Meet Aaron Ryan

Seattle-based bestselling & award-winning author Aaron Ryan has been a longtime motivational and inspirational speaker, panelist and workshop leader at some of the largest conferences around for both authoring and voiceovers, including Norwescon, VO Atlanta, OneVoice, Doxacon, Southwest Washington Writers Conference, DARA Program, and dozens of independent businesses and churches since 1995.

Aaron is a Seattle-area motivational speaker committed to bringing an encouraging message for authors and creators on treating their authoring pursuits as an entrepreneurship, teaching on creative marketing, avoiding scammers, reckoning with AI, steps to publishing, steps to approaching an agent, networking, and more.

Learn more about Aaron Ryan

Full Transcript.

50 Scam Emails a Day: An Author's AI Survival Guide with Aaron Ryan

Laura Williams: [00:00:00] Do you feel that navigating the indie publishing world lately is a constant battle against book scams and AI bots? On The Writing Biz, we're tackling that exact challenge, and figuring out how to protect your work without losing your mind. With us is Aaron Ryan, the bestselling author, voice actor, and speaker who's right in the trenches of the modern publishing world. We're diving into the rise of sophisticated industry scams, the massive flood of AI-generated content, and, more importantly, how you can lean into your unique human voice to stand out and keep your creative joy alive. Aaron, thank you so much for joining me today. How are you doing?

Aaron Ryan: [00:00:37] I'm doing well. Thank you so much for having me, I really appreciate it.

Laura Williams: [00:00:41] It seems like we always gravitate toward discussions on AI these days, with it being so much in the news, and everyone trying to figure out, as authors, when to use it and when not to. As a prolific author and a voice actor, you see the creative world [00:01:00] get disrupted from two different angles. The world is moving so fast, powered by AI, that it's honestly hard to keep up. Can you give us an overview of how the creative economy is changing?

Aaron Ryan: [00:01:15] Yeah, and you're right, I absolutely see it from two different sides of the fence, and both are infuriating at times, unsettling for the most part. The economy is perpetually changing — in terms of my own economy, in the financial sense, as a voice actor, our income has been eroded substantially. I've lost tremendous, beloved relationships with producers I've worked with for years, who've either themselves been replaced by senior management saying, ‘We don't need you anymore, we'll have our videos produced by SeedDance,' for example, or they've been instructed to forgo genuine, authentic human voice talent in favor of something like ElevenLabs, or Respeecher, or Speechelo. So the voice acting economy is really [00:02:00] under threat right now from AI, and it's not going anywhere. It's in bad need of legislation, of reining in this Wild West of new technology.

Aaron Ryan: On the authoring side, we're definitely seeing it too — the erosion of good-quality books, the suspicion among fellow authors about who's using AI, the arguments that erupt over it, the dumbing down of society, the slop that gets foisted on us all. And now we're seeing scammers making great use of AI to barrage us daily with these well-written, legitimate-sounding emails laden with flattery, which are really just — they're annoying, and they won't go away either. So it's a tool that's being misused across the board, in multiple industries.

Laura Williams: [00:02:48] Yeah, I agree with everything you said. AI is so complicated, because as a solopreneur, and also trying to produce a podcast, [00:03:00] I do use AI tools to help run my business. But at the same time, I'm totally against AI tools that interfere with creativity. And like you said, with voice actors losing work to new technology — I don't even know what the adjustment is going to look like there — and the fact that the market's being flooded with a lot of poorly written, poorly thought-out books, which authors who've spent a year or two on a single book are now competing against, that's completely unfair. I understand it from both sides, but it's a very complicated situation we're all trying to deal with. I think the hardest part for everyone involved is that it's moving so fast, and just keeping up with the knowledge you need to understand what's even going on is a challenge. [00:04:00]

