Reinventing the Creative Life with Aaron Ryan: Reinvention, resilience, and life unfiltered

Some people reinvent themselves once, some reinvent themselves twice. And then there are those people, like today's guest. People who reinvent themselves every time life asks them to and sometimes long before it does.Creativity isn't a straight line. It's a series of chapters. Some beautiful, some painful, all necessary, just like life.Sometimes the bravest thing in creator can do is to walk away from a space that no longer feels like home and build something new from the ashes. Like the phoenix rising. Today's guest has done that again and again.And each time he's emerged with a new voice, a new story, and a new way of seeing the world. Today we're going to have a conversation about how you can find your inspiration and your muse. I'm your host, Michael Hurst.Welcome to one more thing before you go. Today I am joined by someone whose creative life reads like a novel. Aaron Ryan, bestselling and award winning author.He's a voice actor, he's a speaker, and he's a man who has lived more creative lives than most of us can even imagine. He's a writer of 41 books. Yes, I said that correctly, 41 books.He's had multiple works adapted for the screen, won awards at film festivals, narrated his own audiobooks and. And he walked away from some toxic spaces to reclaim his creative voice, which I think we all want to do. Aaron, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me. What an intro. I'm so flattered.

You earned it. I mean, you know, you earned. You took all the steps, you climbed, you climbed the ladders, you ran through the obstacles and here you are.

Here I am. I wouldn't say unscathed, but maybe, maybe changed.

Changed, always changed. It's like Bruce used to say, every step, every failure is a learning lesson. Every learning lesson is building upon the next one.And the only pitfall is if you stop climbing, you stop achieving, then life stops and you can't have that. Right.

Yeah, that's actually a maxim that I've been teaching my 10 year old. I've got two boys, 10 and 6. They're my pride of my life.And one of the things we were talking about recently was you fail your way towards success, you consistently fail your way towards success. I don't know if someone famous said that, but I'm saying it now. So here we go.

You're close. That's another. I follow Bruce Lee because his philosophies helped me to overcome and rehabilitate through eight different operations.Learn to walk again. So his thing is, every step to failure is A building block to success. Yeah, that's what he states. And it is. It's 1,000% true.But hey, I like to start at the beginning. What got you started as a writer? And I know that from what I've learned, you were a writer. Seven years old.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I would say that it was accidental, except that it was an assignment.So all of our origin stories were assigned something or other, whether it's powers we don't know what to do with, or homework. In my case, it was homework. And Mrs. Walker gave our second grade class an assignment to write a book. And you know, we're not specialists.We don't have any accolades. We have no history or track record of writing books. It was just kind of slapped together something that you think you can do and do it.So I wrote a little novella called the Electric Boy. College rule. Paper, three hole punch, crude construction paper, surround cover back and crude stick figure drawings. Total copyright infringement.Plagiarism. Ripoff of Alan Dean Foster's ET Novelization at the time, but put my own spin on it.And I just remember holding it in my hand when I was done and going like, oh my gosh. You know, I made this. Look at this. And it really showed me the power of creation from a very early age.I then read the Lord of the Rings and I was just. I was hooked on reading and writing.

Because it just, it blew my mind from that perspective. Is that what puts you into more of the creativity path that you have taken into fantasy and.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. I'm. I'm predominantly right brained. No one said there'd be. Math is a phrase I've said often, you know, with dismay.No one said to be math, but, you know, I could count two plus two. I know it equals chicken. I just, I'm much more of a right brain. I've always been that way. I have to create.I thrive in positions where, where I do get to create and where it's not simply, you know, rigor or routine.

Right. I think we all need that in our lives. I mean, it's a.Unfortunately, what we're seeing in today's day and age is a lot of putting the performing arts, the creative aspects of life on the side burner for right now. And any, any time that we can grasp a hold of any portion of creative arts, whether it be writing, drama, dance, music, anything along that line.Art, I think, is an opportunity for us to grab a hold of who we are as a human being and how we're connected to the, to the Universe, I think.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean I, I'm a firm believer in God as the ultimate creator.And, and I get to, I get to echo that, I get to reverberate some of that and, and replicate that act and art of creation. It's amazing.And so in this stage of day and age, of a day and age of AI where people are outsourcing their creativity to a chip and surrendering that God given right, it's, it's like, man, it's, we're in a hard time.

