Episode 66 - Story is Code: Personalizing AI Workflows for Authors with Kimberly Gordon

Listen

This week on the podcast, we are exploring the intersection of technology, legacy, and the future of storytelling. Steph Pajonas and Danica Favorite sat down with Kimberly Gordon, a woman who truly embodies the “Ink and Code” philosophy. As a writer from a family of authors and a veteran of the IT world, Kimberly shares how she uses AI not just to write faster, but to bridge the gap between human creativity and technical execution.

Meet Kimberly Gordon: Director of the Ink and Code Society

Kimberly Gordon is the Director of the Ink and Code Society at the Future Fiction Academy (FFA). Her background is a unique blend of high-tech and high-art. Growing up as the daughter of a tech enthusiast and a successful romance author (Anita Gordon, a Golden Heart winner), Kimberly was cleaning 100-pound printers and playing with floppies long before she began her own writing career.

After a career spanning military broadcasting and IT cybersecurity, Kimberly returned to her first love: storytelling. Today, she is a prolific author of Urban Fantasy, Epic Fantasy, and Cozy Fantasy. She views AI as the ultimate tool to manage the repetitive tasks of publishing, freeing her “maximizer” brain to focus on the creative “fodder” she’s collected throughout her life.

The Philosophy: Story is Code

One of the most profound takeaways from Kimberly’s discussion is her view that “story is code.” Because novels are built on layers of symbols, metaphors, themes, and complicated instructions, Kimberly has found incredible success using coding applications (IDEs) to draft and organize her work.

By treating a manuscript like a codebase, she can use tools designed for software engineers to follow complex narrative instructions. This approach allowed her to achieve a staggering feat: writing 26 books in 12 days during a “tear” of experimentation in November. For Kimberly, the AI isn’t replacing the author; it is an assistant that helps assemble the “puzzle pieces” of a story that already exists within the writer’s mind.

Personalizing the AI Experience

Kimberly emphasizes that AI is most effective when it is deeply personalized. Rather than using generic prompts, she advocates for “interviewing” the AI. She provided her own CliftonStrengths (Strategic and Maximizer) to Claude to help build a novel-writing workflow tailored specifically to her personality.

She also uses “Claude Skills” to maintain a unified voice across her series. By identifying patterns in her own editing—such as removing “AI-isms” like the smell of ozone or passive verbs—she creates custom “skills” that the AI can then apply to future chapters. This “reverse fine-tuning” ensures that the output remains consistent with her unique authorial voice.

AI as Assistive Technology and a Cure for Burnout

The conversation took a touching turn as the group discussed AI as a vital assistive tool. Kimberly shared how she uses AI to help her homeschool her son, who is on the autism spectrum, creating custom stories to help with socialization. Danica and Steph also noted how AI acts as a helper for neurodivergence (ADHD/Autism) and the brain fog that often accompanies life’s transitions.

Perhaps most importantly, Kimberly credits AI with making writing fun again. Many authors drop out of the industry within five years due to burnout from the grueling admin and editing demands of indie publishing. Kimberly argues that by “automating the pain points,” authors can return to the spirit of play that made them want to write in the first place.

Kimberly’s Favorite Tools & Recommendations

Kimberly is a self-described “dragon hoarder” of data who prefers local folders to the cloud whenever possible. Her current “power stack” includes:

Antigravity: A coding app she uses for its incredible speed in drafting and following complex instructions.
Claude (Desktop, Code, and Skills): Her go-to for deep-dive editing and creating reusable writing “skills.”
Obsidian: A free note-taking tool that uses Markdown (the language of AI) to link her thoughts and organize her world-building.
Your First Draft (YFD): A tool used within the FFA to generate initial drafts based on meticulous worksheets.
NotebookLM & Perplexity: Used for deep research and summarizing transcripts or data.

Key Takeaways from This Episode

Know Thyself, Know Thy AI: Before diving into tools, understand your own workflow and interview the AI so it understands your strengths.
Story is Code: Don’t be afraid to use non-traditional tools like coding apps (IDEs) to manage the complex layers of a novel.
Connect the Dots: AI doesn’t create the talent; it connects the creative dots that are already inside you.
Automate the Pain: Identify the parts of writing or publishing that drain your energy and use AI to handle them.
Stay Portable: Tools change and go obsolete. Focus on the skill of communicating with AI, which is portable across any platform.

Resources Mentioned

Transcript

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

Steph Pajonas: Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Brave New Bookshelf. I’m one of your co-host, Steph Pajonas, CTO of Future Fiction Academy, Future Fiction Press, where we teach authors how to use AI in any part of their process. And we are publishing AI forward books on the press. So there’s been a lot going on in the, in the writing and author world lately, which we’ll probably talk about in another episode. I won’t go into that too much except to say that things are cooking out there. There’s plenty of anti AI sentiment that’s happening, and there’s plenty of cool things that are happening as well in the AI world.

I watched the Super Bowl like a lot of people, and saw a ton of AI ads [00:01:00] there. I was impressed by how many there were. In fact, I wrote many of them down. I was like, what is that one? I don’t know that one. So I enjoyed that. But there’s always something going on in the AI world, and we’ll be talking about it here on the podcast as usual.

I’m here with my lovely podcast co-host, Danica Favorite. Danica. How are you doing today?

Danica Favorite: I’m good. I’m good. Yeah. I am also kind of in that weird AI space. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Danica Favorite. I’m the community manager at Publish Drive, where we help authors on every stage of their journey from getting their manuscript formatted, to using some cool AI tools, to find book descriptions, some AI book covers, and then distributing your books to the widest audience possible.

And finally, if you are working on projects with co-authors and things like that, we can help you split your royalties. And couple things I wanna say about what we’re [00:02:00] doing at Publish Drive, because it’s not always the sexy stuff that we can say, Ooh, we’re launching this.

But I did just get out of a big team meeting today, where for those of you who use our AI tools, we are updating some things on the backend and with the AI service providers to some of the later models, newest models. So look for some changes there and some updates there. Again, nothing sexy that anyone’s gonna notice or be like, ooh, this is such a cool new feature.

