# The Creative Wound, Publishing, And Money, With Joanna Penn ## Метаданные - **Канал:** The Creative Penn - **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8p_EzOEw1M - **Дата:** 19.01.2026 - **Длительность:** 1:34:08 - **Просмотры:** 855 - **Источник:** https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/18223 ## Описание What if the most transformative thing you can do for your writing craft and author business is to face what you fear? How can you can find gold in your Shadow in the year ahead? In this episode, I share chapters from Writing the Shadow: Turn Your Inner Darkness Into Words (https://www.thecreativepenn.com/shadowbook) . In the intro, curated book boxes from Bridgerton's Julia Quinn (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1361360798/1464839836) ; Google's agentic shopping (https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/message-ceo/nrf-2026-remarks/) , and powering Apple's Siri (https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/company-announcements/joint-statement-google-apple/) ; ChatGPT Ads (https://openai.com/index/our-approach-to-advertising-and-expanding-access/) ; and Claude CoWork (https://claude.com/blog/cowork-research-preview) . Balancing Certainty and Uncertainty [MoonShots with Tony Robbins (https://open.spotify.com/episode/7bOovaQmvwADqeWS7LYeAB?si=RJv_9mxwS4KWL7DES8IN9w) ]; ## Транскрипт ### Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00) [] Welcome to the Creative Pen podcast. I'm Joanna Penn, thriller author and creative entrepreneur, bringing you interviews, inspiration, and information on writing, craft, and creative business. You can find the episode show notes, your free author blueprint, and lots more at the creativepen. com. And that's pen with a double N. And here's the show. Hello creatives. I'm Joanna Penn and this is episode number 846 of the podcast and it is Saturday the 17th of January 2026 as I record this. In today's show I am sharing some chapters from my audio book of writing the shadow turn your inner darkness into words. This is part of my pivot into transformation because what if the thing that transforms your writing craft and your author business this year is facing up to your fears and leaning into the things that challenge you. Writing the shadow took me many years to write because it's one of my most personal and was transformational for me in writing it. So I hope it helps you. There's a short introductory chapter on what is the shadow and then I go into the shadow in traditional publishing in being an indie author and self-publishing as well as work and money. I hope you find it interesting and also challenging. So that's coming up in the main section of the show. In writing and publishing, it's always great to see different kinds of authors doing creative projects and also interesting when very successful traditionally published authors do it too. And Julia Quinn, author of the Bridgetton books, is launching curated romance book boxes on Kickstarter. So, from the Kickstarter page, I love pretty books. I love to look at them and touch them and most of all to read them. It's been amazing to see all the gorgeous special editions that have been coming out lately in the romance genre. And honestly, why has it taken publishers so long to realize that romance fans are precisely the readers who would love pretty books? Sprayed edges, lux covers, custom artwork. They make my heart so happy. But I've noticed that historical romance isn't getting the star treatment. To which I respond, not in my universe. And of course, this is Julia Quinn writing. Introducing JQ Editions, where every author is a diamond of the first water, which if you don't know, The Diamond is Dafany Bridgetton in the first episode of the first series of Bridgetton on Netflix, chosen by the Queen as the most promising debutant of the season. And yes, we are actually currently re-watching Bridgetton in preparation for the next season coming soon. While I don't really read romance, I do like the Bridgetton series. Julia says, "These are my very favorite books. A mix of brand new titles, recent gems, and classics of the modern genre. Not just the books I like, the books I love. " This is really interesting. Book boxes are of course something we've seen romance authors do, but of course, romantic has been the biggest thing. And Julia is obviously saying right it's the turn of historical romance. Now this plays into the trend of direct sales and the trend of more beautiful books. And I guess what I wanted to say is we all have to think about our genres. So people have said to me oh I mean the beautiful books they work in romanty or whatever fantasy and all that but they won't work in thrillers or literary fiction or whatever you might be writing. And I haven't seen campaigns on Kickstarter for this genre or that genre. And all that shows you is that we are early. It doesn't mean there isn't an appetite for it. It just means as ever, romance authors are always first. Always, always first with any shifts, any technological shifts. They're always on the cutting edge. And so we've had the romanty boom in beautiful books. Now looks like it's moving into historical romance. I've definitely I mean I have a few thrillers and a folk horror on Kickstarter and yeah for sure there's not many in these other genres but it's our responsibility. We get to shape the genre. So if you love beautiful books in any genre I think doing these types of campaigns, it doesn't need to be a book box. Obviously I don't do book boxes but getting different genres into this trend of beautiful books I think is so important. And the more of us who create beautiful books in any genre, the more popular they will become. So please do your beautiful books this year. And then on AI things, there's a few things that have happened already that underpin the shifts I talked about in my ### Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00) [5:00] trends episode a few weeks back. First of all, Google has partnered with Shopify and in the same way that ChatGpt has as well as Target and others on agentic shopping. In their press release, they say, "Google search has always been an important starting point for shopping on the web. Now with AI mode, we're seeing these journeys move from keywords to natural conversations. It's a fundamental shift. While you once had to sort through pages of results, AI can do the hard work of narrowing down exactly what you're most interested in buying. Google's Gemini has also been chosen by Apple to power Siri. So, if you're an iPhone user or a Mac user in general, hopefully this will improve the experience by the end of the year. And I also predicted that people would start paying the AI systems for ads rather than protesting against them. That's clearly going to happen with Google Ads and Chat GBT has also announced they're going to launch ads on the free and cheap plans. Once you have direct shopping and ads, the way we discover and buy things starts to shift. Of course, they're saying the ads won't be everywhere. From their press release, we need to keep a high bar and give you control over the experience, so you see truly relevant, highquality ads and can turn off personalization if you want. Ads do not influence the answers chat GPT gives you. Answers are optimized based on what's helpful to you. Ads are separate and clearly labeled. The best ads are useful, entertaining, and help people discover new products and services. Given what AI can do, we're excited to develop new experiences over time that people find more helpful and relevant than any other ads. Now, I just wanted to point out I am not averse to these kinds of personalized ads and in fact I find them very useful. I already use chat GPT for shopping, but there's no direct click and I'm using the sort of deep research tools and the shopping research and all that. As I've talked about, we all buy things for ourselves. other people. And I actually generally get more cool things served to me on Instagram these days. The biggest problem with ads is when they degrade the experience of the user, which is what I find now happens on Amazon. I used to use Amazon to search for books, but I don't anymore. I will still buy there, but I know what I want and I just type in the book that I'm looking for. So, I hardly ever use their own search or their own sort of recommendations because I find that the paid ad experience, which I use as a paid advertiser, pollutes my own experience. So, it's going to be very interesting how this shapes out by the end of the year if the ads are already starting now. I mean, we can't use these ads, by the way. This is all ahead of us in 2026, but I am really hoping that this is something I can use to get traffic to my Shopify stores. And we shall see what how it is with the other stores. But the biggest news certainly in my mind over the last week is the launch of Claude Co-work, which is the first real agentic system I've used for non-technical people. So I immediately jumped on. I had it analyze and update all my Amazon ads. Handsree people. Handsree. I'm going to do a video in my Patreon with my hands in the air so you can see it's not me doing the work. But it