Yeah, I understand that. My, I grew up in a newsroom. My father was a journalist and you know, you, you, you did, you wrote your first as an assignment at 7 years old.My father put a typewriter in front of me when I was six to teach me how to, how to type. And I'm talking about, wow, not the electric kind of, that kind of gives a little bit of my age away. Yeah.You know, I, I remember going down to the newsroom with him and you know, listening to and seeing all these, these, these reporters just typing away and you know, pulling paper out and stacking it down and watching the stories come to life, at least from a news perspective. To me at that time, all I saw was these people creating this, these pieces, these articles, these news articles and so forth.So yeah, he introduced it to me in a really early age. I, I found value in that. I think that people who can, can write. Especially you coming with 41 books, that's a lot of books.We'll talk about that in a few minutes. But you know, you, you, you have the muse in you. It's almost like that song. You have the muse in you, not that muse instead of music. Right?

Yeah. Well, 42 is tomorrow's the 26th. Yeah, 42 and 43 drop tomorrow. So those, those will be added to the publishing stack.I just, everything I've done, Michael, as, as far as vocations go, since I've been, you know, not, not a, you know, a temp job like a Dairy Queen or a paper route or something like that, but every vocation I've had, every career path has always been about storytelling. So I mean, that tells you something.

Well, I, I, and that's brilliant because I mean, you've been an author.Well, you're obviously an author now, but you've been a voice actor, wedding videographer, a musician, a, a producer, a worship leader, a tech support, executive assistant.I mean, I think those chapters probably shaped the storyteller you are today because like you said, you live stories you told stories from different perspectives. Video perspective, audio perspective, visual perspective.

Yeah, it's been. It's all about leaving a legacy. I love leaving legacy.I love a trail behind you that says, you know, this person was here, or this is what they gave, or blah, blah, blah. One of the greatest legacies that I'm just. I'm so proud of, and I. It's the greatest story I've ever written is. Is one that is a living document.It's actively continuing every single day. And it is a journal that I've kept for both of my sons. They're now 10 and 6.When Brennan, my oldest, was 2 months old, I started writing this journal. And it's basically a journal of virtually every day. I've done it virtually every single day, except for, like, weekends.And maybe I'll miss a day here and there that records who they are, who we are as a family, what we've done, where we've gone, lessons learned, milestones, monuments and. And memories.And I cannot wait to give this story, which will be arguably my penultimate story to them when they're 18, you know, 21, whatever, just to show them how front of mind they were in my life. That's my greatest story.

That's brilliant. Actually, I think that we don't tell stories like that enough. We don't.I mean, look, way back when, you'd sit around a fire and everybody would tell us stories. You'd listen to stories from your grandparents, your great grandparents, and they'd pass those down.You know, I was very lucky enough to have been friends with Native American community. And I've gone to powwows.I've gone to story storytelling, quote, unquote storytelling, where you'd have an elder go up and tell the stories and pass them on. We don't do that enough. We don't do that enough.You're brilliantly doing it the way you're doing it because, you know, giving your kids something like that at 18 years old, instead of waiting until you're 70 or 80 and then going, what do I remember? And trying to, you know, and trying to put it down on paper, that's. That's really cool. From one dad to the other. That's really cool, actually.

Thank you. Yeah, it's something I was given. The example was set for me, so it was something I just decided to replicate. It was a sweet woman who I call.She's basically a second mom. And she had several of these kids who were young adults at the time in a college group in our old church. She did this for us every single day.And I'm doing it for two kids. She did it for. I think there were nine or ten of them, you know, every single day. Kept individual journals for each of them.

What an amazing. That's amazing. Yeah.

She set that example for me.

Yeah. That's an amazing person. Amazing person. I know we have some bumps in the road. You left a toxic online voiceover community. I know that.You did voiceovers. You can hear that in your voice while we're talking, actually, you know, you said you walked away. Did that open up.Did that open up a floodgate of creativity? What. What happened?

Oh, my gosh, absolutely. I mean, everything was just kind of waiting in the wings, waiting to happen. I, you know, I wouldn't say it's.I wouldn't put the label rat race on it, but it is, you know, of sorts, a little bit of a rat race. There is what I affectionately like to call an Illuminati at the top of the voiceover food chain.And I think I spent far too many years trying to kiss the butts of the people at the top and gain acceptance into their little clique in their circle to be allowed to speak and teach and be recognized by the mucky monks. And it went nowhere.It was a corporate ladder rat race where in the end, I was never going to be, and I was always going to be an anomaly on the outside looking in, I found out what they really thought of me.And when you don't fit into someone's boxes and you don't, you know, you're a square hole, square hole in a round peg and round peg in a square hole, whatever it is, you just don't work. You don't blend with them. And he had. The guy at the top, had his harem of.Of women that he would keep around him and say what he wanted to hear and blah, blah, blah. And I just was never going to get into that.And I realized it finally as a light bulb, watershed, epiphany moment, whatever you want to call it, and said, you know what? I'm done. And I pulled the rug out from everything that I had, the foundations of everything that I laid, coaching, training, networking.I pulled all of it down like a house of cards. And I sat back in my chair and I did have that what have I done? Moment. I did have that, to be honest.But it opened up a Pandora's box of so much creativity and so many opportunities for creativity, including storytelling and returning to my first love, which was authoring. So I'm so Glad I have no regrets whatsoever.