It’s not. Just updates. But always like to mention that. And also just wanted to say simply because a lot of people I’ve been talking to lately seem to not know this, we do ebook, audiobook and print on demand. And so I’m amazed at how many times people will say, I didn’t know you did that format. Yep, we do it.

Just little updates there. And, nothing super cool, super big, but, between us and the FFA, we have a lot of really great tools for authors at every stage of the journey. Like they’re doing [00:03:00] some really incredible things at the FFA to help teach authors how to use some of the tools.

And one of those FFA instructors we have today is Kimberly Gordon. Kim is someone who’s doing some very cool things with Ink and Code as part of the FFA. Love what they’re doing. I was telling Steph I, I really wanna get more of the FFA instructors on the show, because they really are doing some great things for their members and for helping people.

And I love what Kim is doing, Kim’s style of teaching, and helping authors get motivated. I know Kim’s got this nervous look on her face. And uh, please don’t be nervous, because I’m really enjoying a lot of the stuff that Kim is talking about, and I was really excited when Steph says, yeah, we can get Kim on.

I’m like, yes. Usually I schedule the guests, and Steph was nice enough to make the connection for me to get her on today. So without further ado, we will have Kim [00:04:00] introduce herself or herself to you. And Kim, tell us about yourself. Tell us about what you do, what you’re teaching, what, how you use AI, all of that cool stuff, anything relevant. Oh. As we were doing the chit chat before we started recording, I know you said some of your background, so please also share your background with AI, computers, all that good stuff.

Kimberly Gordon: Okay. So all the stuffy stuff, which I’m known for. Yeah. Hi, I’m Kimberly Gordon, and I am the director of the Ink and Code Society at the Future Fiction Academy.

And that’s just a recent position. Before that, I was a member for a couple of years and I love AI. I, I love technology. I come from a tech background, but I also come from a family of writers. So I’ve been writing all my life, but I’ve also been playing with computers all my life. So the idea of being able to talk to a computer about writing is really exciting to me. That is like heaven. So when the AI started coming out and it was like, oh my gosh, you can ask it about [00:05:00] story ideas and outlining and you can actually make it like draft things. That blew my mind. I saw some of the really early videos with Elizabeth Ann West and Sudowrite back when she was with them.

And then of course I found Feature Fiction Academy. But I’ve been playing with words and computers as long as I can remember. I was telling them before the show, my dad was a big techie and he had a huge, he had huge computers in the basement with 12 inch floppies. And he’d hire me to clean his like hundred pound printer, that my mom was always worried was gonna fall over on me, because I had small hands so I could get in there and clean it. And he’d, he’d refurbish ’em and sell ’em.

So for as long as I can remember been around computers, and I was playing with basic and making mandalas out of a book. I was never good at coding from scratch, but if I could take somebody else’s code and do something with, so I played with that. I grew up around them. I had the, my first computer with a PC Junior, ran off of Floppies, and as I got [00:06:00] older, I got into broadcasting. I wanted to write. I wanted to do something with technology, but I wasn’t sure I wanted, I didn’t really wanna be a software engineer like my dad. But my mom was writing books. She won the Golden Heart Award for her first romance novel right after I graduated high school.

So I remember her writing that book, and she was in trad Publishing, and I saw that.

Danica Favorite: That’s awesome. I didn’t know that.

Steph Pajonas: The Golden Heart, really? Isn’t that the the Romance Writers of America.

Kimberly Gordon: Yes.

Steph Pajonas: Oh yes.

Kimberly Gordon: For her first book.

Steph Pajonas: Wow.

Kimberly Gordon: My, my mom is Anita Gordon, who also writes as Kathleen Kirkwood, and she’s got six.

Danica Favorite: Oh my gosh. I know who your mom is.

Steph Pajonas: This is amazing.

Danica Favorite: Amazing.

Kimberly Gordon: That’s my mama, and I love her. And she helped me edit my books. Talk about fabulous, fabulous, feedback on everything. And sometimes really difficult feedback. But she’s amazing. So I was like, well, I kind of wanna do that. But then I saw how crazy trad problem was.

I was like, yeah, maybe not. So I went into to, I [00:07:00] was gonna go into print journalism. I got talked into broadcasting. I joined the military with two of my best friends, and we, at 18 or 17, actually, I went in after graduation and we went to basic advanced training, and Korea together. We were there. We replaced the military broadcasters who had covered the 1988 Korean, the Seoul Olympics.

Yeah, I’m old.

Steph Pajonas: Wow, that’s so cool.

Kimberly Gordon: Yeah, yeah, I was over there doing broadcasting and the Army issued me a husband and a baby. And I got out and I taught English. So I have done a lot of different weird things, but it was great writing fodder. So I get back to the states and I’m still doing things.

I I deliver the mail, I do all kinds of fun things. I raise my kids. And that didn’t work out. And what, and I had to decide ’cause the marriage didn’t work out. I’m like, oh, I need to figure out what I wanna be when I grow up. I was only like 37 then, you know, oh, what grow up? So I got into IT, and I did that for [00:08:00] many years.

But I still wanted to write. I had started writing. I wanted to follow my mom’s footsteps. Indie Publishing was coming in and I was like, I really wanna do this. And so I went to a couple RWA conferences with my mom in my thirties. Started a uh, uh, my first book, which was a small town romance. And it was, I had a Job character, based, like a Job inspired character who loses everything.

And then I proceeded to lose everything. And it was a be careful what you write. And so that book sat untouched for 10 years as my whole life changed and I went into IT. I picked it up in 2015. I joined the self-publishing school and met my, my, my buddies, I have a couple friends that are publishing today that I met there, that are in the FFA now.

And I started publishing in 20, in 2016, and I’ve got 14, 15 books out now in all different genres. I’m an Urban Fantasy author, with Epic Fantasy in it, [00:09:00] Portal Fantasy, I’ve done, I’m writing Cozy Fantasy. I’ve done, I did the Small Town Romance. I’ve done a whole bunch of other genres. I just love stories.

I love them, and so playing with the AI has been so much fun. When I figured out that I could start farming out some of the repetitive stuff to the AI, and that would free my brain up to be really, really creative, and put all these crazy experiences down on paper. I started having so much fun with that.

So.

