[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello authors.
[00:00:01] Speaker B: I'm Joanne Morell, children's and young adult.
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Fiction writer and author of short nonfiction for authors. Thanks for joining me for the hybrid.
[00:00:09] Speaker B: Author podcast, sharing interviews from industry professionals to help you forge a career as a hybrid author, both independently and traditionally publishing your books. You can get the show notes for each episode and sign up for your free author pass over at the hybrid author website to discover your writing process, get tips on how to publish productively, and get comfortable promoting your books at www. Dot.
[00:00:34] Speaker C: Let's crack on with the episode.
[00:00:42] Speaker A: Hello authors.
[00:00:45] Speaker C: I hope you're all keeping well in whatever part of the world you reside and listen to. The podcast in today's interview is with Amina Al Sharif on generative AI for authors, and we chat about what a generative AI engineer is, the benefits and threats authors face now and in the future via using or not using generative AI, Amina's tips for authors looking to implement generative AI within their business assets and author identities Amina's fiction series and so much more so in my author adventure this week, it has just still been another very busy week of creating my Kickstarter campaign. It was coming along nicely and was really proud of the videos and that was putting together and the images and all those types of things. And then I had a meeting with my small business consultant Sonia, and was talking to her about what I'm doing for the Kickstarter and she gave me some really good tips and pointers and which made me think just along the way that I'm marketing what I'm doing and yeah, so I also hadn't received the print books. I'd received a proof copy. So I was kind of in the printing house that I've gone through local printers in Perth. They, as I said, a few weeks back they dropped off a physical copy to me, but they don't buy it wasn't bound. So it was kind of held together by an elastic band, which, you know, probably didn't look too professional for the campaign with the video and with the imagery and stuff like that. So I thought, well, I'm gonna get the books. I got them yesterday and they look absolutely amazing. Quite a few boxes came, so it was a small print run, but it's always novel, especially getting them delivered to my door, which hasn't really been, has it been something? I'm not sure if I've had that before, but it was quite funny because I opened the door to the delivery driver and he kind of had his face half hidden. And actually, this is the benefits of going local, people. When he pulled his face down, it turned out to be a good friend of mine who hadn't seen for a long time, was the delivery driver. So I was like, what are you doing? And, yeah, so, you know, personal touch, getting it personally delivered to my door and also by a personal friend of mine. So all those little things just made this experience of, you know, printing local all the more special. You know, it's not something you think of. So that was really cool. And the books look fantastic. Really good quality. Very, very happy with them. Really, really pleased. So those books are all good to go. I've got the ebook and the audiobook. Ebook's fairly standard. I do that myself. Audiobook, even though it's fiction, I'm considering recording it myself, and I'm not sure yet whether that is a good thing or a bad thing. I think I'm not faced. I wouldn't, I don't think I'd try and do any silly accents or anything like that. But then, you know, and because I know my book so well, I don't know. I don't know. I just feel. And because I do audio, I know it's different, fiction's different, but, you know, as long as you read in an animated voice, I don't know. Jacqueline Wilson, who's a really well known author in the UK, she's been the children's laureate. I love her books, and I've listened to a few audio books that she has narrated and, I mean, it's children's fiction, but just, yeah, it feels more special when the author's reading it. I find, considering that I haven't really looked into it otherwise. And to be honest, if I was to get someone else now, I don't think there'd be enough time. And I am offering the audiobook in the Kickstarter, so it kind of needs to be done. And so all the formats are in place. And the Kickstarter that I'm offering, I will be able to tell you all the details next week and fully what I'm offering on there, because it isn't just the books that I'm offering for the Kickstarter, and it's not just a beautiful book that I want to make. I've already made the book beautiful. I don't want to do all these fancy designs and things, which a lot of authors use Kickstarter for. That's really, you know, the platform is a crowdfunding platform to get projects and ideas off the ground. And I've had quite a grand one and it's quite a pricey one. That's why I want to run a Kickstarter, because I'm already up for all the costs of my book as a self publisher. This other project, to know that there's a market for it first before I would go out and buy any kind of products for it. So looking forward to sharing that with you next week. The Kickstarter campaign, I was going to launch on the 1 July, which is Monday, unfortunately. Yeah, as I said, because the print books have only just arrived and you've got about like a week, a week and or a bit deadline. You've got to put your Kickstarter campaign in for review. And I just, there was a couple of little bits and pieces. I thought, you know what? Take, take the pressure off, push it back another week, and then I'll have all my print books. I'll be able to use them