I've found this just absolutely brilliant. I had it analyze and update my existing Amazon ads and I'm going back in. I've got to so many use cases. I'm just I'll tell you in a minute all the other stuff that's going on. But anyway, back into the press release around Claude Co-work. In co-work, Claude completes work like this with much more agency than you'd see in a regular conversation. Once you've set it a task, Claude will make a plan and steadily complete it while looping you in on what it's up to. So, yeah, I am so excited about this. In terms of my predictions for the year, my number seven prediction was AI will create, run, and optimize ads without the need for human intervention. And it looks like we're almost there within two weeks of that prediction. And as I said, I have a lot more use cases to try and it's very new. So, we'll see how it goes. So, with all these changes and everything starting to sort of rev up again for the new year, I wanted to talk about uncertainty for a minute as I heard Tony Robbins on the Moonshots podcast last week with Peter Diamandis. It's one of my favorite podcasts and they had Tony on talking about the rate of change that's happening and why some people find it so hard and it stuck with me. his analogy stuck with me. Now, I used to listen to a lot of Tony Robbins. I got all the tapes back in the day, the early 2000s, when I was trying to change my life and break out of the corporate world and get into writing. I listen to all of those audio books like over and over again. And then I also rate his book on money called Unshakable. That's excellent ### Segment 3 (10:00 - 15:00) [10:00] particularly for us people because it's obviously US focused, but I found it very useful too. Anyway, in this discussion on the Moonshots podcast, Tony talks about certainty and uncertainty and how as humans, we need both of these things, but often in different amounts at different times. Now, we crave certainty because we want to be safe, but we also need an element of uncertainty or we'd be deathly bored. And that's why people seek out new things. We crave variety and the new. But the speed at which we adapt to uncertainty can be difficult. But Tony says external certainty is an illusion because we all know things can change in an instant. Obviously when the pandemic hit, we all found everything changing so quickly. We're not in control of a lot of things. And what he says is you need to stop trying to find certainty in the external world and start creating it internally. This involves trusting in your own capacity to learn and adapt rather than trusting the environment to remain static. So just to say that again, trust in your own capacity to learn and adapt rather than trusting that the environment will remain static. And this really hit me because I think this is why I'm so deep into the AI side of things. And I only talk on this show about the stuff that affects us as authors, but I'm super deep into the scientific side, the finance side, the health side, and even frontier maths at the moment, which is interesting as someone who's not a mathematician, but my curiosity and my desire to learn helps me feel that I can adapt as things shift. And it may be I was actually thinking like on a much deeper level given the writing the shadow stuff that perhaps my depth on this topic is because I am like there is a part of me that is afraid. Of course there is. There's a part of all of us that's afraid. And my way of helping control the environment is just to learn as much as possible. I mean in my Clifton strengths I am a learner. I'm a futurist and I love input and I have intellection as well. So it's like I really love to learn all this stuff, but I'm perhaps also trying to prove to myself that I can adapt and that is enough to help me navigate the future. So yeah, it's this sort of adopting the mind of a creator and Tony actually says this adopting a creative mind which means we should all have an advantage. You know, you must believe that you're the kind of person that will find the way and also that you can find meaning in anything. And I think this is fascinating in the same way as I go to the gym and lift heavy weights. I as a human do not need to lift heavy weights. There are plenty of machines that can lift heavy weights for me. There are plenty of humans who can lift heavier weights than I can. And it's the same with to me with AI and writing and everything. If AI becomes a better writer than me, there are plenty of humans who are better writers than me, who are better marketers than me, who sell more books than me. I will keep writing. I will keep creating regardless. I want to add more beauty to the world, what I think of as beauty. And beautiful physical books are part of that, as we talked earlier about what Julia Quinn's doing. But also, we're creative people. That's who we are. none of this is going to stop us. So, I thought that was really interesting, the kind of certainty and uncertainty. So, can you be certain in your ability to learn and shift rather than counting on the external world to stay the same? Tony also mentions here, fear stems from thinking a crisis is unprecedented, but by recognizing patterns in history, you realize history rhymes and that there's always a precedent. And I was thinking about this too because I feel like those of us who are my age, if you're basically if you're over 40, you saw the change the internet made. You were in the '9s and before mobile phones, before the internet, before any of that. And we saw how everything shifted, how business changed, how creativity changed, social patterns changed, both good and bad from the internet and mobile commerce. So if you've seen the shifts that technology can bring then you can say okay then history rhymes. It won't be the same but it will maybe follow a similar path. So this feels like the same kind of reinvention certainly how I feel about it. And yeah so anyway I hope that helps and you can listen to Tony Robbins on the Moonshots podcast with Peter Diamandis. One of the podcasts I listen to every single week. And also, if you want to hear me and Honora Ross talk about the coming shifts with AI for authors, our latest episode is out on the self-publishing with Ally podcast where we talk about agents and Claude Co-work as well as ### Segment 4 (15:00 - 20:00) [15:00] discoverability and as ever, how to be more human. So, that is at self-publishing. org or you can find it on self-publishing with Ally podcast. In personal news, as I mentioned, I have just I'm quite slammed at the moment, actually. I'm still editing Bones of the Deep, and it is intense. I thought I would be done with it, but it is really intense, and it is a thriller. So, while it starts at the pace of a South Pacific sailing holiday, as in all relaxed, it rapidly speeds up and eventually things spiral. And that's obviously the fun part as a thriller writer, but the I'm deep into characters here and the editing is I'm finding it quite hardcore. And also as a discovery writer, I work things out along the way. So I've done some big structural changes in the last week. I was like, "Oh, I just not happy with that. " And so I went back by about 10 chapters actually and re-edited from there. I'm still not entirely certain on the ending, which I I'm finding I know the ultimate ending. I just don't know the slightly chapter beforehand. It's really hard to explain unless you are a discovery writer, somebody who just doesn't plot the whole thing out. I mean, I always knew approximately the ending, but it's just how we get there in the last few chapters. So, I do need to clear the decks because my new university term starts on as this goes out, and I have three papers, one of which is philosophy and two of which are religion and are very dense, let's say. So, I need to clear out my brain. And I'm definitely I work in projects. So, I won't be able to focus on the college stuff until I've got this book to Kristen, my editor, and also really thrilled to have two beta readers from my community, an oceanographer, and a sailor, someone who has been on tall ships. So, if you're interested in the Bones of the Deep, go to jfpen. com/bones, and the Kickstarter page is there. You can see pictures of me from when I did actually do a tall ship trip, which didn't end in the way that this thriller will. [snorts] The business for authors webinar also went really well. I've had some lovely emails from people who found it transformative. James said, "It was a fabulously rewarding webinar. " And Helen said, "The webinar helped me clarify who I am and what I'm truly about. " And that is the point. It's only two hours, so it's clearly not a here's all the things you need to run an author business. It is not that at all. It is much more strategic and help helps you figure out what the hell you're doing. So, it depends when you're listening to this, but I do have one more webinar this coming weekend, Saturday 24th of January. So, if you want to join me, you can check it out at thecreativepen. com/live li. Patrons get 25% discount. So check on the Patreon if you are a patron before you book. I'll also be speaking at the Alliance of Independent Authors Indie Author Lab at