Aaron Ryan: [00:04:01] Yeah, that's a very accurate and insightful overview of it. It's really discouraging as an author — I'll set the voice acting side aside for a moment, since we're fellow authors here — it's so discouraging to see legitimate authors, and I've been accused of this myself, because I am prolific. My love language is giving. I love writing and putting books out into the marketplace, leaving that legacy, and sharing the stories in my head and my heart with people who might be interested. So I publish quickly. I do get my books edited, I do record the audiobooks — it all takes time, but I still publish quickly, and as a result, the frequency of my publications draws suspicion from cynics who say, ‘Well, he must be using AI.' So I have to defend myself, but honestly, I have the best defense in the world. As a voice actor, I've watched our income absolutely erode because of AI. I have no love for AI, except for some forms of assistive AI. I don't have [00:05:00] a problem with assistive AI for organization, or idea generation, or paraphrasing tools, or a manuscript report — I use a great service when I finish each book called manuscriptreport.com, and I highly endorse it. But the trade-off with generative AI is that you're surrendering your God-given right to do something so fundamentally native to who you are as a human being — to create, from the Creator — and so many of us so willingly lay that down in favor of the quick fix, the shortcut, the highway to publishing, bypassing this beautiful, God-given gift entirely. It's really upsetting. I would never do that.

Laura Williams: [00:05:44] Yeah, I understand exactly what you're saying, and it's even more complicated by the fact that the industry hasn't even come up with a reliable way to detect AI.

Aaron Ryan: [00:05:57] Right.

Laura Williams: [00:05:58] So people who aren't even using [00:06:00] AI get accused of using it, while people who actually are using it slip right under the radar. I don't know how long it's going to take for this to shake out, and historically we go through this same process with every major new technology.

Laura Williams: But boy, is it a pain to be in the middle of it and trying to figure it out, especially with something so closely tied to our humanity. It's really difficult.

Aaron Ryan: [00:06:30] Yeah, it's a maelstrom. It really is a maelstrom, and so many of us are circling that drain, just trying to get out of the funnel and back to smooth sailing. We're all caught in this maelstrom, circling the same drain. And those of us who are staunchly opposed to AI bear the frustration and the blame from people who label us old-fashioned, Luddites. ‘Hey, the steam engine revolutionized the horse and carriage too.' Well, yes, but that's apples and oranges — this [00:07:00] is something that's replacing humanity, not

Laura Williams: [00:07:02] Right.

Aaron Ryan: [00:07:03] assisting it. I'm not a Luddite. I'd love to have smooth sailing again, but I'd like to do it in a ship that's competent and built by humans. It's so frustrating.

Laura Williams: [00:07:14] Gordon McClellan, from Dartfrog Media, has a program called True Origin. It maps out your work from beginning to end, so you can say, ‘I did not let AI touch this manuscript.'

Aaron Ryan: [00:07:34] Yeah, that's great.

Laura Williams: [00:07:36] That's helpful, because then no one can argue with it — it's there in black and white. There are so many pieces to this.

Aaron Ryan: [00:07:42] We do need something empirical. What I do love seeing on the voice acting front, by the way — I met him briefly at a fan expo — is Sean Astin, who's the president of SAG-AFTRA. As a SAG-AFTRA accredited voice actor, I watch his dealings closely with government, with associations, with unions, [00:08:00] in terms of ensuring that people who've signed up under the SAG-AFTRA banner have those protections — that their likeness isn't used without permission, that they're properly compensated and credited for anything related to their likeness being used in marketing, promotions, or broadcasts. And man, if we had somebody championing that for authors, I'd fall right in line behind them and say, full steam ahead, I'm right behind you, damn the torpedoes, let's do this — because we do need something like that.

Laura Williams: [00:08:37] I agree. So with online marketplaces getting absolutely flooded with AI-generated books and audiobooks, it's getting harder for us to cut through that. Do you have any thoughts on how we can battle the algorithms, get found, sell books, and rise above [00:09:00] all that?

Aaron Ryan: [00:09:01] Well, promotion online or offline isn't really that different — it's a slog either way. It's about being steady and consistent, putting out good content, and developing a following, a fan base of people who understand that your content is unique. Now, if I had a book generated by AI, my readers would know instantly, because I have a very signature style — and I'll add, if I had it fully generated by AI with no further editing whatsoever, yes, you'd have telltale signs, like overused em dashes and a very clinical style of writing that lacks human finesse, but my readers would know regardless. I have a very distinct, individual signature style that's all me. That's what we need to do — we can't just be more of the same as Tolkien, or Rowling, or Asimov, or Clancy, or Crichton, or Grisham, or anybody else. We have to develop a unique style first and foremost. Secondly, the marketing we're doing outside — I [00:10:00] think there just needs to be a much greater focus on offline marketing, things like vendor markets, craft fairs, trade shows, where you can have a booth, meet readers in person, build an offline following, hold book signings and book parties, get your own personal email list and branding out into the public zeitgeist, and start communicating with people who then tell other people, who tell other people, until the marketing starts working almost on its own. But yes, there's plenty you can do online too — it just requires investment, and not everyone's willing to make that financial trade with promotion sites like Written Word Media, or Kraven Books, or The Fussy Librarian, or Bargain Booksy, or any of those — but they're still important to use.