in the marketing video. I'll have all this extra time to tweak the campaign to suit the marketing angle I'm going for, which is kind of book clubs and larger groups of book lovers and friends and things like that. So I'm happy with that decision. So the 1 July, which would have been the launch for the Kickstarter campaign, is now the review. So I will have it ready and be able to submit to Kickstarter. They'll, they review it, I guess, to make sure that you comply with their rules and things like that. And then I will be launching the following week. So next week is largely, you're going to see me on social media an awful lot next month promoting the Kickstarter and my new book. Hope you'll support and I hope you'll follow along or certainly pass me over to people who you feel that what I'm doing would suit their tastes and their needs. So next week is going to be a cover reveal and also a countdown to the actual official launch. And I'm really excited. I've gone through all the things and yeah, I just can't wait. I can't wait to see how it's received. And, you know, I know there'll be a bit of nerves about putting it out there, but at the end of the day, it's a case of I'm doing it because it's either people want it, want this product and this idea that I'm putting out or they don't. It's as simple as that. It's not the book. The book is happening regardless. It's more of an immersive experience into the book via friendship and things. So more to come on that and yeah, school holidays. This is the last day of school today. So halfway through the year and two terms down, shout out to all the parents, all the writers with kids, and I know how that goes. And I'm just happy that I'm gonna have this pretty much lockdown, I guess, the Kickstarter campaign, and really, this holidays will be mostly marketing for me, I don't think I'll probably crack open any writing projects. I have plans to do the next in series of this women's fiction before any other projects now that will be at the forefront, my young adult fiction. I'm still thinking that I might get it finished by the end of the year to be able to submit to traditional publication that we had open that I just had a critique for. But we shall see, we shall see. So, yeah, lots of heads down, bums up doing fun things with this Kickstarter, and I can't wait to share all next week.
So there you have it, folks. The amazing Amina al Sharif on generative AI for authors. And it was such an interesting conversation with Amina and hearing her perspectives. I'd heard something she'd said before about other stuff, was kind of brand new. And, I mean, I'm still at the very, very beginning of call it genitive author adventure, and I'm not opposed to it. I just don't know. I need to learn how I can have it serve my business author business in terms of people are using it for admin tasks and stuff like that. And I just, I know from the information that I've already gathered, which is going along to this conference that they had in Perth, or a whole one day conference, and listening to other authors in the sphere. And yeah, it's an exciting tool, but one that I hopefully compensates authors for the use of their work or just anybody for the use of their work. People and all the issues get ironed out, so it's used ethically and people are properly compensated. That's, you know, my goal. But yeah, I'm excited for the tools. I think they'll be good, good for certain things. And at the moment, the most I've used it for myself is to almost like a thesaurus in a way, asking for specific synonyms for specific words to do with characters. And also, yeah, that's been about it, just just sort of bouncing off ideas when I've thought of some stuff and then seen what it comes out with in case there's other stuff that I haven't thought of in terms of word use.
[00:09:44] Speaker B: Thorn creative where beautiful websites for authors are brought to life. No matter what stage you're at with your writing, your stories deserve a dedicated space to shine. Whether you're just starting out or have a bookshelf full of bestsellers, your website is the hub of your author business. Finding everything you and your books offer together, Thorne creative can nurture all aspects of redesigning your old site or start afresh from the initial design. They can provide ongoing hosting and maintenance to marketing your books online, saving you time, money, and stress trying to wrangle your site yourself. An author website built by Thorne Creative can easily direct readers to your favorite retailers, your publisher, or simply set you up to sell to them direct. The options are endless. Thorne Creative have worked with many authors across all genres and know what goes into good, functional working author websites. To sell books, head on over to thorncreative.com dot au websitesforauthors to read author and publisher testimonials and to see what they offer and some of the sites they've created.
[00:11:12] Speaker A: Amina al Sharif is the author of the Nadiri fiction series. Originally from Cairo, Egypt, she immigrated to the United States in 2010. As a first generation Arabez American and African American, Amina is a member of the LGBTQ community as well as a BIPOC writer. Amina has worked with the Joint Special Operations Command JSOC for over ten years as a United States army officer. She is deployed to Baghdad, Iraq, northern Syria, Turkey, Israel, as well as Afghanistan, supporting the special operations community. Amina regularly blogs on medium, documenting her self taught technical career, and maintains a literary blog on her website. In January 2020, she published her first book, an approach to machine learning in cyber defense for the Department of Defense. My goodness, Amina, welcome to the hybrid author podcast.