London Bookfare. Well, it's on the kind of London Bookfare fringe. That will be 11th of March, 2026. You can get tickets at self-publishingadvice. org/indyauthor lab. Links in the show notes. I will also be attending but not speaking at self-publishing show live in June, also in London. So, hope to see some of you at any of those. I'm not sure if I'll be in the USA this year. We shall see, but definitely in 2027, I intend to be back in some form. So, thanks for your emails and comments and photos this week. Julie said, "Quote of the year so far. " In the introduction to the episode with Cla Taylor when you said, "We can do really cool, beautiful things, so let's do that. " I'm glad that encouraged you, Julie. And yeah, I guess we're back on that theme again. I'm going to keep going on that theme. I do feel that beauty is something that we need to lean into. And of course, we all have different ideas of beauty, but what you find beautiful is something that other people, some people are going to find beautiful, too. Karen sent a picture from a train station in Barcelona saying, "I'm living here until the end of March as you. I'm studying. I'm doing a masters in creative writing. " That is lovely. I love Barcelona actually and I will be coming back to Barcelona as soon as they have finished the Sigrada Familiar which should be next year I think 2027. If you don't know they that has been that cathedral is incredible. It's in my book gates of hell opens at the Sigrada Familiar and it is just wonderful in so many ways. But to have a cathedral of that scale finished in our lifetime I would really encourage you to have a look at that. I'm just super excited. But yes, Barcelona, wonderful place. And Lee sent pictures from Japan's Hotel Tatayama, an isolated hotel at the top of a Japanese alpine route. Next to the hotel is Hell Valley, a geothermal area known for bubbling vents. And uh Lee sent pictures of the ### Segment 5 (20:00 - 25:00) [20:00] 20ft snow walls and the steaming valley saying I visited just as I started reading Death Valley, my thriller Death Valley, and found it amazing that the two settings seemed so similar yet obviously so different. And Lee, of course, setting things at a place that you can't get away from is kind of the point. And my Bones of the Deep is similar. It's also the sort of bracket is locked room. if a locked room can also be a locked location where people can't get out of and a tall ship on the Pacific is similar in a different way as you're saying. So, thank you for that. As ever, please leave a comment on the podcast show notes at the creativepen. com or on the YouTube channel. You can email me, send me pictures of where you're listening or your favorite cemetery, crypt, or death culture place, or anything you think I'll be interested in. Joanna@thecreativepen. com. I'd love to hear from you. It makes this more of a conversation. So today's show is sponsored by my community at patreon. com/thecreative pen. Thanks to the 29 new patrons who've joined in the last week. And thanks to everyone who's been supporting for months and years. If you join the community, you get access to all my backlist videos and audio on writing craft and author business as well as AI tutorials. This week I shared a prompt for getting Claude or Chat GBT to give you analysis of your book sales and financial data and also shared my own numbers for 2025 and my percentage splits between fiction and non-fiction formats, platforms, my expenses, my revenue streams, and much more. Patrons also get a 25% discount for my business for authors webinar and my other webinars as I do those. The Patreon is a monthly subscription, the equivalent of buying me a black coffee a month or a couple of coffees if you're feeling generous. So, if you get value from the show and you want more, come on over and join us at patreon. com. P A T R E O N. com/thecreative pen. Right, let's get into writing the shadow. Turn your inner darkness into words. Written and narrated by Joanna Penn. Introduction. What is the shadow? How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also if I am to be whole. CG Yung. Modern man in search of a soul. We all have a shadow side and it is the work of a lifetime to recognize what lies within and spin that base material into gold. Think of it as a seedling in a little pot that you're given when you're young. It's a bit misshapen and weird. Not something you would display in your living room. So, you place it in a dark corner of the basement. You don't look at it for years. You almost forget about it. Then one day you notice tendrils of something wild poking up through the floorboards. They're ugly and don't fit with your scandy minimalist interior design. You chop the tendrils away and pour weed killer on what's left, trying to hide the fact that they were ever there. But the creeping stems keep coming. At some point, you know you have to go down there and face the wild thing your seedling has become. When you eventually pluck up enough courage to go down into the basement, you discover that the plant has wound its roots deep into the foundations of your home. Its vines weave in and out of the cracks in the walls, and it has beautiful flowers and strange fruit. It holds your world together. Perhaps you don't need to destroy the wild tendrils. Perhaps you can let them wind up into the light and allow their rich beauty to weave through your home. It will change the look you have so carefully cultivated. But maybe that's just what the place needs. The shadow in psychology. Carl Gustavong was a Swiss psychologist and the founder of analytical psychology. He described the shadow as an unconscious aspect of the human personality. Those parts of us that don't match up to what is expected of us by family and society or even to our own ideals. The shadow is not necessarily evil or illegal or immoral, although of course it can be. It's also not necessarily ### Segment 6 (25:00 - 30:00) [25:00] caused by trauma, abuse, or any other severely damaging event. Although again, it can be. It depends on the individual. What is in your shadow is based on your life and your experiences as well as your culture and society. So it will be different for everyone. Psychologist Connie V in the inner work of age explains the shadow is that part of us that lies beneath or behind the light of awareness. It contains our rejected unacceptable traits and feelings. It contains our hidden gifts and talents that have remained unexpressed or unlived. As Jung put it, the essence of the shadow is pure gold. To further illustrate the concept, Robert Bllee in a little book on the human shadow uses the following metaphor. When we are young, we carry behind us an invisible bag into which we stuff any feelings, thoughts, or behaviors that bring disapproval or loss of love, anger, tears, neediness, laziness. By the time we go to school, our bags are already a mile long. In high school, our peer groups pressure us to stuff the bags with even more individuality, sexuality, spontaneity, different opinions. We spend our life until we're 20 deciding which parts of ourselves to put into the bag. And we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again. As authors, we can use what's in the bag to enrich our writing, but only if we can access it. My intention with this book is to help you venture into your shadow and bring some of what's hidden into the light and into your words. I'll reveal aspects of my shadow in these pages, but ultimately this book is about you. Your shadow is unique. There may be elements we share, but much will be different. Each chapter has questions for you to consider that may help you explore at least the edges of your shadow, but it's not easy. As Yung said, one does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular. But take heart creative. You don't need courage when things are easy. You need it when you know what you face will be difficult. But you do it anyway. We are authors. We know how to do hard things. We turn ideas into books. We manifest thoughts into ink on paper. We change lives with our writing. First our own, then other people's. It's worth the effort to delve into shadow. So, I hope you will join me on the journey. 2. 