Laura Williams: [00:10:49] I think, like you said, if you're out there organically building an audience, that's what actually gets you ahead of AI-created content, because AI-generated content generally isn't doing that. Usually people are just throwing books up there. Now, there are people who genuinely market them — [00:11:00] I'm not saying none of them do — but a lot of it is just thrown up, and it's about how many books you can churn out, not necessarily how well you can bring any single one of them into the world.

Aaron Ryan: [00:11:22] Well said. It's a purely capitalistic venture, and it always amazes me — I forget who the author was, but she got called out for this, I believe she was a UK author, and she accidentally left the AI prompts in the book. She got called out publicly, and her book was pulled by her publisher. I could just as easily today have a book generated by AI — my readers would spot it and know. But you're sacrificing quality for quantity. You're flooding the marketplace, watering down the offerings, the quality across the whole author sphere, and it does nothing for your bottom line. You're going to fizzle [00:12:00] out before anyone even has the chance to check out the three hundred books you published in three days. The math just doesn't add up.

Laura Williams: [00:12:09] The thing about AI use is it spans a massive spectrum. Some people use it for brainstorming or proofreading, while others use it to write their entire book. For authors trying to navigate where to draw the line between a helpful digital tool and losing the human heart of the story, where do you think most people are actually drawing that line?

Aaron Ryan: [00:12:34] There was an editor — I really wish I'd written down who it was, I was just scrolling — who posted something on LinkedIn that I found so insightful, and so indicting, and perfectly articulated. She said something to the effect of, are you using AI to write your book? If so, stop. And here's the kicker, this is what I loved — she said, I cannot bring out your voice if it wasn't there to begin with. [00:13:00] And that ties right back to what we were talking about earlier — you want to be authentic, unique, and have a signature style that stands out in this flood of content.

Laura Williams: [00:13:12] Right.

Aaron Ryan: [00:13:13] With that statement, she's calling people out. If you're using AI, which is trained on the backs of all these creatives without accreditation, without remuneration, without permission — it's an amalgamation of this whole pool of other people — there's nothing definitively you in that writing. There's nothing that says, this was authored specifically by Aaron Ryan. It's really important to decide, from the very beginning, before you even start your book, what kind of voice you want to offer the marketplace, who you really want to be, what signature style you want to put forward. It's so important to decide which tools you're going to use to make that happen. [00:14:00] If you go for the trade-off, you run the risk of people detecting it and thinking, this is AI, and you'll pay for that trade-off in your book. You might make the same trade-off with your cover — if readers see an AI-generated cover, they'll assume the book is AI too, and it won't sell. But if you decide to use assistive AI tools, like QuillBot for paraphrasing, or manuscriptreport.com for a good-quality report on the nature of your book — the KDP keywords, the description, the categories, the sales pitch, your target audience — those are assistive uses. They can help and save time without completely usurping your gift and privilege of writing the book from your own head and heart. There's no trade-off in the latter case. There definitely is in the former.

Laura Williams: [00:14:53] That's how I think about it in my own business, and with this podcast too — if it's something I'd hand off to an assistant, that's something AI can do for me. [00:15:00] If it's something I need to create myself, I do it myself. That's generally how I approach it. I wouldn't hand my book off to an assistant. I'd write that myself.

Laura Williams: Now, I've heard the argument — and I think about this two different ways, I'd love your take on it — that AI is no different than using a ghostwriter. My thought on that, especially knowing ghostwriters and understanding what they actually do, is that a good ghostwriter is the voice of the person they're writing for, because they have conversations with them, listen to them, pay attention to how they talk and communicate,

Aaron Ryan: [00:15:47] Yeah.