[00:12:05] Speaker D: I'm happy to be here. Thank you for having me.
[00:12:07] Speaker A: Joanne wow, we are so thrilled to have you. You have achieved an awful lot. But how did you come to join the writing and publishing industry?
[00:12:16] Speaker D: For undergrad, I majored in computational linguistics, and so a big part of the linguistics part of my coursework has to do with copywriting, copy editing, and a lot of writing. But when it comes to writing itself, I'm actually more of an avid reader than I am a writer. But my mom used to incentivize me to write in my journal because she thought it was important for me to know how to express my feelings and my thoughts in writing when I was young and she would actually bribe me with books. So that lovely little circle of nonsense worked out quite well. I guess. In the end, because now I'm turning my focus to writing some more fiction, as opposed to nonfiction, which has been the majority of my work.
[00:12:58] Speaker A: Oh, I love that your mom used to bribe you with books. What an absolute visual that came to mind there.
[00:13:04] Speaker D: Yeah, it was a great incentive. Yay.
[00:13:06] Speaker C: Oh, goodness.
[00:13:07] Speaker A: Well, it sounds like, obviously from your bio and your nonfiction writing that you're quite technically minded. So today we're touching on your work and books and things, but generative AI for authors is the topic. So can you tell us about your current role as a generative AI engineer for people who are maybe not so tech or haven't heard of this term yet? Can you tell us what it is? What does any of that entail?
[00:13:31] Speaker D: Yeah, so most folks would be familiar with generative AI if they've used chat GPT, which I'm sure you've possibly heard of, is kind of all the rage, especially with the young folks at the moment. But generative AI is just another kind of spinoff of data science and machine learning as a field. But what it really focuses on is, at least now, nowadays in applied use cases, is the convergence of language and computation. So how much can we teach mathematical algorithms to understand the process of human language, all the way down to common patterns, cultural nuances, etcetera. So I work for Google, and so I work on Gemini, which is the kind of equivalent or answer to chat GPT. And so, yeah, that's generative AI in a nutshell.
[00:14:22] Speaker A: Yeah, I have played around with it myself. And was it barred before it went to Gemini?
[00:14:28] Speaker D: It was barred, embarrassingly enough. Google. Google has a branding, a very long track record and branding confusion, but eventually we get it right. And so that's where we at.
[00:14:39] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah, I think.
[00:14:40] Speaker A: I've got to say, I think Google was probably the first one that I did play around with the bard. Yeah, I don't know whether I've gone back when it's been Gemini, and I have to say I haven't done a lot of it, but I've watched as an author all the conversations taking place last year in the industry about it. And then I recently attended a conference that was held here in Perth, Western Australia, a couple weeks ago about AI and generative AI, and it showed you the different things that it was doing at the speed of lightning, how it advanced in, like, six months and blah, blah, blah. And it was just, you know, it sounds like this is the new revolution that's going to be taking over in terms of technology and not just in authorship. It's sort of across the way in the businesses. I guess what I'm interested to know as well is, so are you guys implement, are you putting, you're putting in data into the algorithms, like into the AI for it to be learning? Like, I just wondering where is it getting the information from and where is it being sort of taken and all that sort of stuff?
[00:15:42] Speaker D: Yeah, so that's actually a big topic in the community of discussion, is where does, where does the data come from? So, generally speaking, with machine learning models to include generative AI models, the process that, you know, machine learning models are not actually artificially intelligent. It's a little bit of a misnomer, at least very well known in data science community. The way I like to express it is machine learning is a combination of an algorithm, which is a mathematical algorithm of any kind, whether it's, you know, a linear algebraic algorithm or a statistical regression algorithm, you know, neither. It doesn't make a difference what algorithm you use, and then you introduce it to training data, and that's how you end up with something called a machine learning model. And so where that data is sourced largely across all of what we call hyperscalers. So the big tech companies is actually Internet data. And so this is where things get really exciting, but also confusing and also potentially contentious insofar as which vendors have created which models with what data. And recently I actually had a dear friend of mine, who is also an author, a published fiction author, discover that her book was included in the training of chat GPT's 3.5 models. So that the latest or four, the latest model that they have. And so amongst the author community and the writer community, and obviously the New York Times has made the headlines themselves several times, the issue around ownership and IP has become a really big topic of concern in terms of what's allowed to be used to train these models and what agency creators have over their content to be able to opt in or opt out. Right. That's incredibly important to have your own agency over your own IP.