Danica Favorite: I love that. I love that. And that really leads us great into that first question that we try to ask people is how are you approaching AI in publishing? Because here’s the thing and I am gonna get on the soapbox a little bit, is like I, I’ve seen some pretty mean anti AI comments lately about writers who can’t write using AI.

Or like people who can’t write, sorry, you’re not real writers. Like you are a freaking real writer, and you have this [00:10:00] amazing history of writing and being an author. And so this to me is holy crap, yes, this is somebody who is a real author. And I always saw you as a real author. I didn’t know anything about your background.

And I’m like, seriously just going, oh my gosh, your mom is one of my writing heroes kind of thing. And I think that it would be really amazing to hear like how you’ve taken AI as someone who has all of this writing experience and history and knowledge and said, yeah. I’m gonna use AI and figure out what that approach is.

So that would be really great to hear about.

Kimberly Gordon: I love to experiment. I have very high maximizer in my Clifton strengths and strategic. I’m a number one strategic, so I’m always like, oh, which way could I go? My mind’s like A GPS. Which way could I go? How could I do that? How could I solve that? So I am always experimenting.

I don’t think since I found [00:11:00] AI that I have written any book, like I, I’ll write one book on one or two tools, maybe three, at the same time, doing things. And then the next book will be on totally different tools, because they changed so fast. And so I don’t think I’ve written two books on the same tool since I started using it, but I started just playing with it. I’m like, oh my gosh, the potential. My friend Nadine Travers, who is my accountability buddy from forever, was like, you’ve gotta look at this. You cannot believe what you can do just in the planning and the outlining phases and the brainstorming, and we’re like, okay, let’s look at that.

We weren’t even thinking about writing with it. Or editing with it, which you can do. We were looking at marketing, we were looking at the planning stuff, and so that was really cool. And I said, well, let’s try, let’s just try writing something. What does it do? And so I wrote my first book in ChatGPT, like 3.5 in the chat window.

And I just spent like a whole day, for some reason, the stars aligned and nobody bothered me that day. Like, mom, mom, I have five kids. I have [00:12:00] five boys, three, three are grown, two are with me. But nobody bugged me, and I played with that thing, and I had a 40,000 word demon hunter story, that was funny, but it was like full of AI-isms.

It was awful. I look at that like, oh my gosh. But I did it. I was like, I just wanted to see, could I just take prompts and build a story and yeah, you could. And then like I started getting into FFA stuff. It was like, hey, we got Rexy over here, and you can sequence prompts. I’m like, oh, cool. I don’t have to cut and paste forever and you know, type it all in.

I’m like, I can actually do it once and then have it redo things. So I played with that, and I ran a ton of books, and I loved that. I used that to help me write my next Black Cat book. I had to do it a lot of editing. That was not, that was not a clean draft at all, because I was learning, I was experimenting. And so I kept trying different tools.

And over the course of time, I think I’ve now [00:13:00] got three or four really big books out that are completely AI. They’re, they’re AI generated. I do a lot of heavy editing. That is my process. I am a maximizer. I do not put anything out there that’s raw out of the AI. There is no way, ’cause I’m a perfectionist and yes, I know done is better than perfect, but I I do so many editing passes, but now, what’s out now with the IDEs, the coding apps make those editing passes much faster. So I was able to do a deep dive with Claude one day. ‘Cause I’m like, you know, it’s still taking me forever to get a really good quality book out. And I’ve been using AI for three years now. I’m like, can we figure out ways to leverage it that fit my personality, my workflow, and my strengths, my Clifton strengths.

I gave it everything, this deep dive with my buddy Claude. And we came up with a novel writing workflow that works in [00:14:00] Antigravity. This Antigravity is a coding app. This is the stuff I’m teaching, because I believe story is code and the coding apps can follow complicated instructions. And so novels also need a lot of complicated instructions. There, there’s a lot of different layers to them. So story is kind of a code. We have symbols, we have metaphors, we have themes. It’s language and the coding apps still speak the same language. They’re the same LLMs we use to write novels or to draft them or brainstorm them or whatever you wanna say.

So I thought, why not marry those two? And so I took this novel writing workflow, customized it to how I work, and I got something I really could live with. And so in November when I was testing Claude Code, Antigravity, and I was also into Claude Skills was a really great one. I love Claude Skills for editing because you can take instructions and reuse them.

And I like talking in the chat. I like [00:15:00] talking about the stuff and going, Hey. This isn’t right. Let’s fix the too many passive verbs. Let’s do an editing pass and fix all the passive verbs. Instead of taking a chart and going, oh look, 200 ways to replace the word said, the AI already knows those. Or I can feed it the chart and it can choose, how about this word?

How about that one? And it takes so much less time. Or designing a fantasy language. I do that. And that takes a lot less time. So, I’ve been learning how to leverage these with my own workflows and developing those. So in November, I wrote 26 books in, all of these, I tried, YFD was part of that too. I built worksheets with the coding apps and then sent them through Your First Draft.

I did Claude Code, I did Claude Skills, I did Antigravity, the 26 books in 12 days, and that included Thanksgiving. ‘Cause I was just crazy on this tear of trying it all. And then in December I, I started teaching it immediately. I’m like, oh my gosh, [00:16:00] people need to know about this. Especially ’cause Antigravity was free and they were giving us free Claude code credits for a while.

So it’s like it’s free. Go use it, try it. It won’t hurt. You can always just throw it away if you don’t like it. It’s just cost your time. So in December I was teaching it, and I wrote, I think like 14 more books. I went 40 by the end of the year, and now I’m trying to get those out into the world as proof of work.

So I’m trying to solve the bottleneck. What happens after you’ve drafted a great book, but it’s not ready for publication yet? How do you get it there without it taking forever? And so I’m using a lot…

Danica Favorite: I love this and I, I love so many pieces of this, like it, first of all, the fact that you went and you took all of, like your personality and your strengths and everything to come up with, this is what my ideal writing process stuff is.

I think that’s amazing, because I’ve done something similar, but, seriously until this very moment I was like, huh, I [00:17:00] should ask it, okay, you know all the stuff about my personality and what I need. Why not tell me what my best writing process is? Like I, I’m like, wow, that’s a duh moment, and I love that you did that. And it’s so interesting to me, all these people who keep saying, oh, AI is just gen generic, blah, blah, blah. No. Like it is so deeply personalized to you and your systems and how you do it. And it’s interesting because we just had Dana Sacco on as a guest, and she does a lot of stuff with N8N for her books.