Well, I mean, you wouldn't think that there would be a talk, I guess, in everything, in every, in every organization, no matter what it happens to be. I guess there's that hierarchy in there that could be toxic at times.And you always have the people at the top that want to stay at the top, you know, and don't necessarily appreciate those coming in at the bottom, you know, anymore because they want to keep where they're at, which is, you know, unfortunate life in general. Was there a moment when you realized that I'm not just a creator, I'm a storyteller?Was it that moment that you kind of said, I am a storyteller more so than having to read somebody else's stuff?

No, not. I mean, it definitely wasn't that moment.It, it occurred very early on in my life and I mean, I was writing a full on full length novel, feature length novel, when I was in my early 20s, in the early 90s, and it did not represent the direction of my life, the desired direction of my life at the time. So I actually hit the delete button on it. And I wish to God that I had not done that because I was nearly complete with that novel.But everything I've done, like I said earlier, it's just. They've all attested to storytelling, whether it's been wedding videography or corporate videography or memorial videos for.For elderly folks, or preserving video cassettes on DVD voiceovers is telling a story. Authoring is the purest form of telling a story. I've just always known, I guess.

Well, you know, I think it's nice when we can find our purpose in life and really understand it and grasp it. It gives a better understanding of enjoying our life from, from there, I think.

Yeah, it's definitely enjoyable. They say, find what you love to do, you'll never work a day in your life, right?

Exactly. Exactly. Thousand percent. You've written and published 41 books. Two more coming out tomorrow. That's extraordinary. That's all I can say.What keeps inspiring you to write another book? And why did you. There's gonna be a twofold question or otherwise I'll forget. Why did you create series?Because are they more difficult to keep track of each one of them? No.

Well, to answer the first question, every book is my love language is giving. And so Christmas time, the tree is loaded with presents underneath. I cannot wait for my wife and my sons to open up what I've got for them.It's just such a magical pursuit. Every book is A magical pursuit of wanting to go ahead and share with the world what I've created. I just absolutely love that process.Series are different and more difficult because you don't like. For me, I'm a pantser. It's an organic style of writing. We fly by the seat of our pants.And so I don't quite know the entire story arc as I'm going on. I find it out as I'm writing.Just as you will when you're reading is difficult because you have to keep track of so many more details as you're going on. Characters, timelines, traits, developments in the story, blah, blah, blah. But it's always worked out.And I love that about the whole story writing process is it's always actually worked out. I've never pigeonholed myself in a corner and had to control Z my way backwards and get out of there.

Well, and I think that that within itself, it allows you the freedom that you need to be able to create. Well, it's like. Like how I told you we do under my podcast. I like the organic nature of it.What, you know, the conversation will take us where we need. Where it needs to go. Do you kind of get that. That same feeling when you're writing a book? It.Because I know that again, telling you, my father was a journalist. I used to watch him outline his story. He went point A to point B, to point C to point D, kind of.I think in a nutshell, it was a little more depth than that. But, yeah, Flying by the seat of your pants. Does that make it more difficult overall?You just don't want to go into the plot point one all the way to the end.

No, I think it makes it a little bit more dangerous, but it also, therefore makes it more adventurous. And art imitates life. You're going to a wedding, you're going to get a flat tire that you didn't anticipate.And so these things happen to us and we roll with the punches. I want the same thing to happen to my characters. I'm going to throw a monkey wrench.There's an author, I forget who it was, who said the goal of every author should be to get their protagonist up a tree and then throw rocks at them. And then how they fare reveals a lot about that protagonist, its character development in the utmost primal degree.Um, so, no, I. I don't really know how it's going to go, but I love that I don't because then it just becomes an adventure of discovery each time.

From my perspective, I had to Smile a lot because I had to go after some kids that went up in tree or were throwing rocks at people and that was fun trying to get them down because we had to call the fire department. Oh, no. So.

Wow.

So that's how that story played out. Wow. So I had to grin. Sorry. Flashback memory.

Yeah.

You kind of. It's almost like writing a screenplay. And I'm familiar with that genre very well, actually.So one of your books are being pitched to major streaming network, I think through one of the other interviews that I had seen you on or one of the conversations that you had and two others that have already been adapted and have won awards at some film festivals. What does it feel like to see your stories come alive on screen like that?

