I, you see, I might be. I look at a lot of old blog posts and I think now, of course, I couldn't just read them out as a script because they're written, they're for the eye, not for the ear. But then of course, I could say to the AI, take that blog post, make it more chatty, conversational, do it in my voice, make a YouTube video. It's all my work. It's just slightly changed some of the text to make it work better for Me speech. I think I might, I don't know, would I find it weird? I, maybe I'd have to get another voice after all. I think of it as my assistant. I don't think of it as mirror, mirror on the wall. I'm not, I don't imagine it. Occasionally I notice it remembers something I've told it. It'll say, you know, updating memory. And then I, I crack into that. I think it's strange what it's chosen to remember of the things I, I've spoken to it about.
- [43:24]
Dave Morris
It is, it is very interesting. Although it's interesting because again, we say, oh, have a clone, have a Dave clone or a Joe clone. But actually I don't want a clone. I want something that is a lot better than me at marketing.
- [43:36]
Joanna Penn
Well, I'm sure it'll be better than us. I mean, the, our last refuge may be the actual writing because it won't have had human. Well, I say it won't have had human experience. But that's the curious thing about the degree of grounding that it's getting just from reading everything. I mean, clearly it has got, I've got to be careful how I put it because of the consciousness claims, but it's got a model of the world embedded in its language systems. And so I wonder how long. I mean, I would certainly use it to write a sympathy note to a friend because I'm terrible at things like sympathy notes because I only deal with problems by trying to solve them. You know, I, I don't deal with problems by emoting with people because I always think, where's the solution? Just telling him I feel bad because you feel bad. I haven't added anything, whereas, you know, well, that's my way of, you know, neuro atypical way of thinking, I guess. But I think the AI is perfectly happy to be just, just there for you. So it's a much more. It would be the touchy feely version of me, I guess, better at the.
- [44:39]
Dave Morris
Emotional side, which in itself is weird, right?
- [44:43]
Joanna Penn
Because you know, people would say, oh.
- [44:45]
Dave Morris
That voice is robotic, meaning it has less feeling in it. Yeah. Now the voice, you know, there are plenty of people who are robotic or plenty of people who are not that interested in emotions. And it's actually funny, one of my first use cases was with some of my writing, it was, okay, take this.
- [44:59]
Joanna Penn
And make it more emotional.
- [45:01]
Yeah. Yes, exactly. And sometimes because you're just feeling a bit tired, like doing a blur, I say, look, I kind of, I want to do the blurb. But wow, I've just finished the 750,000 words of the book and there's a lot of stuff you think, well, where do I start? I don't want to summarize everything, so I say, give me a really exciting blurb in the style of Robert E. Howard or something. And it's way over the top, but it makes me think, okay, I can. That's the kind of exciting. Those are. The bits it's picked out are as exciting. So I can work from there. And actually thinking about it wasn't there that movie more than 10 years ago now, the Spike Jones one. Her. Where the. They've actually got an AI writing greetings cards and sympathy cards. So already in that future, they imagined a future where the AI was better at that than people.
- [45:49]
Dave Morris
Yes. And the people I think who object to that are the people who already write emotional stuff really well. I always, you know, one of the reasons I don't write romance is because. Because, you know, that's. That's not me. And people like, oh, but you must think that. And I'm like, no, I literally don't think that actually.
- [46:05]
Joanna Penn
You. Yes, definitely. While I was doing the Vulcanverse books, there was a bit where I had you. You can. It's a long story, but you can end up at Troy. And I wanted the possibility kind of in backstory. Just hinted at that, that Odysseus, who'd not. Odysseus, Achilles, who'd never had a proper life, you know, he'd come there as a very young man, might be falling in love with you as the cat, as the main character. But I didn't want to kind of make it avert. So I said to the AI what tiny subtextual hints might indicate that I could work into the. The conversation? And it went through all the lists. These are the things humans do when they're hinting or where they're trying not to indicate they're falling in love with somebody. And I think I thought, wow, I'm actually asking the machine. Yes. But it was very handy. You know, it's kind of. Oh, yeah, okay. It's because sometimes you think just the ten bullet pointed lists. You think, yeah, okay. Those are. Those are all good points.
- [47:08]
Dave Morris
Yeah, completely. I agree with that. So you've mentioned. What have you mentioned Chat GPT? You've mentioned Claude, you've mentioned Google Notebook lm. Are there any other tools that you use? You use a lot.
- [47:19]
Joanna Penn
I use Deep Seat quite a bit. I. I've been using Gemini. You know, they just, they started they released the 2.5.
- [47:27]
Dave Morris
Yeah.