[00:17:30] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it just feels like we're back to where it sort of started with the age of technology, how when the Internet came along and then websites and things like that, and how people can use it without stealing other people's work, and then, you know, citing people and crediting it where credit's due. I almost think, like, with AI, you know, I think from like a student learning perspective, like, so I'm not sure, I'm sure America's the same, but in Australia, like at universities, if you've got to put, like an assignment into. You've got to submit it through a sort of portal that will detect whether you've plagiarized so much of it from the Internet. Do you have something like that over there?
[00:18:11] Speaker D: Yeah. So, you know, turnitin.com and common, you know. Yeah. Common tools like that can do detection of plagiarism. It's a very kind of binary one to one mapping when it comes to does this phrase or set of words or set of phrases appear in some kind of combination of one another? That could be. And then, you know, turn it in. There's, it's, it's not simple. It's, it's a very complex rule based engine. But essentially, turnitin determines based on a threshold whether something's considered plagiarized or not. Now, the funny thing about generative AI is there is no actual plagiarism detection tool for generative AI. But what's been really interesting that we found, you know, amongst faculty, I work with education institutions all the time in my capacity at Google, is that teachers have become conditioned to recognize the kind of very generic, plain language that's used by these generative AI models. And so for the students who aren't incredibly, let's say, creative in their approach and using generative AI as opposed to, you know, prompting Bard or Gemini to produce an essay in the voice of a 9th grade high school student who may be an ESL speaker. Right. They're just prompting for, you know, the generative AI model to create some content, and it comes out very bland. Right. It's going to come out as just what the default of the model has in its kind of brain or cortex. And so that's a very interesting turn in the education field in terms of, you know, it's the calculator effect is how I equate it to. Right. So when calculators, you know, came out, now all of a sudden, you know, long division is a skill that has atrophied. And I think that about the same kind of transformation will probably happen with generative AI, where it'll elevate or force students and teachers to elevate what they define critical thinking to be and what it constitutes within an academic organization.
So I think education is long due for, at least in America. Right. The, the upgrade that it's needed. You know, our education system is very antiquated at this point. And so I think this is the generative AI kind of revolution, as they're calling it, is kind of the swift kick in the. But for a lot of folks to try to figure out, you know, what is that higher, complex level of thinking and skill sets that we now need in the workforce as well as in education, that's going to change kind of how our world looks and how it's shaped in the next five years.
[00:20:48] Speaker A: Yeah, it definitely is a revolution, I think. And part of this conference that I went to, that's what they were saying, you know, they believe that the generative AI is like, it will be the new kind of Internet, I suppose, in terms of there was websites, but now there's, and I think, I don't know if it was the mobile phones before websites, before mobile phones, but now there's this. And every business will have their own generative AI and that's, we'll be searching through them. And, yeah, it's a minefield. But no, I wonder, and I absolutely agree with you there. And that's been my thought process about the whole thing, actually, that it feels like a calculator that people can just take the answers from rather than actually giving it any thought. But I like how you put it, that we have to think above that on, yeah, a smarter level. But I just wondered whether, you know, eventually, because the responses that maybe they say students are getting, if they're prompting it for essays and stuff at the moment, might not be too clever, but eventually will be super, super clever and wondering if there'll be another software or whatever it's called, like Turnitin that comes in for to be able to tell that's generative AI, I think they're even talking about it now, I guess in the publishing and the book industry, about having, you have to maybe say this has been created, but with generative AI or buy that or something, you know.