Oh, my gosh. Well, I haven't seen them come to life yet. They are definitely in screenplay form. And so it's every indie author's dream to see your.Your book become a movie. That's every indie author's dream. And it would be so wonderful to do that. I don't know when that will happen, but several of them.There have been three that have been adapted thus far. One is actively being pitched to streaming networks. There are two others that have been entered into the film festival circuit.So they're winning entrants into the festivals, they're garnering awards. And I've got two more that are going to be following that same path.In the end, the goal is to just get someone to notice it, a producer to notice it somewhere who has enough faith in the screenplay to say, let's make a movie out of this, or let's make a streaming series out of this. I would just be on cloud nine if that happened.

Now, who it it is, I. I'm going to come at you from that creative perspective as well.I, When I was still with the police department, then afterwards I created two international film festivals and ran five screenwriting conferences in Las Vegas. So I'm really familiar with that. The whole arena between the film festivals as well as screenwriting and are you having somebody else?Did they offer to write the screenplay? Did they pitch you to write the screenplay?

Well, both. One of them, I actually didn't write it myself. I actually kind of.You could call me a co writer, but I was really offering feedback based on the book to the person who really, from that perspective, put it down in print. The first one, Dissonance Volume one Reality, that was independent of the other four. He wrote it himself. He is a Hollywood fellow.He's accredited, he's on IMDb and he's won awards in the Hollywood system. So I vetted him thoroughly, found out that he was legit. He produced it. And. And I don't have, you know, Hollywood contacts. I have nobody.I have no idea who to pitch it to. I have no idea.

Yeah.

And log lines and treatments and blah, blah, blah. He's created all of that and he's actively out there working it. So that's cool. It's been wonderful.

Yeah. That's gotta be. That's a. That's a nice feather in your cap. It really is.

Yeah.

Again, I mentioned, it's a tight knit circle and it's hard to get into, so kudos for that, man. That's pretty cool.

Thank you.

You're a dual storyteller. You're an author of the voice actor. How do those two worlds feed each other? I mean, we all. We get this visual of what a voiceover artist does.I'm familiar with it from a filmmaking perspective.Most people see it on TV or they see it in a film where they see somebody up to a microphone and they got a little ear over there and they're reading the lines and this kind of a thing. Right. How did you. How do you make that work between yourself? Do you fall into that. That voice in your head?

A little bit. I mean, people are always asking you, hey, do Donald Duck, you know, or do Mickey Mouse, whatever. It's anyway.And all the different characters that you see, Batman, do, Megatron, I don't. I don't do a lot of character animation work. I don't do that. You can see my son peeking through the window back there, by the way.Hope that's not too distracting.

No.

I have my little sign that I've. That my little flip sign that says do not disturb. But do they disturb? Yes, they do.

I'm a dad. It's okay. My pod, Aaron, my podcast is about life, a unique about life. So, you know, life happens. Right. It's all good.

There's two little lives right out there. Exactly. Yeah. It's what I love about it is that being a voiceover artist and an author, it is unique.I'm a little bit of an anomaly in that regard because most are either or if they do both, I love that I get to be a dual storyteller. I do love that I can go back there in that studio behind me and I can go record UnitedHealthcare.I'm the voice of UnitedHealthcare right now, by the way. And so that's wonderful. And it's. It's very lucrative. Then I can come back here and I can actually, you know, pour out.I'm telling someone else's scripts in there, telling their story. Then I come back here and I get to tell my own. And I so much more prefer this one obviously, but I love that they're on dual tracks.I love that I can do both.

That's a good, that's a good opportunity within itself. How does AI now AI obviously AI has exploded immensely and in all arenas.So I still have a lot of context within the film industry and that entertainment side of it. And I know that they're very frustrated and SAG and after are all working towards AI protections with regard to that.Do you think it's eroding your voiceover opportunities and or has anything to do with your books? Is it complicating? Do you use AI to help?

No, I will never use AI to structure any part of my books. I cherish this God given gift of creation far too much to renounce that or surrender it to a chip or outsource it to these systems.Maybe it's a pride issue as well and that I just take great pride in this gift that I've been entrusted with. AI has definitely impacted the voiceover industry negatively.It has caused a lot a severing of a lot of cherished long time relationships I've had with beloved producers and partners. It has cherished and separated or it has separated me from jobs that I've had for years.I've enjoyed long standing, you know, ongoing projects with companies for years that either the producer I worked with has been replaced by AI or the higher ups in that company have now said let's just use 11 labs or respeecher or speechalo instead of a human being. So our income has nose dove, if that's the word. It's taken a nosedive and it forced me to pivot back to voiceovers.Sorry, back to authoring from voiceovers. But on the other side, authoring is not immune from it either.You're seeing the dumbing down of the marketplace and the proliferation of AI into the authoring offerings of books that are written by AI So people don't know what, what is human, what is anymore.