Laura Williams: [00:15:48] and bring all of that into the writing of the book. That's not what AI is doing for you.

Aaron Ryan: [00:15:52] Yeah, that's absolutely true, and I love that parallel, because ghostwriters, yes, they have active conversations with the original author. They [00:16:00] know their style, know what they want to convey. There's an indefatigable human element in creation, and it comes from relationships. Ghostwriters have a relationship with a human, and so they know how to bring out that person's humanity and preserve it in the manuscript. AI doesn't do that. It doesn't know me at all. I'd have to sit here with a prompt that would run for miles, describing who I am, where I come from, what's happened to me in life, what my belief systems are, what my family's like, my origin story, what I've previously written, what I care about, my political views, my religious views. There's so much information it would have to absorb about me personally to generate an accurate reflection of who I actually am, and it just can't do that.

Laura Williams: [00:16:54] And that's a good thing. I don't want it to, because then this whole situation would get even more [00:17:00] complicated, and we certainly don't need that. So you touched on how perfect-looking AI content might actually make raw, authentic human creativity more valuable. How can writers lean into that? Like you said, it's the way we think, talk, and communicate that makes each individual writer's work resonate with someone.

Aaron Ryan: [00:17:26] That's a really good question. Here's an example from the voiceover side. In voiceover auditions, one of the things we do is leave our breaths in, leave our little mistakes in — sometimes intentionally, because it signals that this wasn't AI-generated. AI isn't going to make mistakes. It's polished, fully presentable, with no artifacts or anomalies suggesting it's imperfect in any way. It always wants to put its best foot forward. One of the things we see a lot in casting notices now is, ‘We don't want AI, we want a real [00:18:00] human. AI will not be tolerated.' To meet that request, if I'm saying, ‘And I went to the store,' I'm going to leave things in that make it sound conversational. And the other piece is we leave our breaths in — we don't strip all of them out, because AI is now even simulating breaths, which is genuinely creepy.

Aaron Ryan: You leave the breaths in partly to reinforce that you're human, and only humans breathe and have lungs. On the author side, applying that same logic — I'm a perfectionist, but I'm actually okay with having an occasional error, a typo in my book, or something that signals this was in fact written by a human. I'm also a strong believer in putting a note about AI at the beginning of your books, which does two things. First, it tells readers, no AI was used in the making of this book, and I want you to know that, it's important to me that you know that. [00:19:00] Second, it's a kind of rallying call to fellow authors who read my book, asking them to stand with me, and with every other author who genuinely wants authentic human creativity to matter. Now, that note itself, some might call suspect, saying, oh, that's the perfect cover for someone who actually did write their book with AI. They're saying they didn't, and you can't please the cynics — perception is always reality. But I still endorse having a note in your book that simply says, look, I don't write with AI, and neither should you, and I hope you take that

Aaron Ryan: at face value.

Laura Williams: [00:19:37] I think we're going to see a lot more of that — books getting stamped as not written by AI.

Aaron Ryan: [00:19:42] I saw it in a book — I forget which author — and thought, oh, that's a great idea. So now it's at the beginning of every single one of my novels.

Laura Williams: [00:19:50] I'm a copywriter as well, and in that community, they're losing ground for the same reasons you are in voice acting — [00:20:00] they're being replaced by AI. To me it's really eerie, because after being a copywriter for over twenty years, I look at the copy I write, say for my website, and I look at AI-generated copy, and there's often no difference, because I was taught to use that same kind of language for SEO, to communicate what a service actually offers.

Laura Williams: It's frustrating from so many different angles — this is taking over and affecting people's livelihoods.

Aaron Ryan: [00:20:33] Yeah. The creative industries are so under threat, and like I said earlier, it's a Wild West of unregulated use, and we're seeing the impact on creatives across drama, literature, music, film. Rights are being trampled, and no one really knows what to do with it yet. We're not exactly approaching Skynet and Terminators, but our rights are [00:21:00] being terminated and forsaken all the same. What I can't stand most, though, is the dumbing down of society — the AI slop, the videos out there that people, no offense intended, are just naive enough to believe are actually real.

Laura Williams: [00:21:14] Yes.