[00:22:04] Speaker D: Like, yeah, I think for now that's probably where we're at. But just like when djing came around, right, and it switched from vinyl to electronic music or EDM or house music, you know, a lot of people initially when that type of music came out, you know, were, they were skeptical, right? This is witchcraft. Real, real music, right. Because it's being generated by, by something electronic. But at the end of the day, behind every single electronically produced thing or something produced by technology, software is a human driving it. And so that's where I think it's incredibly important to remind ourselves in the creative industry that even though these technologies are appearing, at the end of the day, the uniqueness of using those technologies for something good or to create something new is going to rely on the human that's ultimately driving that technology, and so now it's kind of even to expand it out to the workforce. It's not about, is AI going to take my job. It's about, will the people who know how to use, use AI take my job? Because that's, that's really where the technology is right now. I'm sure it'll morph in the future, but for right now, that's, that's kind of where we're at both, you know, in kind of the enterprise industry, but also in, in the creative industry, I think.
[00:23:20] Speaker A: Yeah. So I guess, like, these jobs are, what would the titles be? AI prompter or something?
[00:23:26] Speaker D: Yeah. So that's a funny, it's a funny point of debate right now. So a lot of, a lot of positions are coming out that are asking for prompt engineers. The funny thing here is that the best prompt engineer to be able to get what you need to get out of a model is not necessarily someone who comes from an engineering background, but someone who's the knowledge stakeholder, if that makes sense. So in the case of writing, right. It's going to be the writer that needs to figure out how to, and the proper term to use is prompt design, because it's really not pure engineering at all. It's really going to be the writer that's going to be that target person to essentially upskill their current skills to learn how to incorporate this technology into their craft, if that makes sense.
[00:24:13] Speaker A: No, it does. And so from, say, like, an authorship perspective, do you think, you know, there's a lot of people, and I've got to say, even myself at that conference, like, you feel a bit of fear.
[00:24:25] Speaker C: And then you feel, all right.
[00:24:26] Speaker A: You can see the potential and the excitement. And then, yeah, people.
[00:24:29] Speaker D: People are a bit that people are.
[00:24:31] Speaker A: Always scared of the unknown or new things or change. And so from an authorship perspective and being an author yourself, using it from an authorship perspective, rather than just, you are.
[00:24:41] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:24:41] Speaker A: And you find. You find. What's the benefits you're finding.
[00:24:44] Speaker D: So I guess I'm an artist to a certain extent, but I'm not a good artist. And so, actually, the, the COVID of my novel was designed by Generative AI. It took in the input was actually some calligraphy that I did with the name of the book incorporated. So, Nadiri, in Arabic. I have an arabic calligraphy background. It's just kind of a hobby I picked up, and I did use mid journey way back when, before had all these other tools available to us to help me create the COVID of my book. Right. So rather than in the traditional kind of publishing industry, having someone else create the COVID for my book, that calligraphy was very, very personal to me. The name of the book came to me while I was actually in the hospital for a mental health event that I had. And so calligraphy was one of the things that really helped soothe me while I was in treatment, and that's where the name of the book came from, and that's also where the design came from. So that's one aspect that I have been using generative AI in my writing for. I will be kind of open. There's a lot of resistance in the publishing industry to take on any pieces that might have possibly been generated by AI for. And the common excuse is, well, you know, who do we give credit to for writing this content? Do we give credit to the AI and the companies that created the AI that you use, or do we give credit to you as the creator? And I personally think this conversation is improper, you know, kind of publishing industry style just kind of dragging its feet at the moment. One artist that I think is actually doing this really well is Grimes. She's a. An electronic music indie artist, and she decided to embrace this wave with full effect, right? And she decided to license out her voice so that anyone could use her voice in a generative AI capacity to compose new songs. They just had to give her credit, and she would get part of the royalties from it. And I really love that approach because it democratizes art in a way that is really beautiful, and it opens up avenues for potentially new creativity that has never been seen before. Right? History tends to repeat itself. But the only scary part that I find about generative AI being introduced, because at the end of the day, for people who design and maintain these systems, it does come down to math, right? So that we're not dealing with an intelligent system at all. We're dealing with a system that does math really well. At the end of the day, it really comes down to, like I mentioned, that the creativity of the human behind using that technology, and now that we have that technology, it can open up so many more avenues to new types of creativity that can be introduced by people who maybe never made art before for kind of removes that blank slate or blank sheet of paper syndrome, especially for writers. If you're able to interact with this kind of assistant like feature to go from a blank page to words on a page, and then you've got something to start with, right, which is, you know, classic writer's block, this could be a massive change for how we approach and tackle writer's block. So, yeah, I have a very positive outlook about this type of technology, unlike many people who are either in the industry or out of the industry, if that makes sense.