2 The creative wound and the shadow in writing. Whatever pain you can't get rid of, make it your creative offering. Susan Kaine, Bittersweet. The more we long for something, the more extreme our desire, the more likely it is to have a shadow side. For those of us who love books, the author life may well be a longheld dream, and thus it is filled with shadow. Books have long been objects of desire, power, and authority. They hold a mythic status in our lives. We escaped into stories as children. We studied books at school and college. We read them now for escape and entertainment, education and inspiration. We collect beautiful books to put on our shelves. We go to them for solace and answers to the deepest questions of life. Writers are similarly held in high esteem. They shape culture, win literary prizes, give important speeches, and are quoted in the mainstream media. Their books are on the shelves in libraries and bookstores. Writers are revered, held up as rare, talented creatures, made separate from us by their brilliance and insight. For biblophile children, books were everything, and to write one was a cherished dream. to become an author. Well, that would ### Segment 7 (30:00 - 35:00) [30:00] mean we might be someone special, someone worthy. Perhaps when you were young, you thought the dream of being a writer was possible. Then you told someone about it. That's probably when you heard the first criticism of such a ridiculous idea, the first laughter, the first dismissal. So, you abandoned the dream, pushed the idea of being a writer into the shadow, and got on with your life. Or if it wasn't then, it came later when you actually put pen to paper and someone, a parent, teacher, partner, or friend, perhaps even a literary agent or publisher, someone whose opinion you valued, told you it was worthless. Here are some of the things you might have heard. Writing is a hobby. Get a real job. You're not good enough. You don't have any writing talent. You don't have enough education. You don't know what you're doing. Your writing is derivative, unoriginal, boring, useless, doesn't make sense. The genre you write in is dead, worthless, unacceptable, morally wrong, frivolous, useless. Who do you think you are? No one would want to read what you write. You can't even use proper grammar. So, how could you write a whole book? You're wasting your time. You'll never make it as a writer. You shouldn't write those things or even think about those things. Why don't you write something nice? Insert other derogatory comment here. Mark Pierce describes the effect of this experience in his book, The Creative Wound, which occurs when an event or someone's actions or words pierce you, causing a kind of rift in your soul. A comment, even off-hand and unintentional, is enough to cause one. He goes on to say that such words can inflict damage to the core of who we are as creators. It is an attack on our artistic identity, resulting in us believing that whatever we make is somehow tainted or invalid because shame has convinced us there is something intrinsically tainted or invalid about ourselves. As adults, we might brush off such wounds, belittling them as unimportant in the grand scheme of things. We might even find ourselves saying the same words to other people. After all, it's easier to criticize than to create. But if you picture your younger self, brighteyed as you lose yourself in your favorite book, perhaps you might catch a glimpse of what you longed for before your dreams were dashed on the rocks of other people's reality. As Mark Pierce goes on to say, a creative wound has the power to delay our pursuits, sometimes for years, and it can even derail our lives completely. Anything that makes us feel ashamed of ourselves or our work can render us incapable of the self-expression we yearn for. This is certainly what happened to me and it took decades to unwind. Your creative wounds will differ to mine, but perhaps my experience will help you explore your own. To be clear, your shadow may not reside in elements of horror as mine do, but hopefully you can use my example to consider where your creative wounds might lie. You shouldn't write things like that. It happened at secondary school around 1986 or 1987, so I would have been around 11 or 12 years old. English was one of my favorite subjects and the room we had our lessons in looked out onto a vibrant garden. I loved going to that class because it was all about books and they were always my favorite things. One day we were asked to write a story. I can't remember the specifics of what the teacher asked us to write but I fictionalized a recurring nightmare. I stood in a dark room. On one side, my mom and my brother Rod were tied up next to a cauldron of boiling oil, ready to be thrown in. On the other side, my dad and my little sister Lucy were threatened with ### Segment 8 (35:00 - 40:00) [35:00] decapitation by men with machetes. I had to choose who would die. I always woke up, my heart pounding before I had to choose. Looking back now, it clearly represented an internal conflict about having to pick sides between the two halves of my family. Not an unexpected issue from a child of divorce. Perhaps these days I might have been sent to the school counselor, but it was the 80s and I don't think we even had such a thing. Even so, the meaning of the story isn't the point. It was the reaction to it that left scars. You shouldn't write things like that, my teacher said, and I still remember her look of disappointment, even disgust, certainly judgment. She said my writing was too dark. It wasn't a proper story. It wasn't appropriate for the class. As if horrible things never happened in stories or in life. As if literature could not include dark tales. as if the only acceptable writing was the kind she approved of. We were taught the prime of Miss Jean Broady that year, which says a lot about the type of writing considered appropriate. Or perhaps the issue stemmed from the school motto, so hateth she's the legend of good women. For fear of night, so she hates the darkness. I had won a scholarship to a private girl school and their mission was to turn us all into proper young ladies. Horror was never on the curriculum. Perhaps if my teacher had encouraged me to write my darkness back then, my nightmares would have dissolved on the page. Perhaps if we had studied Mary Shel's Frankenstein or HP Lovecraft stories or Bram Stoker's Dracula, I could have embraced the darker side of literature earlier in my life. My need to push darker thoughts into my shadow was compounded by my wonderful mom's best intentions. We were brought up on the principles of the power of positive thinking by Norman Vincent Peele and she tried to shield me and my brother from anything harmful or horrible. We weren't allowed to watch TV much and even the British school drama Graange Hill was deemed inappropriate. So much of what I've achieved is because my mom instilled in me a can do attitude that anything is possible. I'm so grateful to her for that. But all that happy positivity, my desire to please her, to be a good girl, to make my teachers proud, and to be acceptable to society, meant that I pushed my darker thoughts into shadow. They were inappropriate. They were taboo. They must be repressed, kept secret, and I must be outwardly happy and positive at all times. You cannot hold back the darkness. The night is dark and full of terrors. George RR Martin, A Storm of Swords. It turned out that horror was on the curriculum. Much of it in the form of educational films we watched during lessons. In English literature, we watched Romeo drink poison and Juliet stab herself in Zepharelli's Romeo and Juliet. In religious studies, we watched Jesus beaten, tortured, and crucified in the greatest story ever told and learned of the variety of gruesome ways that Christian saints were martyed. In classical civilization, we watched gladiators slaughter each other in Spartacus. In sex education, at the peak of the AIDS crisis in the mid80s, we were told of the many ways we could get infected and die. In history, we studied the Holocaust with images of scalal bodies thrown into mass graves, medical experiments on humans, and grainy videos of marching soldiers giving the Nazi salute. One of my first overseas school field trips was to the World War I battlegrounds of Fllanders Fields in Belgium, where we studied the inhuman conditions of the trenches, walked through mass graves, and read war poetry by candle light. As John McCrae wrote, "We are the dead. Short days ago we lived, felt dawn, saw ### Segment 9 (40:00 - 45:00) [40:00] sunset glow, loved and were loved. And now we lie in Fllanders fields. Did the teachers not realize how deeply a sensitive teenager might feel the darkness of that place? Or have I always been unusual in that places of blood echo deep inside me? And the horrors kept coming. We lived in Bristol, England back then, and I learned at school how the city had been part of the slave trade. Its wealth built on the backs of people stolen from their homes, sold, and worked to death in the colonies. I had been at school for a year in Malawi, Africa, and imagined the black people I knew drowning, being beaten, and dying on those ships. In my teenage years, the news was filled with ethnic cleansing, mass rape, and massacres during the Balkan Wars, and images of bodies hacked apart during the Rwan genocide. Evil committed by humans against other humans was not a historical aberration. I'm lucky, and I certainly acknowledge my privilege. Nothing terrible or horrifying has happened to me. But bad things certainly happen to others. I wasn't bullied or abused. I wasn't raped or beaten or tortured. But you don't have to go through things to be afraid of them and for your imagination to conjure the possibility of them. My mom doesn't read my fiction now as it gives her nightmares. Sorry, Mom. I know she worries that somehow she's responsible for my darkness, but I've had a safe and mostly happy life for which I'm truly grateful. But the world is not an entirely safe and happy place. And for a sensitive child with a vivid imagination, the world is dark and scary. It can be brutal and violent, and