Aaron Ryan: [00:21:15] because it looks so convincing. It's like, don't believe everything you see — it's just, gosh, that's so true in this day and age.

Laura Williams: [00:21:23] It's even more concerning when you think about young people coming up who don't have the frame of reference we have — it's going to be so much easier for them to believe things.

Aaron Ryan: [00:21:35] Yeah, absolutely.

Laura Williams: [00:21:36] I don't know. It's a really difficult thing.

Aaron Ryan: [00:21:40] They lack discernment, and that discernment is really the one thing we all need so badly right now, to understand what's real and what isn't. Because if you don't understand what's real, you're prone to misinformation, to disillusionment, to being dumbed down, and you just don't want that.

Laura Williams: [00:21:59] You mentioned scams earlier. If an indie author opens their inbox and finds a new pitch from a book marketer, or a review service, or anything else churned out by an AI-driven bot farm, how do we tell what's real and what isn't?

Laura Williams: Are there any red flags we should be watching for?

Aaron Ryan: [00:22:21] A great way to start educating yourself right away is to subscribe to writerbeware.blog. It's a tremendous resource that puts out regular content, keeping you up to date on the current scams making the rounds in the author and creative communities, and you'll learn a lot there. But the things I look for right away — if you're emailing me from a gmail.com address, you're instantly untrustworthy. If you're presenting yourself as an editor, a fellow author, a movie producer, a screenwriter, a video trailer maker, or a marketer, and you're coming from a gmail.com address, you're going straight into a [00:23:00] bin and getting blocked. That's how I operate. I don't answer any gmail.com addresses unless I've already communicated with that person, and I know it's, say, a vendor market sending out a logistical email about an upcoming event, and I need to actually see it — so I do check that folder occasionally. But anything that's very well written, anything that addresses you as ‘hello' without using your name, anything that promises results — because no one can ever legitimately promise you results for your book — anything whose email is so polished, so laden with AI-generated flattery, is another red flag. They're promising you X number of reviews, X number of guaranteed sales, and so on — those are red flags right away. But the thing I'd always advise anyone is: do not ever, ever reply to these people. Ever. Replying does one of two things for them. One, it immediately shows them you have a legitimate email address [00:24:00] that they can keep passing around — there are entire farms of people running these operations out of basements — it just proves your email is real. Two, you're inadvertently exposing your IP address through your reply. Just maybe two hours ago, I got yet another all-caps death threat email from scammers upset that I'm posting about them on LinkedIn instead of using their services. They circle back, they threaten me, they threaten my family, and it creates more work, because I have to send it to the FBI. All because, years ago in my naiveté, I made the mistake of responding to one of these emails, calling them out, saying, back off, buzz off, leave me alone, I'm not using you, you're a scammer, and so on. I never should have done that — hindsight's twenty-twenty. I don't do it anymore, though I'm tempted every time. I get thirty to fifty of these emails, [00:25:00] actually closer to forty or fifty, every single day. The death threats are rare, I hadn't gotten one since February until I got one again just this morning. But you cannot respond to them. Just file it away somewhere, forget about it, keep your head down, keep writing, and move forward. But there are definitely warning signs that help you spot a scam email.

Laura Williams: [00:25:23] What makes it even harder is that a lot of these emails come from a legitimate-looking .com address, so it's very hard to decide who to respond to and who not to. I've gotten some crazy emails myself. Some of them, you open and they give you a virus. And now it's become even more of a problem, because they're using AI to generate these messages faster, and in more creative ways. It's insane.

Aaron Ryan: [00:25:56] This is where a nascent technology like this, falling into the wrong hands — people [00:26:00] purely motivated by capitalistic greed, or looking for shortcuts to profit — becomes so dangerous. It's absolutely, utterly dangerous, because a bright-eyed new author, so excited and optimistic about their book, thinking it's the best thing since sliced bread — we all think that about our own novels — gets an email from someone expressing genuine, and I mean genuine in air quotes, interest in their book, and thinks, oh my gosh, yay, you're a film producer, you want to take my book and adapt it for the screen, and it's only $7,500? Oh my gosh, this is it, this is the golden ticket to the red carpet. They don't know any better than to put on an air of cynicism and look at it clearly, objectively, skeptically, before signing anything. What I really hate is when fellow authors get impersonated. [00:27:00] I've received emails supposedly from J.R.R. Tolkien, for crying out loud. That's how untrained and careless these scammers are — he passed away in 1973, and if you'd done even a little research, you'd know that. They're literally banking on hopes and dreams, and it's just sad.