I think Amazon, I mean correct me if I'm wrong, but we can touch upon self publishing. But I think Amazon has some protocols.My daughter had written a book and so just recently actually and she would, she had to go through all this stuff with us and has this been any AI used to help this?You know, I don't remember all the questions that they were asking her, but they kept asking her about artificial intelligence and whether or not, you know, any chapters were written, the titles were written, anything else contributed to the. To the context of the book and so forth. Do you think that plays a heavy factor? I mean, you self publish.Do you self publish through Amazon or you do you do a different world?

No, I actually publish what's called Wide.So you go through Kindle Direct Publishing, and you can also go through, like, Draft 2 Digital and IngramSpark and Barnes and Noble Press, and, you know, all those things. Ultimately they. They do ask questions, you know, like, has this been supplemented or augmented by the use of AI?Is that something that factors into the creation of your book? And you do have to answer, but I mean, people are not beholden to answer yes or honestly to that question if they have.So, you know, it's just one of those things where we are constantly. We're battling with this truth that we know that we have written this book ourselves and we have not used AI the people who haven't.And yet, you know, you could be accused of being AI just by someone's simple interpretation or lack of understanding of the nuances of AI. So it dilutes the offerings out there in the book industry. It creates suspicion, it pits authors against each other. I use AI. No, you don't.Yes, you do. And it's created a lot of consternation that really didn't need to be there.AI is an unregulated wild west of technology that really needs to be reined in, I believe.

Well, I think in totality, in all aspects of the creative universe, I think it needs to be done that way. I do have actor friends of mine that are afraid is going to take over their job.And when you look at when I was going to asu, the dot system that they use in Avatar and all these others, films like that, where you watch actors who are in front of a green screen and they've got all the electronic dots all over them and the character's created off the actor.

Correct.

But it still limits. There's still limitations on them really knowing you or your face. If I could say, yeah, that was me, I did that when it wasn't me.And I didn't do that kind of a thing. But so I know actors who are getting frustrated even with that aspect of it.

Big difference between CGI and AI. Motion capture, Mocap, Andy Circus performing Gollum was covered in those dots in order to bring Gollum to life.But there's A huge difference between CGI and AI. And the problem is that when you have, there's a lack of consent, there's a lack of accreditation to all the people that AI has been trained on.There's a lack of, of remuneration, you know, for those original creators.And so right now you have companies like Sea Dance that are being sued because they have created a rooftop video of Brad Pitt having a fist fight with Tom Cruise and neither of them acted in that. It is entirely AI. It is 100,000% believable and people are being misled and their likeness is being used without their consent. So it's crazy.

That's crazy. Yeah. I have not heard of that one yet. Wow, that's crazy. In talking about self publishing, how do you compare that to traditional publishing?Back again, I'm going to age myself. Back when my father was trying to get his novel published, he passed before he could. It was a traditional publisher.He had to send a query in, you had to send a letter in. Can say, yeah, let me see it.And then you send that in and then you have to wait either for a rejection letter or yeah, well, blah, blah, blah to move forward now, you know. Plus they take a lot of money. Publishers, regular publishers. Let's talk.Can we talk a little bit about the self publishing versus traditional publishing?

Yeah, I totally prefer indie publishing every day of the week and twice on Sunday. Self publishing, indie publishing is, allows so much freedom. So there's obvious pros over traditional publishing.Granted, you get with a traditional publisher, HarperCollins, you know, Simon Schuster, whoever, and they're going to do some marketing for you. They're going to foot the bill. They're going to have an expansive marketing and distribution chain and promotions and all that stuff. Great.If you get that. Awesome. I have not wasted any more effort or breath trying to get on board with a trad pub, as they're called because of these few reasons.One, I can get the book to market much quicker, much quicker. I can command higher royalties. I retain all of my rights, I retain all creative control.I can pick my own branding, my own marketing team, my own editors.There's just, you know, those are some of the reasons why it's just for as a freelancer and an entrepreneur, I much prefer to go my own way, you know, to make my own mark.And the mistaken assumption I think a lot of people make with indie publishing is, or with traditional publishing rather, is that they're going to do all the marketing for you. Well, no, you're going to do some of Your own marketing because you're enthusiastic about your book. So self publishing.Oh no, I'm going to have to do all my marketing. Well, you would do the same thing with being traditionally published.So the only trade off that I really, those five or six things I listed, those are the biggest trade offs that I really personally can't stomach. But my books having been self published, if a big trad pub came today and said, hey, you've done well with Dissonance Volume one reality.Let us take the ball, you know, further from this point forward. I go, sure, have at it. You know, it's already been out there in the market, so go ahead, we'll see.