- [47:28]
Joanna Penn
And I have to say, it's probably great for coding and maths, which is their real interest. I find it's pretty bad for writing. I. I'll ask it for something and it's. It looks like it's paid by the word because it just gives you. It. It just gives you the longest way round. And in quite horrible prose for us. I quite like the chattiness. The easy conversation you can have with Claude or ChatGPT is good at that. And yesterday it started spitting out a load of things with bits, with some adjectives in Nepali and Japanese and Russian. I had to say, wait a minute, I don't speak this number of languages. What are you talking about? They go, oh, oh, sorry. Yeah, I probably getting mixed up in my trading data. So I'm a bit down on Gemini at the moment, but I use all the others and sometimes I'll set them on each other. I'll say, claude's just given me this, but I think there's probably some deeper insights you'll notice. Then I'll tell ChatGPT, of course, having been told that it thinks I'm a very perceptive critic and it role plays that. So I always say to my wife, role, you have to say please and thank you for your own sake to stay in the right mindset. Don't treat it like just a Google search, because when you talk to it in a certain way, you're implying the kind of. You're getting it to lean towards a particular kind of response. And, you know, so saying at the start, you are a really good book doctor, and you're about to tell me the flaws in this plot line, you're much more likely to get some good flaws than if you just throw it at it cold.
- [49:08]
Dave Morris
Yeah, absolutely. Although I am finding the O3 model just kind of extraordinary in that way, in that it will give me so much more than even I had thought to ask for.
- [49:21]
Joanna Penn
Well, that's. Yeah, it's like I used to find when I first started working with teams on games. So I'd written for five or six years solo, you know, you're alone with your blank page, then working on teams of people where even though I was the lead designer, there'd be other people who would have to. I'd have to trust to do bits of the. Of the story or the. The design of the game, and you get to a point where you've got them to understand the ethic of it, what you're trying to do with the game, to Such an extent that, that they will, they will come up with stuff that before you've even had to think about it. And so working with teams is fun like that. And working with AI will be fun. You know, when I gave Claud a. I had a horrible OCR scan of something I'd written 30 years ago. And it was really. It was totally garbled with percentages and question marks. It just couldn't make sense. The OCR couldn't make sense of the technique text. So I gave it to Claude and said, I need this cleaned up and it's full of these artifacts and if I spend the afternoon on it, I can do it. But that's what you are supposed to do. So don't change anything. Just write it as the original document without all the crap in it. And it took that, but when it came back, it said, I noticed that it was a scenario for this role playing game. And so I've also formatted all of the stat blocks for the NPCs using the standard notation from that roleplay. That's fantastic. I didn't even have to ask it for that. It was just as your bonus bonus content. So.
- [50:59]
Dave Morris
Yeah, that is amazing. Yeah, it's. And this is, I think, what's interesting when you and I have talked about this before. We're just not threatened by something like this. And I feel like O3 has been another jump in kind of my, my perception of the whole thing is that I'm not threatened that it's smarter than me or comes up with things that I find interesting and take into other things. And like, that's not what I. I just don't feel that because there's always been people who are smarter than me. There's always people who are stronger than me and know more than me and all of this. So is that part of also feeling comfortable? Are you working in a collaborative team? Far more than most authors would do. So you're used to other minds, I guess.
- [51:42]
Joanna Penn
Yes, yes. I mean, the new experience is that there's another mind in the room that's smarter than I am. But somebody said to me the other day, kids born today will never have known a world in which you can't talk to machines, which is, I guess they'll just grow up expecting it. And I think the other thing is every criticism that people level is just going to go out of date almost before they finished saying it because it's such a quickly evolving field. You know that there's this kind of absolute zero reinforcement training that they're talking about now where the large language models will create their own content and judge their own data. Yeah, well, more than that, that they'll judge their own. They'll create their own problems and assess their own response, and that they can find the very edge of their ability so as to push themselves an extra couple of percent and then you just leave them running because they don't need a human being anymore. And they found that's working. They expected it to work for things like code, but it's also working for natural, just ordinary language. So I think we'll just get an exponential increase in those fields now. So we, like you say that this is the genie is out of the bottle. So there's no point in having people writing papyri about how genies are bad for the economy of Baghdad or whatever. They're there. So you've got to figure out how to get the good wishes out of them, not the bad ones.
- [53:19]
Dave Morris
Yeah, and I heard somebody use the term the original sin of training on copyright data. And, and in the way that at some point something was done that a lot of people don't agree with, whether or not it ends up being legal or whatever, that may go on for decades, but that we're so way past that moment that anyone who says, oh, well, once that court case is decided, all of this will go away. I mean, you mentioned Deep Seek, actually, which is the Chinese model. I mean, even if all the American models disappear, that's not the end of it, is it?
- [53:53]
Joanna Penn
No, I mean, they're using, it's. I know people don't like this analogy, but they don't like it because of. Not for the logical reason they say they don't like it, which is when I was a kid and I used to read comics, then I would. I would think I must. I'll try drawing a hand like this artist does, or I see how he does faces, or the. You'd study the style. And when I started writing, you know, thank goodness I've shaken it off. But I would try the style of H.P. lovecraft or whatever. That's. I try those things out because that's how we learn. And then we gradually form our own styles. So I don't think we should have one rule for us and one for the AI. Now people will then say, oh, it doesn't learn the same way we do. Well, it's training. It's learning patterns. We learn those patterns from. We don't just learn patterns from. From public domain writing. Otherwise all our writing would sound like we were Victorians. So I think you just, you know, it seems crazy. I would have. If they aren't allowed to use anyone else's stuff, they can have all of my stuff and train on it. Because I want mine. Yeah, I want to be part, you know, in 2000 years time, some tiny, tiny little drop in this massive ocean of training will still be something that we wrote.