And it’s really funny, because people ask her all the time, well, I just want your prompts. And she’s like, my prompts aren’t gonna help you, because they’re so personal to me. And like here you are talking about how personal you’ve made it, and even though you do teach it, there is just this level of personalization of what does a Kimberly Gordon book sound like? And [00:18:00] what is a Kimberly Gordon preference? And that’s just so cool how you’ve come up with all of these different things.

Kimberly Gordon: It, it, It’s, as you are using the AI, it’s getting to know you. And it will work with you. AI so wants to help you, if you just, if you just talk to it, even if you don’t know how to talk to it, say, how do I talk to it?

Interview it and get to know it. It gets to know you, and it’s kind of trained on you. It takes, especially Claude and OpenAI, ChatGPT they remember you. And now Google has also unleashed that with the personal intelligence. It’s taking what it knows. And I can be kind of freaky. I mean, be careful what you give it access to.

And former cybersecurity person here is saying be careful. But it does get to know your personality and your preferences. It learns, and then it can give you so much richer results. And especially if you’ve already tailored a workflow that works for you. And then you can encode those in skills. And this was something I discovered [00:19:00] before the IDEs really got good, the coding apps, with the Claude Skills came out in October. And I was trying to solve editing issues with books for the future fiction press, ’cause I was helping as an editor. And I was like, oh my gosh, how am I gonna get this to sound, the voice to sound right? Because these had been running Your First Draft and sometimes they didn’t sound like each other. I was like, okay, we need to get the voices sounding unified. And then we had passive verbs and things happening that just weren’t, they weren’t ready for publication. We were gonna get them ready. And I was like, how do I do that without combing through every single thing and taking forever?

And I found that what I could do, and this is in, I’m starting, I’m working on an editing with Claude Skills class right now, I taught an intro, is that you can go into Claude or any of, especially Claude. You can edit with him, talking with him, talking through the problems chapter by chapter for about maybe five or 10 chapters, that’s what I usually do, to identify the problems in [00:20:00] that particular book. Especially, it’s gonna be different with whatever AI you use to generate it. You identify the pattern. Then you tell it, hey Claude, I want you to make a skill. I want you to identify all the problems we’ve talked about in this thread and encode that in a skill.

And then we’re gonna run that over the rest of the book. And what I found was it’s almost like a reverse fine tune. You are fine tuning a skill. You go through, your data is the threads, it’s the conversations you’ve already had. So if you’ve already been editing or writing with these AIs, you can tell it, I want you to make a skill out of that. Maybe you use it for newsletters, maybe you use it for brainstorm or outlines. You can go, look at these threads we talked about in, and I want you to identify the patterns and make it a skill, template it. And so then what you do, like for me, when I was using doing the FFP books, I said, okay, now we’ve done book one.

Let’s update the skill again with the rest of that thread. Now we have version two, we do book [00:21:00] two. Partially through that. We can update it again if we want, but we are literally fine tuning it. So by the time we get to the last book in that series, we have a highly tuned skill that works. It’s very customized, and you can really get granular on what your voice is, and then say you wanna do another series in that pen name, or maybe it’s some totally different one.

Take everything, Claude, that I found, all the great basics, good basic writing things we’re doing, and go make a new skill for this author, my other pen name, like I did this with LitRPG. Okay, we know the basics. We know we don’t want, not X, but Y patterns that AI loves.

We don’t want passive verbs. We don’t want the attack of the was or the ozones, it smells like ozone, all the AI-isms. So we can go take those, you know, we can farm the skill or the threads, and make new skills and agents out of ’em too for IDEs. So it [00:22:00] is just, the possibilities are endless.

Steph Pajonas: They really are.

They really are. And I’ve taught people that if you don’t wanna use Claude Skills or you just wanna use a chat, what you can do is when you’re, when you’ve made progress in the conversation and you have a lot to show for it, and you’ve gotten to a good point, that’s a great time to say, hey, Claude or Gemini or whatever, give me a brief about what we’ve talked about in this conversation, sum up all the different skills that we’ve talked about, the different, edits that we’re interested in, just anything that you’ve been working on, tell it to sum it up into a brief. And then you take that brief with you just save it on your computer someplace as a plain text document.

And then the next time you start up a conversation, you start it up with a brief. You say, here’s a brief about what we’re working on.

Kimberly Gordon: Yeah.

Steph Pajonas: This is like editorial guidelines for this book, because you got it from the previous conversation. It’s always good to tell it, to sum up, tell it to understand what you’ve been working on, and then to write it [00:23:00] all down and then take it with you.

So Claude Skills is great that way because it’s very um, it’s, it’s much more automatic. You can just say, create a Claude Skill about this, and then it goes off and it does it. But if you’re not using Claude or you’re using something else, there are hacks to do these sorts of things by doing that.

Kimberly Gordon: You can turn ’em into a GPT or you could turn ’em into Gemini Gem.

Or just like you said, a brief note, whatever you want. It is so flexible and anytime you’re having a conversation with one of these things, that is data. It is data. Or say you see a YouTube, like all the stuff we teach on YouTube for free, you can take the transcript, and you could go to Claude or to any of ’em and go, Hey, I or Perplexity is great for this.

I want you to do a deep dive. I want you to give the main points of this, and then I wanna learn more about it. Give me a, like a lesson, like a lesson plan. Help me find more information about it. It is just, there is no excuse anymore for any part of your workflow to be [00:24:00] saggy. You have a problem, if you have a pain point, you can automate it, or you can learn how to overcome it with AI, with all the technology, it’s not just AI. There, there’s just so much great technology out here right now. But and then there’s, you have transcription, you have text to speech. I had a couple weeks ago on the, on the Ink and Code Society YouTube live that I do every Saturday, I had Tiffany on, tiffany Kohnen, who she has got, what you call a progressive disorder with her hearing and her sight. She is losing her hearing and sight, and she is using all kinds of technology to be able to publish a book at least once a month, sometimes 18, every 18 days. And that’s amazing, the things that she’s overcoming with the tech.