Laura Williams: [00:27:15] It is. Let's talk about your books. I love the lead-in to the Dissonance alien invasion saga, where you write, ‘We thought they were angelic messengers. We were wrong.' Just the way you put that — I haven't read your books yet, they're on my TBR, but I have read the reviews. It sounds like a really interesting series. Could you tell our listeners more about it?

Aaron Ryan: [00:27:42] Yeah, sure — that's really what got me started back into fiction writing. My wife and I were watching I Am Legend, we'd seen it before and love the movie, but from the opening scenes, my mind started going: what if society wasn't wiped out by a vaccine gone wrong [00:28:00] causing rabies, but by an alien invasion instead? I wanted to write something that had humanity at its center, loaded with thematic depth — yes, there are aliens up there, and they have the ability to telepathically immobilize you, a telepathic paralytic, so you can never lock eyes with one or it's over, and they'll eat you at their leisure. They're not house pets. But the real enemy is always man. Mankind is always mankind's own worst enemy. The first book wasn't intended as a referendum on politics or government in 2023, but it did carry some of that messaging inherently, because we really are our own worst enemy. Before I knew it, it grew into a hexalogy, six books — for anyone who doesn't know that term, I didn't either, I had to look it up. It's become the most robust body of work I've ever done. I've got six series now — two kids' book series, Dissonance, The End Christian dystopian saga, and [00:29:00] Talisman, which is a spinoff of Dissonance. But I love the story of Dissonance. I'm so grateful for how it turned out.

Laura Williams: [00:29:10] That's really cool, because it's become such a big part of your life, especially with a long series like that. And then when you spin off from it, it's almost like your creative work becomes part of how you define yourself. I really like that. I think the premise of that story is really good. I've mentioned before, my thing is fantasy fiction. I do read some sci-fi, but it's mostly fantasy and historical fiction.

Aaron Ryan: [00:29:39] Yeah.

Laura Williams: [00:29:39] I had someone on the show once with a zombie apocalypse book, and I'd never read anything in that genre. I read his work, and now I'm like, oh, zombies, I love zombies. His name's Michael Totten, and the series is called Resurrection, if anyone's interested. Really [00:30:00] well written — he's an editor and a publisher himself. Really, really well written, and the character development is amazing.

Aaron Ryan: [00:30:08] Yes.

Laura Williams: [00:30:08] With your books, that's what I'm looking forward to — seeing your character development, because there's no way you can write a successful series like that without good character development.

Aaron Ryan: [00:30:18] Yeah, absolutely. If you don't love the characters, and you don't follow them through their journey, you don't really care. That's what I love about Dissonance — the very first volume plunges you into family life, who they are before the invasion, it's a slow burn, and then once everything happens, it goes down very quickly and life is completely turned upside down. The tone at the beginning is very home-church-and-family, and by the end it's very militaristic, because they're surviving underground in a military blockade trying to outlast the enemy, called the Gorgons. But the primary protagonist of the first three volumes I wrote — one, [00:31:00] two, and three — is the son of the protagonist from the very first prequel, and he's a cynic, for very good reason. He has to move from cynicism to trust, from snarky to respectful and grown up, from distrustful to trusting, and it was great — I loved writing that story and those characters.

Laura Williams: [00:31:23] So if I'm following you correctly, that's the son of the protagonist from the first three books, right? He's been raised in an environment that built up his distrust and cynicism, and he's trying to find his way back to something more like who his father originally was.

Aaron Ryan: [00:31:42] There are actually two prequels before that first one. The first prequel is from the father's perspective, and Cameron, who's the protagonist in volumes one, two, and three, was six turning seven during that story.

Laura Williams: [00:31:52] Okay.

Aaron Ryan: [00:31:53] So you learn early on — and I actually wrote that afterward, since I already knew who he was, but I had to build him properly in the [00:32:00] prequels. You go backward in time to his origin story and learn what turned him into a cynic, what made him mistrusting, what made him frustrated, angry, and world-weary. So yes, he's on a journey of becoming whole again by the time you reach volume three.