[00:28:06] Speaker A: Yeah, no, absolutely. Do you think because you're in the industry, you've got the positive outlook or. I'm not, though. And I do see the positive. I think it's all just about understanding and playing with it. It's about understanding, being open to it and stuff like that, and making your own choices and decisions about it, rather than following the crowd or the pitchforks or the.
[00:28:28] Speaker D: Yes, with the pitchforks or the laptops. Right. And it really does come down to understanding, and there is a lot of hype surrounding generative AI, and there's a lot of misinformation and disinformation about what AI does. And so I think it's really important at this point in time, I think this level of digital literacy is going to be required in order to function in the, in the modern world. Right. So I have a two year old daughter. By the time she enters the work force, she's probably going to have to deal with this technology and more in order to be a member of the workforce and even a member of just the functioning community. Right. A lot of people are using generative AI to do basic day to day tasks like, hey, I have, you know, all of these ingredients in my fridge. What can I make with it? Right? So I think it's not only becoming something abstract that we're kind of looking at from far away and going, that's interesting. It's coming right at us. I think it's already here. Yeah, you're right.
[00:29:30] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. No, you are right. And just only from, again, that conference I went to to get an understanding as well and just to see how far it advanced in six months. But that was really what it was about, was this man trying to educate small businesses. And it wasn't just authors, it was people from all businesses that if they don't implement this sort of tool into their business, then they're going to get left behind. And it's already here. Like, he had some sort of graph, like at 30% in like, whatever percentage you would be kind of left behind, I guess, like how people had to adapt, like when their business is online, you know, when either the Internet hit or Covid hit or all that sort of stuff, it's just looking at what is current and how you can adapt your business. So in terms of, again, authorship in.
[00:30:19] Speaker C: The hybrid author podcast, what are your.
[00:30:20] Speaker A: Tips for authors looking to implement generative AI within their author businesses, you know, across our assets, their identities, things like that, to stay current, I guess with this new technology that is here.
[00:30:32] Speaker D: So the first thing that I would say is you can choose not to use the technology. Right. There are still those really well known businesses that don't exist online, but exist within their communities, and because of their either established brand or reputation, by word of mouth, they're still able to function. Right. I live in San Antonio, and probably 99.5% of all the good taco trucks that exist here don't have an online presence. So there is an option to essentially step away from the technology, educate yourself, stay current with it, but choose not to use it. And I actually think in the, in the field of authorship, just like with self driving cars, as happened with, you know, the horse and buggy, right, there will be people who choose to continue to drive cars because they enjoy to drive cars, and then there will people. There will be people who will be riding in the back of an autonomous vehicle because they prefer to use that time to do other things. I think the one thing that is really going to smack us in the face is volume. So the amount of content that authors can start producing now, in theory, can be exponentially accelerated. What I would encourage other authors to do, if they are interested in exploring generative AI, is to just. Just get started. Just get started using some of the tools. A lot of the generative tools that are out there are text based, but a lot of focus right now in the general industry is happening in the multimodal space. And I think that opens up a really interesting creative niche that I personally am exploring with my book around taking bodies of text that I might have, for example, my really descriptive scenes of scenes in Cairo that are just so beautiful and so imprinted in my memory and imprinted in my protagonist's memory that I'm planning on converting into generated images by generative AI. And then, you know, if that takes off, possibly publishing that as a. As a coffee table book, to go alongside with the book itself.
[00:32:35] Speaker A: So really cool.
[00:32:36] Speaker D: Yeah, that would be my tip, is to start thinking creatively in that kind of way and also start thinking, you know, creatively about what tools you can use and just, you know, like I said, just get started. If you want to be an informed user as an author, take a 101 course, right. It doesn't matter which one from which vendor. Just take a course so that you have a general understanding of what the tool is. It's just like you know, some people use the user manual when you open up something that you have to put together. I'm the type of person that doesn't use the user manual, and I just go break things and then reassemble them until it works. So those two different approaches are totally valid. I would just say that if, you know, as authors use generative AI, if something unexpected comes up or some kind of usage comes up that is not understood or unclear, you know, that's the point where you kind of maybe do need to read a little bit of the user manual before you continue driving. Right? That would be my recommendation, yeah.