So there is no excuse anymore.

Steph Pajonas: Yeah, there’s a lot of good assistive technologies out there that have gotten even better now that AI is present in them and able to help. And I’m really, really grateful for that, because there are definitely a lot of people out there who could use all.

Kimberly Gordon: Well, yeah, I mean, [00:25:00] I have two sons in the autism spectrum. One is grown, one is being homeschooled, and we use AI every day. We create custom copy work and stories and things. I wanna get him excited. I wanted to help him visualize, and help him with his words, and learning all these socialization type of things that are challenging for kids that are in the spectrum. So we use it a lot. So it’s not just for writing, it’s every part of your business, but so many parts of your life too, that you can use to save time and do neat things. So I love it.

Danica Favorite: Yeah, I really love all of these different things. I think this is something that Steph and I go back to a lot, and we’ve talked about since the very beginning of starting this, is that this is really an assistive technology. And to be against AI is truly to be ableist. And I am finding, you know, you’re talking about autism, and [00:26:00] as someone who is later in life discovering, oh, I’m probably ADHD and probably autistic, and like now I’ll be like, oh wait, I do that and that’s an autism thing. And people are like, yeah, you hadn’t figured that out yet?

And I’m like. No. How did you know? And it was like, how do you not know this? I’m like, I don’t know. I just developed all these coping mechanisms, and as Steph and I have talked about being in that great phase of perimenopause and your brain just kind of, oh yeah, yeah. See you’re there too. And uh.

Kimberly Gordon: Oh, I’m beyond it.

Danica Favorite: Yeah. You know, like, but, but our brains are just kind of broken. And AI is there to pick up the slack. And it’s so interesting that you say that, because even now I’m like, oh wait, this is something that I’ve picked up as a crutch to help me with my ADHD and autism, and I don’t, I can’t do that anymore.

How do I do it? And I can pop that into AI and say, hey, what do you recommend? And it gives really good ideas. And it’s [00:27:00] just amazing to me how blessed we are to have this technology. And I know you’ve already been telling us some great workflows that you have and that you’ve done to assist you, but are there any other AI workflows that you think are really helpful or have been helpful. And also, just before I forget, Steph, I’m putting this in kind of as a reminder, but also to let readers know in the show notes, there will be links to the YouTube videos for Ink and Code and all of that. And so the videos that we’re talking about will be in the show notes. ‘Cause some of them I haven’t gotten to, and I’m like, ooh, I’m gonna go, I’m gonna…

Steph Pajonas: Absolutely. Make sure, I’ll make sure they’re all there.

Kimberly Gordon: There’s just so many great ones. I have, my ones that are my favorites are the ones I teach. I love Obsidian because it’s so great for organizing and it’s free, and it is where you link your thinking. And I love it as a planning, a staging area, and as a wrap it up.

Like, I begin and I [00:28:00] end a lot of my books there. I used to use Evernote. I’ve used OneNote. I’ve used like every note taking plan, thing, you can think of. I’ve tried it, because I am ADD I do not have the hyper, though some people think I am. I just get very excited. But I love going down rabbit holes, and I need to think all the things and link all the things.

So I, I love Obsidian, so I teach that. It speaks in markdown, and that is the language of AIs. So it’s very easy to look at anything that comes out of an AI in Obsidian. And then Claude Desktop will write directly to your folders. Obsidian works with your local folders. I am a big local folder person. Because I worked in it in cybersecurity, and also because I lived out in the middle of nowhere with a satellite internet connection that sucked until starlink came along, I like everything on my computer. I am a dragon hoarder. I want it all on my computer. I do not want everything in the cloud. I like syncing it to the cloud, because I need [00:29:00] backup and recovery. And, I’m, I gotta back up my data a million ways, but I want it on my computer, so I do Obsidian.

I do Claude desktop, because it has Claude Code and Claude Chat in it. And you can work with the Skills all in your local files. Antigravity, same thing. It’ll do the desktop. And then Notion, I love Notion. It’s in the cloud, but it’s great for sharing. And it will also, you can talk, back and forth, between the AIs.

I love Chatty, I love Gemini. I have all of them. I use all of them. I know that’s crazy. I use Notebook LM. I will use all the things, but my favorites right now, definitely Claude Skills, Obsidian, and um, Antigravity, because it’s just so fast. I wanna go fast. My brain is fast. I don’t like going slow anymore. So while I love Raptor Write and I have tried Plot Drive, I’ve tried Novel Crafter, I’ve tried Rexy, I have written books in all of them.

I can’t go backward anymore, because I’m [00:30:00] flying. I had, I was testing some stuff for Harper’s Romance intensive that’s coming up next month. And she said, can you test this stuff in Antigravity for me? This is Sunday, what is it, Tuesday today? Right? So two days ago. And she’s like, I just need you to see, does this work, did any of my files get in there when I created it? I’m like, yeah, sure, I’ll put it in a fresh one, and we’ll try it. And she’s like, can you make an outline? You just come up with something. I’m like, oh, I have story ideas. No problem. Because I’ve, I made a story trend scout thing that you could put like Kindle Trends reports, and it would come up with lots of on market ideas.

So I was like, I got a ton. I’ve been running this stuff forever. So I drop in a, a Highlander romance thing I wanted to do. I’m like, yeah, why not do that one? And about an hour later I had a full YFD worksheet, and an hour after that, I had maybe another one, and six hours later I had six books and I ran the first one in [00:31:00] YFD.

Danica Favorite: That’s just, that’s just amazing. And here’s the thing is, you know, like I think people get, oh, how can you possibly write these books this fast? And how can they be good books, but all of this is the culmination of lifelong skills, and skills as an author, and knowing how to write, and giving your brain to the computer.

Kimberly Gordon: Yeah, and it’s all the experience that we have collected and all these insane things I’ve done all my life. I have done theater. I have done music ministry. I’ve written songs on my life. I’ve done all these crazy things. I’m like, I don’t even know why I do ’em, I just have to go do ’em. It’s ’cause I needed fodder for writing.

And then I have crazy relatives. I had to write about them too. So it’s like all of it comes through the writing. And as I was doing the Highlander thing, that was inspired by a Daz 3D render. Harper and I know each other from the Daz 3D community. We’re both 3D artists. And I have renders that would inspire story ideas and vice versa.