Well, I mean you, you, you've done your own creative marketing with your own stuff.

Yeah.

I mean you marketed all your books, you've created the stuff that I've been watching on you and some of your other conversations that you've had. You, you pride yourself in the fact that you've been, you've been your own marker.

Yeah, but I enjoy it. So I'm a little bit of an anomaly in that regard.A lot of people don't like, like, oh, I got to toot my own horn and it's like, you know, forget marketing. Put that term aside and just be an enthusiast. Like I'm holding up a copy of my, of my box set of Dissonance. This is six books in one.And I designed this, I wrote the whole, the whole book. I did the layout, I had the box set produced. This is mine and I'm incredibly enthusiastic about this.So rather than me going and saying, hey, buy my book, buy my book. I can just tell you how excited and passionate I am about this wonderful story in here.And that's less of an arm twisting proposal than you've got to buy my book. It's right here and it's only this price. I just have to be passionate about it. Wouldn't you be passionate about it if you wrote it?

Oh, absolutely, I agree with that. I mean, I think that's a great marketing idea in the first place. And most authors probably overlook that.You know, one of the most, as an individual that brings authors on this show, you know what I hate the most in regard to that and what frustrates me and sometimes I've even stopped the interview is because the first thing that comes out of their mouth is and you say, you know, like I did with you iron, where'd you grow up? Where's the story start? And they say it's in the book and it's like, well, you got to give us a little more than that kind of a thing.

Throw me a bone.

And it. I think that you, you're right. You have an enthusiastic opportunity as to. I wrote this, I created this came out of my mind, my heart and my soul.And you know, there's something I'm going to share with the world. It's a lot easier to accept and say, yeah, I think I want to kind of check that out.

Yeah, well, I mean, yeah, it's, it's a wonderful process. I love it.

You said there's difference between a hobbyist in an entrepreneur which separates the two?

Well, one of the biggest things is, is the difference between expenses and investments. I think a lot of people perceive anything they have to spend. And I've been there, you know, I. Some cases, I still am there with some things.But, but I think one of the biggest things that is a misperception is that this expense that you are expending, you know, to promote your book is only that an expense. If you change and tweak your mindset to reflect that as not an expense but an investment, you'll go a lot further.That's a long term mindset that you can begin to practice right now that allows you to look beyond this present circumstance and see this money that you're parting with as not a want but a need. You need to do this in order to get it out there in front of people.That's a difference that I think I didn't, I wasn't really privy to until, I don't know, later on in my entrepreneurial pursuit. But that's a big difference is the ability to see short term and long term hobbyist and entrepreneur.Another one is, you know, goal setting, time management mantras and mission statements, things like that that you can begin to adopt as an entrepreneur that your average hobbyist just really doesn't. It doesn't enter their, their personal zeitgeist. You know, they just kind of go forward and do routine things, but they don't have vision.That's another thing that a business, a person or a freelancer or entrepreneur has is vision. As opposed to just, I'm going to write a book and see how it goes. No, no, I want this to pay my mortgage someday. I have vision for this.

Well, I think that's important.I mean, from any creative perspective, it's nice to know that we're, number one, going to leave a legacy, either in print or visual or audible from any one of those perspectives. We all want to do that. We want to be remembered for that. But it's like in anything, you have to be able to manage what you're doing as well.You have to have a business sense as well. Because if you're doing it yourself, you're your own businessman, right?

Yeah. Yeah.I used to be a voiceover business coach, and that was part of the problem was I just, you know, I was not being recognized by the voiceover Illuminati, as it were. And so it was so hard to just have all of this desire to share and to encourage and teach and be refused, you know, on the outside looking in.But one of the things I always told people was, was you have to treat your hobby like your identity is a business person in terms of voiceovers, a business person who just happens to do voiceovers. I am a business person who just happens to write books.So if I can treat it that way, then I've got the business that I can put my craft on, business first, craft second, and then I can take my craft places. I can take it somewhere with this business vehicle. That's not something that a lot of.It's not easy for a lot of people to wrap their head around that.

Now, do you do. Do you. Book signing. Do you go to. Do you go to bookstores? Do you. Do you do all of that gamut?