[00:33:33] Speaker A: No, that's amazing. And it just sort of feels like, from what you were saying, like thinking about your content and how you can sort of use AI to multipurpose it, I guess when you're talking about images and then creating that into something else, and it just feels like there's expansion there, and it feels exciting talking to you about it and looking at it from that perspective, which is good, because I think a lot of people, as I said, I think they're scared because as we've discussed, the not understanding or not even have tried it yet, or just listening to the industry and the gist of it from other people. So hopefully they go out and try. Well, please, can you tell us about your fiction series and how that is going and. Yeah.
[00:34:13] Speaker D: Yeah, it's going well. I walked into the series itself started off as a single book, and the single book was just a monster. It was massive. So I broke it up into three parts, and the series itself is a mirror of my own immigration story as a first generation Arab American arriving in the United States, and I arrived on a us army scholarship to go to college. So that was a kind of my own journey going through that. And so what I was able to do was I just. I decided to make this a work of fiction, and I decided to make this a work of fiction because of a few reasons.
One being I wanted the creative space to play. So kind of take my life and consider some of the different parallel universes that could have existed simultaneously that didn't actually exist and combine them. And then the other reason why my this current trilogy is a work of fiction, despite it kind of being based on my story, is I do have bipolar one, which causes some memory loss, some pretty significant memory loss. And so when it came to writing my own story and looking back on all the journals that I had written and journal entries, which is how this all started, there were big gaps in my memory of how things had happened. And so fiction gave me the avenue to kind of fill those gaps and kind of put them out in the world and externalize them in a frankly very therapeutic way.
That's what the series is going to be. It's going to take Hagar Khalifa, the protagonist, from the point of immigration to the United States all the way through her service and her kind of journey through navigating America for the first time, navigating american universities, navigating the American south, which is an entirely kind of different journey in of itself. And I felt like the story needed to be told. Frankly, I didn't get to the point of really pushing to start querying and finding an agent and then a publisher until I got pregnant. And once I got pregnant and realized I was going to have a baby girl, it kind of hit me of like, gosh, I need to put my story out there in some kind of way. This needs to get off my chest so that maybe one day she has a little bit of understanding of why mom is the way she is and some of the background that I've gone through in my journey that I can hopefully pass on to her. And many other Arab Americans. You know, until very recently on the us census, weren't even recognized as a minority that exists at all in the United States, let alone Arab Americans that served in the military, that's an even smaller minority. And so I feel like the stories of people who have been through similar journeys to mine, and there are quite a few, those stories deserve to be told, and they deserve to have a voice.
So that's kind of the gist around the current fiction series that I'm working, working on. Wow.
[00:37:10] Speaker A: It's extremely powerful, Amina. And it sounds super inspiring and, yeah, honestly, bravo. Can you tell our listeners where they can discover the fiction series and everything you do? You know your website and everything online?
[00:37:23] Speaker D: Yeah, sure. So the series, the first book of the series is available now. You can order it off of all of the major platforms. I would encourage people to order the book through their local bookstore, as opposed to the usual places that we order books or Olibris is another place I love to order books from because they donate part of the book cost to those who can't afford books. So that's what I would recommend. You can also order it directly from my publisher,
[email protected]. and I can be found at my website. My writing website is Amina Alsharif camp. So my full name, camp. And then I'm also on Instagram. Amina writes books, and I'm also on Twitter mean and on LinkedIn as well. So those are kind of all the platforms that I currently engage my audience on.
[00:38:18] Speaker A: Amazing. Amina well, thank you so much for coming on and sharing all you have. It's been wonderful.
[00:38:23] Speaker D: Thank you so much for having me and I hope your listeners enjoy it.
[00:38:33] Speaker C: So next time on the hybrid author podcast, we have a loan or so with me and I'll be chatting on, you guessed it, how how to create a Kickstarter campaign. And that'll be me sharing everything that I've been up to so far. If anybody is out there and looking.
[00:38:47] Speaker A: To run one, I wish you well.
[00:38:49] Speaker C: On your author adventure this next week. That's it from me.
[00:38:51] Speaker A: Bye for now.
[00:38:52] Speaker B: That's the end for now, authors.
[00:38:53] Speaker D: I hope you are further forward in.
[00:38:55] Speaker B: Your author adventure after listening, and I hope you'll listen next time.
[00:38:58] Speaker A: Remember to head on over to the.
[00:39:00] Speaker B: Hybrid author website at www.hybridauthor.com dot au to get your free offer pass.
[00:39:07] Speaker C: It's bye for now.