[00:32:00] So this thing’s been kicking around in my subconscious for 10 or fif, 10 years. So it’s like, it just came out and it’s oh, and the AI goes, well, you could do this and this and this. I’m like, why, sure, let’s add this and this and this. Suddenly we’ve got six books of Highlanders. Because it’s helping you connect the dots that are already there.

That’s the thing. It is totally assistive. It’s not writing for you, it’s writing with you, and it’s really helping you organize your thinking. I have burned out, especially in IT. I have burned out of several jobs because I worked so hard. I love what I do. I’m a hard worker, but I would go massively into burned out, ’cause of the stress in that.

That’s why I left IT. I don’t wanna burnout in writing, but I was seeing, when I was doing everything myself, that I was starting to go that way. I was perfectionistic. I was doing, especially my Black Cat series, I would do hundreds of editing passes. It’s like, I just need to…I love Steph’s thing, F it, it’s fine. Just get it out [00:33:00] there. I had to tell myself that a few times. Now I can do multiple passes that are reasonable, with AI, and what used to take me months, takes me days. I had a LitRPG book that I, it’s on pre-order for the end of the month. I went to check it, to human proof it, and it wasn’t as good as I thought.

It was a big hot mess. I’m like, oh my gosh, I have to have this up in like two weeks. It took me one day to fix it. It’s now as good as I thought it was, and now I’m gonna sweep through it again and get it ready to go. It. It’s that fast. It’s crazy.

Danica Favorite: This is really amazing, and I want to go back to one of the things you said, because this is definitely a big quote that I think that everyone needs to keep in their mind when they’re thinking about AI, and particularly when people are saying, oh, AI is cheating or not.

It’s connecting the dots that are already there. Like when you said that, I was like, boom, we need this in neon letters above everything about AI right now. Because it is, that’s [00:34:00] truly what it’s doing. It’s taking those things that are already there. It’s taking your talent, your skills, your ideas, your creativity, and it’s just connecting those dots.

And I think that’s just absolutely beautiful and amazing.

Steph Pajonas: That’s super intuitive, super intuitive. Because you know what, sometimes it’s like I look at AI and I wonder how we’re, how this is all happening, right? But I’ve given it plenty of clues along the way about the way that I work or the way that I like to draft.

I’ll say, yes I like that. No, I don’t like that. Can you change that? And over time. It has enough data on me to connect the dots and figure out the way that I like to write things, or the way that I like to brainstorm things, or whatever it may be. So, yes, exactly. Like connect those dots, because that’s what I need it there for.

Kimberly Gordon: Yeah, and I believe that everything we need is inside of us. AI is just helping bring it out. Sometimes we’re stuck. We’re stuck in some part of it. My, my brother is so creative. He’s just as creative as me. I love him. He’s [00:35:00] just crazy busy, too busy to do his epic fantasy that’s been in his head for 20 years, and I’ve been trying to encourage him.

He had this idea that he had to write chronologically and perfectly, and I’m like, no, just start with the ideas. Get the, get whatever you have, throw it on paper. This was before AI. Throw it on paper. That was what I would do. I would just throw it. I was a puzzle piece writer. I got pieces of it, and then I would put it together as it came

Well, now. AI helps me assemble those puzzle pieces and get it to where it makes sense. And it just speeds us up so much. But it’s still you doing the work. It’s just there to help you. And I think people don’t have to use it for the actual writing if they’re really, if they love the writing, or if they’re opposed to it, but you can use it for hundreds of other things. We wear so many hats as indie authors. Why not allow it to do some of the more repetitive things that are not fun, the admin side, so that you can go have fun and do the writing side. That’s my [00:36:00] soapbox.

Danica Favorite: I love the soapbox.

I, I’m just sitting here enraptured, because everything you just said is the ultimate AI writing motivational speech. It really is like, tell, reminding us that everything we have is already there.

Kimberly Gordon: It is.

Danica Favorite: And it’s something that back in the day when I would teach classes for Pseudo Write, that, I mean, that’s like been ages and ages ago. It feels like a lifetime ago, even though it’s only been a couple years. But that’s what I would always tell people is this idea that like you have that talent inside you, you have that skill, you have that knowledge. And I am loving the fact that like what you just said, everything you need is already inside you because it really is there.

And you don’t have to use it for writing. You can use whatever part of the process you love, keep doing that. But what you were talking about with burnout, and you know, and I can say this because I, I, [00:37:00] again your mom has been a hero of mine for a long time. I believe I have met her at an RWA conference.

So even though I don’t remember meeting you, I probably have met you, ’cause I, I used to go to all of them, and so many of the writers that started when I started are no longer writing because they burned out.

Kimberly Gordon: They, They fall away. The people that you start with, five years later, they’re not around.

Danica Favorite: Yeah.

Kimberly Gordon: It’s crazy.

Danica Favorite: Yeah. And like how do we stop authors from hitting that burnout phase? Because the thing is it isn’t that they stopped loving them um, the shelf, it’s right below me so you won’t be able to see it. But some of my author friends that I started out with, who used to be my bestest, bestest buddies, that we did all the writing things together, are not writing anymore.

And the last time I spoke to one of them, she just said, you know, I really wanna get back to writing again. I miss writing, but oh, I just can’t, it’s just so hard. And it isn’t that she doesn’t have talent. It isn’t that she doesn’t [00:38:00] have ability. It’s that all of the pieces that she hates about writing, she doesn’t wanna have to do again.

Kimberly Gordon: Mm-hmm.

Danica Favorite: And for those of you who are listening and think, yeah, that’s why I’m not writing, you don’t have to do those pieces, just do the pieces you love.

Kimberly Gordon: That’s something we hear a lot in the FFA is that AI has made writing fun again. And that’s the thing, is getting back to that first love, and this is something I kind of wanna talk about on the Valentine’s edition of Ink and Code this Saturday is getting back to the first love, the thing that made you want to write.

And I mean the, and also story is code. We are born coded for story. It’s how we survive. We are born, it’s innate. We must tell stories whether you want them in print or not. I know a lot of people that are amazing at like verbal storytellers. They collect funny stories, but we, this is how we do things as a society.