Yeah, I do, but I personally, I so much prefer not book fairs, but vendor markets and craft fairs. Book fairs were all authors clamoring for the attention of the readers going by. And we're not unique in that regard.So at vendor markets and craft fairs, I have a lot of success going out there and pitching my book to people. There's blown glass artisans right here, and there's photographers over here and there's, you know, pottery over here and T shirt makers, author.You know, I'm. I'm unique in that crowd. And it just works really well done.

Sells great marketing here, and I love.

Meeting the readers live. I love it.

Well, I think that helped. Do you think any of them have given you any positive, you know, opportunities to say, hey, yeah, I think I'll take my next novel in that direction?Or that's a really good idea. Maybe I'll develop a character like that.

Oh, my gosh, yes. So the, the series I just finished, Talisman, Halcyon, Sorry, the series is called Talisman. But the latest two novels in the.In the Talisman series are called Nexus and Halcyon. And those were by far the hardest books I've ever written. I don't know why, but Serious writer's block.Well, at a festival in January this year called Squatch Fest, they celebrate Sasquatch and aliens and things like that. Paranormal.I saw someone there that I had seen last year as a 15 year old kid who had all kinds of ideas when I, you know, started to tell him what my story was about and he said, you know what you could do? You could do this, you know, and add this in. And I was really struggling with that book. So I listened to him and went, wow, that's a great idea.So I put him in there, I put his ideas in there and he shared with me like a crazy username that he had. I incorporated that username in the book and his sister's username and stuff.It's just you kind of a tip of the hat to them and a great thanks for your help with the book. So I do get ideas.

Yeah, yeah, that's very cool. I think that afterwards they, they would recognize that in the novel and kind of go, yeah, yeah, I help with that. That was pretty cool. That was me.Yeah, I did that. I did that. Hey mom, you gotta buy me the new Nintendo. Because I did that. Kind of famous now for writers listening.What's the biggest mistake people make when starting or structuring a novel or even getting started?Because I think, you know, in watching my father do was one of those things where between work and family and everything else, his biggest struggle was trying to find out, like how to start it, when to start it.

Well, I think the biggest struggles that face aspiring artists or aspiring authors or kids in the 21st century is number one. AI, are you, you have to decide from the outset. Are you going to let AI write your novel for you?Because an editor is going to have a real hard time bringing out your voice, your signature voice, if it's not there to begin with. You are, you know, outsourcing your greatest gift, creativity to AI.So decide from the outset if you really want to go that route or if you want to use it as a tool, a supplemental tool for like perhaps idea generation, you know, limit your usage. That's the one thing. The second thing I would say is slow down.We so are looking forward to publishing dates and getting our books out there and sharing it with the world. We can go way too fast and commit way too many errors and typos and glaring plot holes.You have to allow enough time for, you know, your own self, read through after you're done, your editor narrating the audiobook. If you're going to do that because that's when you catch the lion's share of the remaining errors and typos and things. Go slow, slow down.This is a crock pot, not a microwave. Writing a book is a crock pot process.

And I think that in itself, it's almost like any creative project, whether it be authoring or whether it be painting. You can't rush through a painting. You can't rush through a screenplay. You can't rush through in a play. You can't fast forward through the play.

No. Yeah.

Or even a song. You could sing it really fast, but it doesn't mean the same thing. Right? Patience is, you know, patience is a virtue in this regard.Take your time and make it right. Make it better for all of us. In, in. In. What was it like when you first. You got your first book published?I mean, you know, help us understand the excitement, the enthusiasm. You talk about the enthusiasm earlier.I meant that I wrote a note while you were talking about that saying, you know, you're enthused about bringing this up. You're enthused about this six book, you know, thing that you got. What'd that feel like?

Wow. Well, the very first book that I published was something that I eventually unpublished, and it was an autobiography, and I think I was 30 years old.You don't write an autobiography and publish it when you're 30. You're like, you know, a third of your life or half of your life is. Is what's gone by. And so there wasn't much to tell.You know, it was like a little bit of an audacious project. But to see it published, to hold it in my hand and go, wow. I love legacy. I love creating things that last, that other people can partake of.And I was.It was an inspiring process, but really the first dipping of my toes in this publishing stream and the authoring genre, the great tributary and river of authoring, was my voiceover books. I wrote six, published six of them. They're business guides, mix of business and satire. And the first one I published was in 2017.I loved that process. I loved being able to produce it and then share it with voiceover colleagues and aspiring voice actors.To get it back in the mail, to get the proof was one thing.But to get, you know, 10, 20 copies of this book in the mail and go and see all these things that you can then share with people, it was such a thrilling process again, to hold it in your hands and go, I made this, you know, and it'll last for all time. It's so Cool.

