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 thecreativepen.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

773 of the podcast. And it is Saturday, the 28th of September 24 as I record this. In today's show, I'm talking about

writing humour into our books with Dave Cohen. And it's not just about fiction, it's also about

nonfiction, just generally bringing in some laughter or some giggles. Also, we did talk about

the book under one name, but Dave changed the name of the book

after our interview, and it is now called How to Funny Up Your Fiction, Bring Light, Shade and

Lafes to your novel. But I think a lot of the tips are also for nonfiction as well. So that's

coming up in the interview section. In writing and publishing things,

the author Nation podcast has an interview with Ernest Dempsey on how to keep a career

fresh over multiple books and over many years. Ernie is a prolific thriller author who has also

got some action-adventure series

like My Arcane Thrillers, and he talks about why he decided to switch from writing

archaeological thrillers to a golf novel. He was drawn to the story and felt it was important

to write even though it was outside his usual genre. He said, is book 24 of the Sean Wyatt

series going to break through? Is that going to be an award winner? Probably not. I wanted to do

some real art, something like a Sistine Chapel, something that would stand the test of time.

And I think this is really interesting and it's a topic I'm

going to come back to very soon in my show that I do with Orna Ross, the Alliance of Independent

Authors, the self-publishing advice show, is some of these rules we have around series,

...