We survive with stories, all kinds of stories that tell us, stay away from [00:39:00] that, don’t do that, or, hey, look, once upon a time, that we dream and we escape. And so it’s like. AI just helps us get those out faster. But the stories are still inside of you. They still come from you. You can tell it how much you want, how much authority, and how much control you give to it is up to you.

Danica Favorite: Absolutely. And that’s the thing too, is, like Steph and I have both talked about the perimenopause and the brain fog and all this stuff, and that I haven’t been writing for quite some time now. I have gotten a few books out this year, yay me, and I started doing Antigravity partially because, FFA was mentioning it.

You had, I’d seen one of your classes and then, Dana has some Antigravity stuff, and so I’ve been slowly working through doing the story in Antigravity. And I’m gonna be honest, I’m loving it so much right now, and I’ve been working on the story for five days. I really get pissed off when I have to stop working on the story.

Kimberly Gordon: Yeah. [00:40:00] Or if you run out…

Danica Favorite: Which is how I used to be. That’s how Danica the writer used to be, is, man, you make me stop writing, I’m pissed. And I’m back there again, and I am totally doing it, writing with AI the slow way. And that’s fine because that’s my process. And…

Kimberly Gordon: But yeah, but why crawl when, or walk, when you can run and fly?

And that’s what I’m like, I wanna be Peter Pan, I wanna fly.

Danica Favorite: Right. And that’s where I’m getting, I’m like, okay. Someone just asked me, what are you doing for Valentine’s Day? Apparently I’m gonna be at Kim’s Ink and Code class on Valentine’s Day. And I know this will air after Valentine’s Day, so for those of you who missed it, you can go to YouTube and watch it. It’s totally fine.

Steph Pajonas: I was just thinking about how I also fell back in love with writing and publishing and everything, once AI came out. It was such a struggle before that. And I had brain fog from COVID and I just, I, I just thought I was done.

I thought I was done, because nothing was fun anymore. It was such a struggle. It was such a struggle to get [00:41:00] anything done, and I’m not a big believer in this whole you have to be a starving artist and suffer in order to make your art. Right? So I just

Kimberly Gordon: Most of us have been there and done that.

Steph Pajonas: Been there. Done that. Don’t wanna do it again. I wanna be having fun. I’m now in my fifties, crossed over the border to fifties, and I wanna be having fun. I wanna be having fun, and I think that that AI is what is going to be for me for quite some time now, because it just gets more fun every single time I open it up.

Kimberly Gordon: I love it.

Danica Favorite: Yes. It’s so fun.

Kimberly Gordon: It’s almost addictive, but it is so much fun. And it’s, there’s joy in it again. And it’s like, that’s what I wanna, I wanna be in that place. I wanna be happy doing something. I, one of the things that crushed me was, and I know that this stuff, you’ve gone through this too, losing a parent, and not knowing if I was gonna be able to write again after that. I lost my dad two years ago. I left the FFA for a while and came back. I did not know when I was gonna be able to write again. I was also going through, I’m still going [00:42:00] through a really rough divorce. And I’m dealing with, I’m homeschooling and I’ve got a special needs child. So it was just a lot that crushes down. And you go, how am I ever going to do anything positive and good again?

But. Uh, AI has been just wonderful for that. It is just given me this one place of when I couldn’t write for a while when my dad was dying, I did art. I did a lot of art, I did a lot of book covers. And those are on my books now that are finally out. But um, you know, it was like whatever I could do, I was like trying to find what pieces can I do, how can I express myself while I’m still just absolutely crushed? And eventually, you know, time, heal does heal. It takes a long time, but it’s like finally I feel like I’m back to where I can write again. And I suddenly, it’s like, oh wait, I have 40 books to finish? What? O ops. And maybe 10 more this month. It’s just exciting.

It’s very exciting.

Danica Favorite: Yeah, and I think that’s great because I, I have not gone through the loss of a parent, but I did [00:43:00] recently go through a very long and painful divorce. And it’s so funny that you’re saying that about art, because that is where I started to channel my energy is I’ve been doing art, like really bad art, although I am an expert stick figure maker, I make an excellent stick figure. But it doesn’t matter, because it’s a creative expression that made me feel good. And now that I’m writing, I was thinking back to what you were saying earlier in the podcast about making yourself more creative and following these creative ideas. And that’s honestly part of why this book is taking me so much longer than I thought it would, because I’ll get through a chapter, I’m like, oh wait, I have this cool idea. And I wanna change this whole thing about where the story was going and follow this bunny trail, which I couldn’t have done that pre AI.

I just would’ve stopped the book and had to start over again, and it would’ve taken me a year to get to where I’m at now. And in just five days I can play with it. And it’s almost like the choose your own adventure books. Do you guys [00:44:00] remember those where I can say, okay, let’s see what would happen if I went this direction with the story instead, or this direction in the story, and it’s a blast. It’s really super fun, and I am just really loving getting to play, and I think that’s what AI is doing for us all, is we can afford to play. Because I have some really horrible AI drafts that will never do anything, but it was all done in the spirit of play, and I didn’t just waste six months of my life to play with it.

Kimberly Gordon: You didn’t. You were learning and maybe later it’ll be resurrected. You know, Opus 4.6 is really good. Raise those dead ones and bring ’em back to life. Um, What I found was that um, I did that my first Your First Draft project was back when we had 20 chapters. It was a, it was one of my fae books that I’ve been, I didn’t even know I needed it.

I was writing it to solve a world building problem, in a group of, it was like a se, there’s four or five connected [00:45:00] series, and the world build wasn’t right. And I was like, oh, the main series takes place 20 years after this big war. And I’m like, I gotta go write the war. So I started writing the Fae War series and I’m like, I’m gonna do this in Your First Draft.

And I thought, stupidly, oh, I’ll just cram it all into 20 chapters. And as soon as I got to editing it, it was okay. But I’m like, oh, this needs to be expanded. I need this, oh, I need to chop off like, part of the, like the last fourth of the book, and that’s book two. And so I took about two months, and I was kind of doing that.