bad things happen even to good people. No parent can shield their child from the reality of the world. They can only help them do their best to live in it, develop resilience, and find ways to deal with whatever comes. Story has always been a way that humans have used to learn how to live and deal with difficult times. The best authors, the ones that readers adore and can't get enough of, write their darkness into story to channel their experience and help others who fear the same. In an interview on Writing the Shadow on the Creative Pen podcast, Michael Brent Collings shared how he incorporated a personally devastating experience into his writing. My wife and I lost a child years back and that became the root of one of my most terrifying books, Apparition. It's not terrifying because it's the greatest book of all time, but just the concept that there's this thing out there like a demon and it consumes the blood and fear of the children and then it withdraws and consumes the madness of the parents. I wrote that in large measure as a way of working through what I was experiencing. I've learned much from Michael Brent. I've read many of his excellent books and he's been on my podcast multiple times talking about his depression and mental health issues as well as difficulties in his author career. Writing darkness is not in Michael Brent's shadow and only he can say what lies there for him. But from his example and from that of other authors, I too learned how to write my shadow into my books. 23 years after that English lesson in November 2009, I did Nanorimo, National Novel Writing Month, and wrote 5,000 words of what eventually became Stone of Fire, my first novel. In the initial chapter, I burned a nun alive on the gats of Vinasi on the banks of the Ganges River. I had watched the bodies burn by night on Pers from a boat bobbing in the current a few years before, and the image was still crystal clear in my mind. The only way to deal with how it made me feel about death was to write about it. And since then, I've never stopped writing. Returning to the nightmare from my school days, I've never had to choose between the two halves of my family, but the threat of losing them remains a theme in my fiction. ### Segment 10 (45:00 - 50:00) [45:00] In my arcane thriller series, Morgan Sierra will do anything to save her sister and her niece. Their safety drives her to continue to fight against evil. Our deepest fears emerge in our writing, and that's the safest place for them. I wish I'd been taught how to turn my nightmares into words back at school, but at least now I've learned to write my shadow onto the page. I wish the same for you. Questions. What did books and writing mean to you earlier in life? Do you recall comments or experiences that might have become your creative wounds? How might these hold you back as a writer now? How can you move past them? What are your nightmares? Have you written them into your stories? Can you trace the origin of why you write what you do? 2. 3 The shadow in traditional publishing. If becoming an author is your dream, then publishing a book is deeply entwined with that. But as Mark Pierce says in the creative wound, we feel pain the most where it matters the most. Desire highlights whatever we consider to be truly significant. There is a lot of desire around publishing for those of us who love books. It can give you validation that your writing is good enough, status and credibility, acceptance by an industry held in esteem, the potential of financial reward and critical acclaim. Support from a team of professionals who know how to make fantastic books. a sense of belonging to an elite community, pride in achieving a long-held goal, resulting in a confidence boost and self-esteem. Although not guaranteed, traditional publishing can give you all these things and more. But as with everything, there is a potential shadow side. Denying it risks the potential of being disillusioned, disappointed, and even damaged. But remember, forewarned is forearmmed, as the saying goes. Preparation can help you avoid potential issues and help you feel less alone if you encounter them. The myth of success and the reality of experience. There is a pervasive myth of success in the traditional publishing industry perpetuated by media reporting on brand name and breakout authors. Those few outliers whose experience is almost impossible to replicate. Because of such examples, many new traditionally published authors think that their first book will hit the top of the bestseller charts or win an award as well as make them a million dollars or at least a big chunk of cash. They will be able to leave their job, write in a beautiful house overlooking the ocean and swan around the world attending conferences while writing more best-selling books. It will be a charmed life. But that is not the reality. Perhaps it never was. Even so, the life of a traditionally published author represents a mythic career with the truth hidden behind a veil of obscurity. In April 2023, the book seller in the UK reported that more than half of authors, 54% responding to a survey on their experiences of publishing their debut book, have said the process negatively affected their mental health. Though views were mixed, just 22% described a positive experience overall. Among the majority who said they had a negative experience of debut publication, anxiety, stress, depression, and lowered self-esteem were cited with lack of support, guidance, or clear and professional communication from their publisher among the factors that contributed. Many authors who have negative experiences around publishing will push them into the shadow with denial or self-lame, preferring to keep the dream alive. They won't talk about things in public as this may negatively affect their ### Segment 11 (50:00 - 55:00) [50:00] careers. But private discussions are often held in the corners of writing conferences or social media groups online. Some of the issues are as follows. Repeated rejection by agents and publishers may lead to the author thinking they are not good enough as a writer which can lead to feeling unworthy as a person. If an author gets a deal, the amount of advance and the name and status of the publisher compared to others create a hierarchy that impacts self-esteem. A deal for a book may be much lower than an author might have been expecting with a low or no advance and the resulting experience with the publisher beneath expectations. The launch process may be disappointing and the book may appear without fanfare with few sales and no bestseller chart position. In the book seller report, one author described her launch day as a total wasteland. You have expectations about what publication day will be like, but in reality, nothing really happens. The book may receive negative reviews by critics or readers or more publicly on social media, which can make an author feel attacked. The book might not sell as well as expected and the author may feel like it's their fault. Commercial success can sometimes feel tied to selfworth and an author can't help but compare their sales to others with resulting embarrassment or shame. The communication from the publisher may be less than expected. One author in the book seller report said, "I was shocked by the lack of clarity and shared information and the cynicism that underlies the superficial charm of this industry. " There is often more of a focus on debut authors in publishing houses. So those who have been writing and publishing in the midst for years can feel ignored and undervalued. In the book seller report, 48% of authors reported their publisher supported them for less than a year with one saying, "I got no support and felt like a commodity, like the team had moved on completely to the next book. " If an author is not successful enough, the next deal may be lower than the last. Less effort is made with marketing and they may be let go. In the book seller report, six authors, debut and otherwise, cited being dropped by their publisher, some with no explanation. Even if everything goes well and an author is considered successful by others, they may experience imposter syndrome, feeling like a fraud when speaking at conferences or doing book signings, and the list goes on. All these things can lead to feelings of shame, inadequacy, and embarrassment, loss of status in the eyes of peers, and a sense of failure if the publishing career is not successful enough. The author feels like it's their fault, like they weren't good enough. Although, of course, the reality is that the conditions were not right at the time. A failure of a book is not a failure of the person, but it can certainly feel like it. When you acknowledge the shadow, it loses its power. Despite all the potential negatives of traditional publishing, if you know what could happen, you can mitigate them. You can prepare yourself for various scenarios and protect yourself from potential fallout. It's clear from the book seller report that too many authors have unrealistic expectations of the industry. But publishers are businesses, not charities. It's not their job to make you feel good as an author. It's their job to sell books and pay you. The best thing they can do is to continue to be a viable business so they can keep putting books on the shelves and keep paying authors, staff, and company shareholders. When you license your creative work to a publisher, you're giving up control of your intellectual property in exchange for money and status. Bring your fears and issues out of the shadow. Acknowledge them and deal with them early so they do not get pushed down and reemerge later in blame and bitterness. Educate yourself on the business of ### Segment 12 (55:00 - 60:00) [55:00] publishing. Be clear on what you want to achieve with any deal. Empower yourself as an author. Take responsibility for your career and you will have a much better experience. questions. What dreams do you have or did you have around traditional publishing? What are the pros and cons of traditional publishing for you? Why do you value traditional publishing? What triggers you in this area? What do you get angry about or deny exists or criticize in other authors or rant about in private? How do you feel when you compare your author career to others? How might those feelings reveal something about your shadow? How can you make your publishing experience more empowering? 