Laura Williams: [00:32:24] That must have been a lot of fun to write.

Aaron Ryan: [00:32:26] Yeah, I loved that.

Laura Williams: [00:32:27] Yeah, I bet. I'd enjoy that myself.

Aaron Ryan: [00:32:31] Yeah.

Laura Williams: [00:32:32] Let me ask you — are you a pantser, or an outliner?

Aaron Ryan: [00:32:36] I'm so much a pantser. I do have a relatively simple outline, usually just bullet points of things I want to address in the story, but how I get there, and when I get there, is entirely up to the protagonist. I basically just write up an incident report and let them lead the way. It's like, if you're headed to a wedding and you get a flat tire you didn't plan for, how [00:33:00] you react to and handle that flat tire reveals a lot about your character. I like the pantsing style of writing, because you discover so much more about your character through the things you didn't plan for along the way. I love that organic style of writing.

Laura Williams: [00:33:17] I'm not a pantser myself, but that's an interesting way of putting it. That's just my personality — I need more control.

Aaron Ryan: [00:33:25] Yeah.

Laura Williams: [00:33:26] And that's honestly how I feel about this whole AI situation too. I don't feel like we have enough control over it.

Laura Williams: That's what we need to work on — getting control, and making sure

Aaron Ryan: [00:33:38] Yeah.

Laura Williams: [00:33:39] people are protected, for a number of different reasons, not just their livelihood. And making sure the people getting their hands on AI to run scams are actually held accountable, that there's some kind of system in place.

Laura Williams: So hopefully — it may take a few years — but hopefully [00:34:00] we get there.

Aaron Ryan: [00:34:00] That's the hope.

Laura Williams: [00:34:01] Aaron, thank you so much for joining me today. Before you go, I want to ask — what are you working on now? Tell people how they can get in touch with you, what you're up to, what you've got coming up. I know you're a very busy guy.

Aaron Ryan: [00:34:15] You can always reach me at authoraaronryan.com. You can also visit authoraaronryangroup.com — it forwards to a Facebook group where, if you're a creator, there's inspiration, tips, and guidance. There's news on my screenplay adaptations being pitched to streaming networks, discount codes, and giveaways. I'm getting ready to start work on a brand-new Christian fiction trilogy called Carbon, which is going to deal with AI, cybernetics, and the moral quandary of replacing humans.

Aaron Ryan: I just released a novel on July 4th that every self-published author would relate to. It's called The Darkness Within. It's a modern-day retelling of Jekyll and Hyde from a self-published author's perspective — he's struggling to stay relevant. He was, once upon a time, [00:35:00] a bestseller, long, long ago, and a friend resurfaces in his life with a serum that has, quote-unquote, ‘done wonders' for him: ‘hey, you should try this.'

Aaron Ryan: So what could go wrong? We find out what goes wrong, and there are some liberties, some licenses taken with that serum that send our protagonist into a complete tailspin. Everything starts to go south. He's already frustrated and cynical about the slog we all maintain as self-published authors, and this just sends it into overdrive.

Aaron Ryan: So if you're a self-published author, you will absolutely relate to everything in The Darkness Within.

Laura Williams: [00:35:38] Was that cathartic for you?

Aaron Ryan: [00:35:40] It was very cathartic. I loved writing it. It was very stream-of-consciousness, and I wrote it in an epistolary format, so it's all diary entries, from the protagonist and occasionally his sister, written after the fact, once he realizes something very grave is happening. But they're all honest [00:36:00] reflections of him watching his own life circle the drain. It's pretty amazing.

Laura Williams: [00:36:06] Well, I look forward to that, it sounds really interesting. Thank you so much for joining me. This has been a fun conversation, and I think it's something we really need to keep talking about, because it's going to keep changing, and we all need to find our place in it. To learn more about the podcast, and to sign up to be the first to know when new episodes are up, visit thewritingbiz.com, and put what you've learned to work in your own writing biz. Thank you so much. Thank you, Aaron.

Aaron Ryan: [00:36:33] Thank you so much, Laura. I appreciate it.