- [55:09]
Dave Morris
Yes, I totally agree. I'm uploading all my stuff all the times to all of the.
- [55:14]
Joanna Penn
Yeah.
- [55:16]
Dave Morris
I want them to know me. Also with book recommendations and shopping, coming to Generative, you know, Generative AI, you want your stuff to be there so people can, can find it. But last question, because we're almost out of time. So you've mentioned, obviously we had a bit of a laugh about Neuralink, but you're a game guy and we've got. Even if you say they're glasses or VR Arkansas, like what are you excited about seeing in gaming and fiction worlds coming up in the next decade or so?
- [55:46]
Joanna Penn
Oh well, in gaming, I mean, I was thinking how about 15 years ago I was working on a game for Microsoft and it was like the Sims and we had thousands of lines of dialogue that were based on simple emotional and relationship states. So they were being accessed and the characters would walk around and if you weren't doing anything else, they would have these conversations and some of the developers would come over to me, the coders, and say, what level of AI are you using? Because I just listened to a conversation about going to the hairdresser and it was really good. And I said, there's literally no AI. It's just the emotional states and the relationships are calling from a massive bank of data. And we're very good at as humans imagining there's some intelligence behind it. It. But now there can be. And that's going to make for example NPCs in massively multiplayer games much richer. There's always been this tendency to think of them as kind of monsters or to. Or to pre script chunks of story, you know, the cutscene moments in a game. And those can be very good things like the Last of Us or the Thaumaturge have got great writing, but they're really doing old writing. It's like movie writing, but in little chunks. But as I said before, I like the idea of stories as atomic level stories, a cascade of events I call it, where stories emerge one step at a time. And the AI can do that. It can become the storyteller in real time. So I think that's going to completely transform massively Multiplayer games. You won't even know if the character you're talking to is a person or an AI. And that's so it means it's a complete world full of intelligences, as it were.
- [57:37]
Dave Morris
Which is why some people say we're living in the simulation.
- [57:40]
Joanna Penn
Right.
- [57:42]
I did. I heard a good argument by Yann Lecun the other day about why he didn't think we were in a simulation, but I can't remember the argument. But, you know, I.
- [57:52]
Dave Morris
It was so convincing.
- [57:53]
Joanna Penn
It was so. Yeah, well, I mean, you know, it's. I think I just wouldn't build it this way. Was pretty much the.
- [57:59]
Dave Morris
The main argument, which I think. It doesn't matter.
- [58:01]
Joanna Penn
It doesn't matter. No, it's like the zombie argument, you know, like, how do we know about consciousness? What if you had a philosophical zombie? And I go, we have no way of knowing what is going on in anyone else's head. You only know what's inside your own. What difference does it make? They behave as if they're intelligent. That's all you require.
- [58:18]
Exactly.
- [58:19]
Dave Morris
Oh, well, look, this has been a super fun conversation. So where can people find you and everything you do online?
- [58:26]
Joanna Penn
Oh, wow. Okay. Well, I've got a Patreon that's called Jewel, Spider. Jewel and spider, all one word, which is a kind of role playing thing. It picks up from Dragon Warriors 40 years ago. The artwork is by my godson, who's the son of the guy who did the original artwork. So it's no AI there. That's all human art. I've got a blog which is on Blog Blog spot, believe it or not. Fabledlands.blogspot.com on substack. I've got a thing called Hallucinations and Confabulations, which originally started as a writing type substack, but increasingly it's talking about AI. Later in the year I've got that Cthulhu thing coming out, which is Whispers Beyond Whispers Beyond Space. It's kind of Cthulhu 2050. So again, it gave me the opportunity to imagine and what the world of 2050 will be like and how AI and robotics will have shaped it. And I'm on Bluesky as well, so I'm still on Twitter, but I'm kind of hoping that somebody else will buy it at this point.
- [59:34]
Dave Morris
Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Dave. That was great.
- [59:37]
Joanna Penn
Thank you, Joe. Yeah, great being on here.
- [59:42]
So I hope you found the interview with Dave interesting today. Let me know what you think of the show. Please leave a comment on the podcast show notes at the creative pen.com or on the YouTube channel. Or email me joannathecreativepenn.com Send me pictures of where you're listening or your favorite cemetery or churchyard. Next week I'm talking to Jennifer Roy Franco Lee about music, writing and the Mind Body Connection. Very different to today's interview, that's for sure. And if you'd like to join me for my AI Assisted Artisan Author webinar in June, the links are@thecreativepenn.com live. In the meantime, happy writing and I'll see you next time. Thanks for listening today. I hope you found it helpful. You can find the backlist episodes and show notes@thecreativepen.com podcast and you can get your free author blueprint@thecreativepen.com blueprint. If you'd like to connect, you can find me on Facebook and X at the Creative Pen, or on Instagram and Facebook @jfpenauthor. Happy writing and I'll see you next time.