2. 4 The shadow in self-publishing or being an indie author. independent indie author can be a fantastic proactive choice for getting your book into the world. Holding your first book in your hand and saying, "I made this is pretty exciting. " And even after more than 40 books, I still get excited about seeing ideas in my head turn into a physical product in the world. Self-publishing can give an author creative control over what to write, editorial and cover design choices, when and how often to publish, and how to market. empowerment over your author career and the ability to make choices that impact success without asking for permission. Ownership and control of intellectual property assets resulting in increased opportunity around licensing and new markets. Independence and the potential for recurring income for the long term. autonomy and flexibility around timelines, publishing options, and the ability to easily pivot into new genres and business models. validation based on positive reader reviews and money earned. Personal growth and learning through the acquisition of new skills resulting in a boost in confidence and self-esteem. A sense of belonging to an active and vibrant community of indie authors around the world. Being an indie author can give you all this and more. But once again, there is a shadow side and preparation can help you navigate potential issues. The myth of success and the reality of experience. As with traditional publishing, the indie author world has perpetuated a myth of success. in the example of the breakout indie author like Eel James with 50 Shades of Gray, Hugh Howe with Wool or Andy Weir with The Martian. The emphasis on financial success is also fueled online by authors who share screenshots showing six figure months or seven figure years without sharing marketing costs and other outgoings or the amount of time spent on the business. Yes, these can inspire some, but it can also make others feel inadequate and potentially lead to bad choices about how to publish and market based on comparison. The indie author world is full of just as much ego and a desire for status and money as traditional publishing. This is not a surprise. Most authors, regardless of publishing choices, are a mix of massive ego and chronic self-doubt. We are human, so the same issues will reoccur. A different publishing method doesn't cure all ills. Some of the issues are as follows. You learn everything you need to know about writing and editing only to find that you need to learn a whole new set of skills in order to self-publish and market your book. This can take a lot of time and effort you did not expect and things change all ### Segment 13 (60:00 - 65:00) [1:00:00] the time, so you have to keep learning. Being in control of every aspect of the publishing process, from writing to cover design to marketing, can be overwhelming, leading to indecision, perfectionism, stress, and even burnout as you try to do all the things. You try to find people to help, but building your team is a challenge, and working with others has its own difficulties. People say negative things about self-publishing that may arouse feelings of embarrassment or shame. These might be little niggles, but they needle you nonetheless. You wonder whether you made the right choice. You struggle with self-doubt, and if you go to an event with traditional published authors, you compare yourself to them and feel like an impostor. Are you good enough to be an author if a traditional publisher hasn't chosen you? Is it just vanity to self-publish? Are your books unworthy? Even though you worked with a professional editor, you still get one-star reviews and you hate criticism from readers. You wonder whether you're wasting your time. You might be ripped off by an author services company who promised the world only to leave you with a pile of printed books in your garage and no way to sell them. When you finally publish your book, it languishes at the bottom of the charts while other authors hit the top of the list over and over, raking in the cash while you are left out of pocket. You don't admit to overspending on marketing as it makes you ashamed. You resist book marketing and make critical comments about writers who embrace it. You believe that quality rises to the top and if a book is good enough, people will buy it anyway. This can lead to disappointment and disillusionment when you launch your book and it doesn't sell many copies because nobody knows about it. You try to do what everyone advises, but you still can't make decent money as an author. You're jealous of other authors success and put it down to them selling out or writing things you can't or using AI or using a ghostriter or having a specific business model you consider impossible to replicate. And the list goes on. When you acknowledge the shadow, it loses its power. Being in control of your books and your author career is a double-edged sword. Traditionally published authors can criticize their publishers or agents or the marketing team or the bookstores or the media. But indie authors have to take responsibility for it all. Sure, we can blame the algorithms or social media platforms or criticize other authors for having more experience or more money to invest in marketing or attribute their success to writing in a more popular genre. But we also know there are always people who do well regardless of the challenges. Once more, we're back to acknowledging and integrating the shadow side of our choices. We are flawed humans. There will always be good times and bad and difficulties to offset the high points. This too shall pass. As the old saying goes, I know that being an indie author has plenty of shadow. I've been doing this since 2008, and despite the hard times, I'm still here. I'm still writing. I'm still publishing. This life is not for everyone, but it's my choice. You must make yours. Questions. What dreams do you have or did you have around self-publishing or being an indie author? What are the pros and cons of self-publishing for you? Why do you value self-publishing? What triggers you in this area? What do you get angry about or deny exists or criticize in other authors or rant about in private? How do you feel when you compare your author career to others? How might those feelings reveal something about your shadow? How can you make your experience more empowering? ### Segment 14 (65:00 - 70:00) [1:05:00] 2. 5 The shadow in work. You work hard, you make a living. Nothing wrong with that attitude, right? It's what we're taught from an early age. And like so much of life, it's not a problem until it goes to extremes. Not achieving what you want to work harder. Can't get ahead? Work harder. Not making a good enough living? Work harder. People who don't work hard are lazy. They don't deserve handouts or benefits. People who don't work hard aren't useful. So, they are not valued members of our culture and community. But what about the old or the sick? the mentally ill or those with disabilities? What about children? What about the unemployed, the undermployed? What about those who are or will be displaced by technology? Those called the useless class by historian Uval Noah Harrari in his book Homodus. What if we become one of these in the future? Who am I if I cannot work? The shadow side of my attitude to work became clear when I caught CO in the summer of 2021. I was the sickest I'd ever been. I spent 2 weeks in bed unable to even think properly. And 6 weeks after that, I was barely able to work more than an hour a day before lying in the dark and waiting for my energy to return. I was limited in what I could do for another 6 months after that. At times I wondered if I would ever get better. Jonathan kept urging me to be patient and rest, but I don't know how to rest. I know how to work and how to sleep. I can do active rest, which usually involves walking a long way or traveling somewhere interesting. But those require a stronger mind and body than I