That's pretty slick. That's, that's gotta feel good. Done. And you're done. In your heart and your soul is your wife. Can I touch on?Does your wife and your kids love what you're doing?

Yeah, well, I think my wife is a little tired of editing books about aliens. I don't blame her because she went through the dissonance saga, but then she edited the end and she's edited several others. The kids love it.They're 10 and 6, so they love aliens. And they've got my speech memorized that I share at these vendor markets where I tell people the synopsis of. Of dissonance.They have it all memorized, you know, and they very cool, you know, they're cute little voices telling people, yeah, daddy's books about gorgons that have a telepathic paralytic, you know, and I'm like, Those are big $10 words for a 10 and 6 year old. But they haven't memorized.

That's cool. That's awesome. That's how you're just being a good dad. See, you're teaching them imagination still exist and that.Yeah, that we all have that opportunity. Speaking of opportunity, we have a lot of opportunity for people to get all these books and get in touch with you and find out more about you.And where can they find them?

Well, right there at the bottom. Yeah. Author aaronryan.com on a fluke, I think I was mispronouncing this in so many interviews early. So I said to be clear, it's not awful. Aaron Ryan.It's author aaronryan.com and so, you know, you could find all the things there. There's news about the screenplays. There's the library of my entire, my entire library of books. There's a page for videos.There's a store link where you can buy all the books. And I will send them to you directly with a personalized note, not just a signature. Aaron Ryan, you know, send you the book. No, I don't do that.I write a very personal thank you include a pen and a bookmark. And so ship those out to you from. Direct from me. And then on the bottom are the links to, you know, virtually all the social media links.So you can find everything@authoraronryan.com and I like to direct people to author aaronryongroup.com which is my private and exclusive Facebook group where you can find tips if you're an author, hear about discount codes, giveaways, blah, blah, blah.

Well, I'll make Sure. That's all in the show notes.And I will add that other one with your permission as well, so that you, everybody can just click it and take it right to you.I'm sure that, that what an amazing opportunity that people will have to, number one, get to learn more about you, your books, your characters, the Gorgons, the aliens and the multitude of opportunity. So I'll make sure it's all right there.

Thank you.

Aaron just says one more thing before we go. So before we go, any words of wisdom for anyone wanting to follow this path?

Yeah, well, I have two that I always give and I think that they're just. They're tried and true and tested. I use them as mantras. So the first one is, is from a movie I like to pretend does not exist.And that is Star Wars 1, the Phantom Menace. A young Anakin or a young Qui Gon Jinn said to a young Anakin Skywalker, your focus determines your reality.And I absolutely love that phrase, your focus determines your reality.That mantra has come true many times in my life, and so right now I'm trusting that it'll come true because authoring doesn't currently pay the bills. I am a voiceover artist who also does authoring, but one day that script will flip and I will be an author who also does voiceovers.

There you go.

Yeah. Your focus determines your reality. The other one is equally as important.I was given it by a casting agent and she said someone's endorsement of you, or lack thereof, has very little to do with your trajectory as an author or an aspiring author.You want the sales, you want the positive reviews, you want the podcast opportunities, you want the speaking opportunities, you want the networking, you want the exposure that'll all come. But you may get negative reviews, you may get barren stretches of no sales.Someone's endorsement of you, or lack thereof has very little to do with your trajectory. I know my trajectory, and it is forward as an author to this great thing called, you know, continued authoring and success.

Brilliant words of wisdom. I think they. Both of them. Thank you for sharing both of them. I've never had anybody give me two of them. So that's.

I told you I was an anomaly.

That's first. It works. Well, thank you very much for reaching out.It's been great getting to know you and I really thank you for your sharing, your journey and your wisdom. We could talk for so much more.What we'll do is I have to have you back on because obviously you're continuing to write and you're continuing to put things out and new things out, new projects out. So we'll have to revisit.

Love to. Yeah. Thank you so much for the opportunity. I really appreciate it.

It's been fun listening to Aaron. We're reminded that creativity isn't a distinction.It's a journey of reinvention, a journey of courage, a journey of choosing your voice again and again, even when the world tries to drown it out. And maybe that's the real lesson here. Your story doesn't end when a chapter closes. Sometimes that's exactly where it begins.So that's a wrap for today's episode. I hope you found inspiration, motivation, and a new perspective to take with you.If you enjoyed this conversation, be sure to like subscribe and follow us and stay connected. You can find us on Apple, Spotify and your favorite listening platform. And you can head over to YouTube and catch the full video version as well.I'm Michael Hurst and have a great day. Have a great week and thank you for being part of our community.

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