I was like, oh, I can go this way and that way, or I was finding as a high maximizer, I’m like, after the fact, I’m going, they need this motivation, this isn’t right. Oh, hey wait, the seasons are screwed up. It’s summer over here and it’s winter and then it’s summer and it’s spring. So I had to fix a lot of stuff.

I rewrote a lot of that book. It took two months. But I was learning that process. And now with Claude skills. I can do that same thing on book two in about a week that used to take me two [00:46:00] months. And I still have the joy of the discovery. I’m not stressed, I’m having fun. And I look back, I just started working on the audio book for that book and I was like, oh, that really is a good book.

It was fun, ’cause it, it has rested for a while. It’s out. But I was like, oh, that one really is good. I’m proud of that. And it was kind of fun to listen to it again and go, yeah, I didn’t screw that up. That’s actually a good one.

Steph Pajonas: You learned a lot. You learned a lot along the way. You know.

Kimberly Gordon: It makes you faster.

Steph Pajonas: It does make you faster. I agree. But I think we we covered a lot of your favorite tools, right Danica?

Danica Favorite: We did.

Kimberly Gordon: I love it.

Steph Pajonas: She likes all the tools, basically.

Danica Favorite: She likes all the tools, and there is nothing wrong with that. And I am so glad that you’re here.

I don’t know if there’s any final tool or a piece of advice or something that you wanna share with us? Just what, yeah. Yeah. Just one last little…

Kimberly Gordon: Yeah. One last [00:47:00] thing. It would be to, I, I teach this too, I say know thyself, and know thy AI. If you know your work process, your unique way that you like to work, if you don’t, go talk to the AI, have it interview you.

If you know your work process, you can pivot through all the different tools. Tools are gonna come and go. We don’t know what’s on the horizon. Antigravity didn’t even exist before November 18th. Claude skills wasn’t, weren’t around before October. We don’t know what’s gonna come out tomorrow or drop later today.

There’s gonna be new tools. The ones you love are gonna go obsolete. It’s not about the tool, it’s about you. If you know how you work and you are comfortable, just get used to talking with AI. That is the skill you need. Being able to communicate what you need, it will help you. It’s, that’s what it’s designed to do.

Know yourself, know how to talk to the AI. The rest will unlock itself, and you can take those, like the skills are portable across all the different apps. [00:48:00] Your skills in your brain are also portable. That’s the most important part is still you. You are the secret ingredient.

Steph Pajonas: And that’s perfect advice to end this particular interview on.

Thank you so much for being here. This was incredible. I love talking a little bit more about the technology and things ’cause I also, I am also a long time technology person. I was in IT for a long time, web developer, et cetera. So I love coming back to talk about those things as well. I’m sure Danica is probably really jazzed now to go write something, aren’t you?

Danica Favorite: I really am. I’ve been jazzed about this a lot. And I’m even more jazzed to, like I said, like really watch more of Kim’s videos, ’cause I’ve done a couple, but, not everything, and that is something, I know we talk about links and everything, and certainly we’ll get more of those here in a second, but please do go watch those free videos on YouTube.

They are [00:49:00] so valuable. And for people who say, oh, I can’t really afford to buy a class or join FFA or whatever, that’s fine. But there are so many free videos that I have learned so much just from those videos, although I do have an FFA membership as well. And I’ve paid for some classes outside of FFA, but you will get so far on just the free classes. Start there, and Kim was saying about figuring out what your AI flavor is, and what you work best, and how you work best. Once you figure that out, then you can figure out where to invest your time and skill into the deeper courses.

Steph Pajonas: Absolutely.

Kimberly Gordon: And automate the pain points. You got pain points, automate them.

Steph Pajonas: Yeah. Automate those pain points. Absolutely. Okay, we’re gonna wrap it up here. I will make sure that I get all of the URLs into the show notes for this particular episode. Kim, do you wanna send anybody to your books or [00:50:00] website outside of the FFA?

Kimberly Gordon: Let’s see. The Black Cat books are on blackcatseries.com. I think I have the exact same website, that I need to update, under authorkimberlygordon.com. And I have, let’s see, I’m still setting up my Kayla Swift. That’s my LitRPG. And the other one is Shayla Summers.com. authorshaylasummers.com.

Danica Favorite: Great.

Kimberly Gordon: So I’ll give you the link so you can put ’em in…

Steph Pajonas: Fantastic.

Kimberly Gordon: and all that stuff.

Steph Pajonas: I will do that. I will do that. I’ll make sure that they’re all in there. And then of course Kim is also the director of the Ink and Code Society at Future Fiction Academy, and she is pretty much live every single Saturday on the YouTube channel for Future Fiction Academy. So that’s youtube.com/@FutureFictionAcademy. We will also link to that in the show notes so that everybody can find it. What else should we leave everybody with Danica?

Danica Favorite: Yeah, just as always, please make sure you’re liking and subscribing to us on YouTube.

One of the things that Steph and I [00:51:00] have been doing in the background is that our podcast provider was not fantastic, and we’re switching podcast providers, so you should still be able to get our podcast on your favorite podcast channel. But always YouTube is very reliable, so you will always be able to find us there, so like and subscribe there.

Besides that, you can see how cute we all are. I mean we all look good for the over 50 club. We look great.

Steph Pajonas: We look great.

Danica Favorite: Yeah. And then of course, make sure you’re liking and subscribing to Future Fiction Press, Future Fiction Academy and Publish Drive on all your favorite social media channels.

Steph Pajonas: Yeah. Drop by bravenewbookshelf.com to get the show notes. You can also find our links to us on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, all those places. And I link up the RSS feed there as well that has all the podcasts in them. So if you do find that you can’t find us on one of your, one of your [00:52:00] providers, grab that RSS link, ’cause that should be able to be put into any one of them. And then you’ll. Pop right up. No problem. So hopefully we don’t have any glitches coming in the future. So thank you everybody for listening, and we’ll see you guys in the next episode. Okay. Bye.

Speaker 2: Thanks for joining us on The Brave New Bookshelf. Be sure to like and subscribe to us on YouTube and your favorite podcast app. You can also visit us at bravenewbookshelf.com. Sign up for our newsletter and get all the show notes.

Episode 66 – Story is Code: Personalizing AI Workflows for Authors with Kimberly Gordon