had during those months. It struck me that even if I recovered from the virus, I had glimpsed my future self. One day I will be weak in body and mind. If I'm lucky, that will be many years away and hopefully for a short time before I die. But it will happen. I am an animal. I will die. My body and mind will pass on and I will be no more. Before then, I will be weak. useless. Before then, I will be a burden. I will not be able to work. But who am I if I cannot work? What is the point of me? I can't answer these questions right now because although I recognize them as part of my shadow, I've not progressed far enough to have dealt with them entirely. My months of co gave me some much needed empathy for those who cannot work even if they want to. We need to reframe what work is as a society and value humans for different things. Especially as technology changes what work even means that starts with each of us. Illness affliction of body and soul can be lifealtering. It has the potential to reveal the most fundamental conflict of the human condition. The tension between our infinite glorious dreams and desires and our limited vulnerable decaying physicality. Conny's ve the inner work of age shifting from role to soul. Questions. [snorts] What does work mean to you? Where have those opinions come from? How will you define yourself if you cannot work? What aspects of work might be in your shadow? What might be some healthier ways to look at work? Are there changes you can make in your life now to incorporate these? 2. 6. The shadow in money. ### Segment 15 (70:00 - 75:00) [1:10:00] In the Greek myth, King Midas was a wealthy ruler who loved gold above all else. His palace was adorned with golden sculptures and furniture, and he took immense pleasure in his riches. Yet, despite his vast wealth, he yearned for more. After doing a favor for Dionis, the god of wine and realry, Midas was granted a single wish. Intoxicated by greed, he wished that everything he touched would turn to gold. And it was so. At first, it was a lot of fun. Midas turned everything else in his palace to gold, even the trees and stones of his estate. After a morning of turning things to gold, he fancied a spot of lunch. But when he tried to eat, the food and drink turned to gold in his mouth. He became thirsty and hungry and increasingly desperate. As he sat in despair on his golden throne, his beloved young daughter ran to comfort him. For a moment, he forgot his wish. And as she wrapped her arms around him and kissed his cheek, she turned into a golden statue frozen in precious metal. King Midas cried out to the gods to forgive him to reverse the wish. He renounced his greed and gave away all his wealth and his daughter was returned to life. The moral of the story, wealth and greed are bad. In Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, Ebeneza Scrooge is described as a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner. He's wealthy, but does not share. Considering Christmas spending to be frivolous and giving to charity to be worthless, he saved by a confrontation with his lonely future and becomes a generous man and benefactor of the poor. Wealth is good if you share it with others. The Gospel of Matthew 25 14-30 tells the parable of the bags of gold in which a rich man goes on a journey and entrusts his servants with varying amounts of gold. On his return, the servants who multiplied the gold through their efforts and investments are rewarded. While the one who merely returned the gold with no interest is punished. For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them. Making money is good. Making more money is even better. If you can't make any money, you don't deserve to have any. Within the same gospel in Matthew 19:24, Jesus encounters a wealthy man and tells him to sell all his possessions and give the money to the poor, which the man is unable to do. Jesus says, "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God. Wealth is bad. Give it all away and you'll go to heaven. With all these contradictory messages, no wonder we're so conflicted about money. How do you think and feel about money? While money is mostly tied to our work, it's far more than just a transactional object for most people. It's loaded with complex symbolism and judgment handed down by family, religion, and culture. You are likely to find elements of shadow by examining your attitudes around money. Consider which of the following statements resonate with you or write your own. Money stresses me out. I don't want to talk about it or think about it. Some people hoard money so there is inequality. Rich people are bad and we should take away their wealth and give it to the poor. I can never make enough money to pay the bills or to give my family what I want to provide. Money doesn't grow on trees. ### Segment 16 (75:00 - 80:00) [1:15:00] It's wasteful to spend money as you might need it later. So, I am frugal and don't spend money unless absolutely necessary. It is better and more ethical to be poor than to be rich. I want more money. I read books and watch TV shows about rich people because I want to live like that. Sometimes I spend too much on things for a glimpse of what that might be like. I buy lottery tickets and dream of winning all that money. I'm jealous of people who have money. I want more of it and I resent those who have it. I'm no good with money. I don't like to look at my bank statement or credit card statement. I live off my overdraft and I'm in debt. I will never earn enough to get out of debt and start saving. So, I don't think too much about it. I don't know enough about money. Talking about it makes me feel stupid, so I just ignore it. People like me aren't educated about money. I need to make more money. If I can make lots of money, then people will look up to me. If I make lots of money, I will be secure. Nothing can touch me. I will be safe. I never want to be poor. I would be ashamed will never go on benefits. My net worth is my selfworth. Money is good. We have the best standard of living in history because of the increase in wealth over time. Even the richest kings of the past didn't have what many middle-class people have today in terms of access to food, water, technology, healthcare, education, and more. The richest people give the most money to the poor through taxation and charity, as well as through building companies that employ people and invent new things. The very richest give away much of their fortunes. They provide far more benefit to the world than the poor. I love money. Money loves me. Money comes easily and quickly to me. I attract money in multiple streams of income. It flows to me in so many ways. I spend money. I invest money. I give money. I'm happy and grateful for all that I receive. The shadow around money for authors in particular. Many writers and other creatives have issues around money and wealth. How often have you heard the following and which do you agree with? You can't make money with your writing. You'll be a poor author in a garrett, a starving artist. You can't write good quality books and make money. If you make money writing, you're a hack. You're selling out. You are less worthy than someone who writes only for the muse. Your books are commercial, not artistic. If you spend money on marketing, then your books are clearly not good enough to sell on their own. My agent, publisher, accountant, partner deals with the money side. I like to focus on the creative side of things. My money story. Note, this is not financial or investment advice. Please talk to a professional about your situation. I've had money issues over the years. Haven't we all? But I have been through a long process to bring money out of my shadow and into the light. There will always be more to discover, but hopefully my money story will help you or at least give you an opportunity to reflect. Like most people, I didn't grow up with a lot of money. My parents started out as teachers, but later my mom, who I lived with along with my brother, became a change management consultant, moving to the USA and earning a lot more. I'm grateful that she moved into business because her example changed the way I saw money and provided some valuable lessons. ### Segment 17 (80:00 - 85:00) [1:20:00] One, you can change your circumstances by learning more and then applying that to leverage opportunity into a new job or career. Mom taught English at a school in Bristol when we moved back from Malawi, Africa in the mid80s. But I remember how stressful it was for her and how little money she made. She wanted a better future for us all. So she took a year out to do a master's degree in management. In the same way, when I wanted to change careers and leave consulting to become an author, I spent time and money learning about the writing craft and the business of publishing. I still invest a considerable chunk on continuous learning as this industry changes all the time. Two, you might have to downsize in order to leap forward. The year my mom did her degree, we lived in the attic of another family's house. We ate a lot of one pot casserole and our treat was having a Yorkie bar on the walk back from the museum. We wore handme-down clothes. And I remember one day at school when another girl said I was wearing her dress. I denied it, of course, but there in the back was her name tag. I still remember her name, and I can still feel that flush of shame and embarrassment. I was determined to never feel like that again. But what I didn't realize at the time was that I was also learning the power of downsizing. Mom got her degree and then a new job in management in Bristol. She bought a house and we settled for a few years. I had lots of different jobs as a teenager. My favorite was working in the delicates because we got a free lunch made from delicious produce. After I finished A levels, I went to the University of Oxford and my mom and brother moved to the USA for further opportunities. I've downsized multiple times over the years, taking a step back in order to take a step forward. The biggest was in 2010 when I decided to leave consulting. Jonathan and I sold our three-bedroom house and investments in Brisbane, Australia, and rented a one-bedroom flat in London so we could be debtree and live on less while I built up a new career. It was a decade before we bought another house. Three, comparison can be deadly. There will always be people with more money than you. Oxford was an education in many ways and relevant to this chapter is how much I didn't know about things people with money took for granted. I learned about formal hall and wine pairings and how to make a perfect gin and tonic. I ate smoked salmon for the first time. I learned how to fit in with people who had a lot more money than I did. and I definitely wanted to have money of my own to play with. Four, income is not wealth. You can earn lots but have nothing to show for it after years of working. I learned this in my first few years of IT consulting after university. I earned a great salary and then went contracting, earning even more money at a daily rate. I had a wonderful time. I traveled, ate, and drank, and generally made merry, but I always had to go back to the day job when the money ran out. I couldn't work out how I could ever stop this cycle. Then I read Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiasaki, a book I still recommend, especially if you're from a family that values academic over financial education. I learned how to escape the rat race by building and accumulating assets that pay even when you're not working. It was a revelation. The poor dad in the book is a university professor. He knows so much about so many things but he ends up poor as he did not educate himself about money. The rich dad has little formal education ### Segment 18 (85:00 - 90:00) [1:25:00] but he knows about money and wealth because he learned about it as we can do at any stage of our lives. Five. Not all investments suit every person, so find the right one for you. Once I discovered the world of investing, I read all the books and did courses and in-person events. I joined communities and I upskilled big time. Of course, I made mistakes and learned lots along the way. I tried property investing and renovated a couple of houses for rental. with more practical partners and skilled contractors. But while I could see that property investing might work for some people, I did not care enough about the details to make it work for me. And it was certainly not passive income. I tried other things. My first husband was a boat skipper and scuba diving instructor, so we started a charter. With the variable cost of fuel, the vagaries of New Zealand weather, and our divorce, it didn't last long. From all these experiments, I learned I wanted to run a business, but it needed to be online and not based on a physical location, physical premises, or other people. That was 2006 around the time that blogging started taking off and it became possible to make a living online. I could see the potential and a year later the iPhone and the Amazon Kindle launched which became the basis of my business as an author. Six. Boring automatic saving and investing works best. Between 2007 and 2011, I contracted in Australia where they have compulsory superanuation contributions, meaning you have to save and invest a percentage of your salary or self-employed income. I'd never done that before because I didn't understand it. I'd plowed all my excess income into property or the business instead. But in Australia, I didn't notice the money going out because it was automatic. I chose a particular fund and it autoinvested every month. The pot grew pretty fast since I didn't touch it. And years later, it's still growing. I discovered the power of compound interest and time in the market, both of which are super boring. This type of investing is not a get-rich quick scheme. It's a slow process of automatically putting money into boring investments and doing that month in month out, year in, year out automatically for decades while you get on with your life. I still do this. I earn money as an author entrepreneur and I put a percentage of that into boring investments automatically every month. I also have a small amount which is for fun and higher risk investments but mostly I'm a conservative risk averse investor planning ahead for the future. This is not financial advice so I'm not giving any specifics. I have a list of recommended money books at the creativepen. com/moneybooks if you want to learn more. Learning from the shadow. When I look back, my shadow side around money eventually drove me to learn more and resulted in a better outcome so far. I was ashamed of being poor when I had to wear handme-down clothes at school. That drove a fear of not having any money, which partially explains my workcoholism. I was embarrassed at Oxford because I didn't know how to behave in certain settings and I wanted to be like the rich people I saw there. I spent too much money in my early years as a consultant because I wanted to experience a rich life and didn't understand saving and investing would lead to better things in the future. I invested too much in the wrong things because I didn't know myself well enough and I was trying to get rich quick so I could leave my job and be happy. But eventually I discovered that I could grow my net worth with boring long-term investments while doing a job I loved as ### Segment 19 (90:00 - 94:00) [1:30:00] an author entrepreneur. My only regret is that I didn't discover this earlier and put a percentage of my income into investments as soon as I started work. It took several decades to get started, but at least I did eventually start. My money story isn't over yet, and I keep learning new things. But hopefully my experience will help you reflect on your own and avoid the issue if it's still in shadow. Questions. Which of the statements about money in this chapter resonate with you? Which of the statements and words trigger you or make you angry or upset? What are your memories around money? What are your fears about money? What words do you use about money and rich people? Are those words you would like to use about yourself if you were in that situation? What does your family say about money? How are those attitudes reflected in your behavior around money? What does your culture say about money? Friends, education, religion, media. What is your money story? Reflect upon how things have changed over time and what lessons you have learned so far. Are you financially educated? If not, why not? Why haven't you spent time learning about money? How might this impact your future? How do you push money away? How do you reject it? How could money be a good thing for you and your author career? How can you change your attitude towards money to be more positive and achieve your financial goals? So, I hope you found the chapters useful from writing the shadow and that you can make some time to perhaps delve into these things in the year ahead. It's easy to do the busy work, but sometimes the most transformative thing is to explore more deeply. You can find the book in all formats on all platforms. And there's also the special foiled edition and workbook as well as bundle deals and the other formats at creativepenbooks. com. Let me know what you think about today's show. Please leave a comment on the podcast show notes at the creativepen. com or on the YouTube channel at thecreativepen or email me joanna@thecreatpen. com. Also, please send me pictures of where you're listening or your favorite cemetery or churchyard. Next Monday, I'm talking about selling books live on social media with Adam Bezwick. And remember, if you want to transform your author business in 2026, I have one more January webinar left for business for authors this weekend, Saturday, 24th of January. Details at thecreativepen. com/live li. And that's where I put uh links to all the places I'm speaking. In the meantime, happy writing and I'll see you next time. Thanks for listening today. I hope you found it helpful. You can find the backlist episodes and show notes at thecreativepen. com/mpodcast. And you can get your free author blueprint atthecreativepen. com/bloopprint. If you'd like to connect, you can find me on Facebook and X at thecreative pen or on Instagram and Facebook @ jfpenauthor. Happy writing and I'll see you next time.