Mike and Chaya sit down with author J.D. Barker, known for his gripping suspense thrillers, who reveals how being on the autism spectrum has shaped his career. Discover how neurodiversity fuels creativity as he shares his journey from ghostwriter to NYT bestseller, his lifelong passion for storytelling, and how to find your own 'superpower'.

We Also Cover:

• The Importance of Supportive Relationships
• Later In Life Autism Diagnosis
• How Autistic Mirroring Aids in Ghostwriting
• Stepping Out of Comfort Zones
• The Influence of Neurodivergent Thinking on Plot Creation
• Finding Ways to Ground Yourself to Avoid Hyperfocus
• Nurturing Creative Outlets at an Early Age
• His Autism Advocacy
• Why AI Cannot Replicate the Human Experience

Quotes:

• "The more often I did something, as uncomfortable as it might be, like putting myself in a social situation, the easier it got."
• "I realized that I could take something that some people would see as a negative and basically turn it into a positive."
• "It takes a lot to walk away from one path, to get on your own path. It takes a lot of guts to do that."

About J.D. Barker:

J.D. Barker is the New York Times and international best-selling author of numerous novels, including DRACUL, the wildly popular 4MK series, and frequently collaborates with James Patterson. He began work as a book doctor and ghostwriter, helping others fine tune their writing for publication. He would continue in this profession until 2012 when he wrote a novel of his own, titled Forsaken. Stephen King read portions of Forsaken prior to publication and granted Barker permission to utilize the character of Leland Gaunt (of King’s Needful Things) in the novel. His books have been translated into two dozen languages, sold in more than 150 countries, and optioned for both film and television. Barker resides in coastal New Hampshire with his wife, Dayna, and their daughter, Ember.

Connect with J.D.:

• https://jdbarker.com/
• https://www.facebook.com/therealjdbarker
• https://www.instagram.com/jdbarker_author/
• https://x.com/jdbarker
• https://www.tiktok.com/@jdbarker_author
• https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B005FCUYU4
• https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/8224327.J_D_Barker
• https://www.youtube.com/@jdbarker_author/featured

As always, thanks for lending us your ears and keep igniting that spark!

Stay Connected:

• Website: https://sparklaunchpodcast.com/
• ADHD Coaching & Workshops: https://www.sparklaunch.org/
• Chaya on Instagram
• Mike on Instagram
• Want To Be a Guest? https://sparklaunchpodcast.com/booking

Mike Cornell: 00:00:00

You've landed at Spark Launch the guide star for embracing what it means to be Neurodiverse. I'm Mike Cornell, joined by CEO of Spark launch Chaya Mallavaram.

Here we navigate mental health triumphs and tribulations from all across the spectrum, charting a course of the shared experiences that unite us and discovering how to embody the unique strengths within neurodivergent and neurotypical alike, igniting your spark and launching it into a better tomorrow. Hello there. I'm.

Chaya: 00:00:31

I'm Chaya.

Mike Cornell: 00:00:33

And today I really am excited to welcome on the show J.D. Barker, a New York Times and international best selling author known for his gripping suspense thrillers that often blend elements of horror, crime, mystery, science fiction and the supernatural. Crediting being on the autism spectrum as an aid in constructing plots and weaving complex structures together.

In addition to his solo projects, J.D. has collaborated with notable authors like Bram Stoker's Family on the prequel to Dracula and James Patterson on various projects. His ability to weave together different genres and create captivating stories has earned him a loyal readership and critical acclaim. Welcome, J.D.

J.D. Barker: 00:01:11

Hey, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Chaya: 00:01:13

Welcome, J.D. we are truly honored that you are on our podcast. We can believe it. So thank you so much.

I just want to start off asking, how did you find your path of being an author? And why crime? Why horror suspense? So please share your journey, how you got here.

J.D. Barker: 00:01:34

Wow. So that's one of those questions. I'm like an overnight success that took about 30 years to actually lay out. So I've been reading my entire life.

We grew up without a TV in the house and my parents were taking us to the library.

From my earliest memories or reading when I was three, and by the time I got into kindergarten, I'd read all the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mysteries and moved on to Charles Dickens and stuff like that.

I had a sister who was 15 months younger than me and I used to write stories and I would staple the pages together and I created my own little library in my room and she would check out the stories. I would charge her late fees, you know, so, like, this has been going on for a really, really long time.

And my parents, like, they always encourage the writing aspect of my life, but they kind of drilled home the fact that it's a hobby, it's something you do for fun. You can't make a living as an author. You have to get a real job when you grow up. And, you know, they hammer that point home as I got older.

So I finished up high school, I got into college Ultimately, I got a degree in finance, another one in business. I got halfway through a psychology degree, and I ended up working in the corporate world. But, you know, like, writing was always that.

That thing that would ground me, you know? So, like, I would come home from a day of work, and I would sit at my desk and I would work on stories to kind of center myself.

It was, you know, more or less a hobby during that time. Like, I guess I got to backtrack just a little bit. When I was in college, I worked for RCA Records division of bmg. And I would basically.

I was basically a glorified babysitter.

So they would have artists come into town, and I'd have to pick them up at the airport and get them to their concert, get them to the radio station, get them to their hotels, and then get them back on their airplanes when it was time for them to leave. So while I was going through college, I realized, college is expensive. I've got some very famous people in the car with me.

And I started to interview those people and sell those interviews to places like Teen Beat and Seventeen magazine, People magazine, stuff like that. I could interview a celebrity and kind of hash it up into four or five different publications and get a little bit of a paycheck.

And when you do that, when you work in newspapers and magazines, you quickly realize everybody you're working with has a novel in some stage of development in a desk drawer somewhere. It's usually about 400,000 words long. They've been working on it for 10 years in their mind.

They're almost done, but it needs just a little bit of work. I was very good with grammar and punctuation and developmental stuff.

So a lot of those people started handing those books off to me, and I would go through them, and I would give them my suggestions to fix it. And that basically turned into a side hustle that I did for almost two decades, working as a book doctor and a ghostwriter.

Initially, I just started doing that for friends and people that I worked with. And then agents got wind of my ability to do that. Editors at public publishers got a hold of me, and I basically did that at night.

So my writing kind of kept me sane while I was working 60 to 80 hours a week in finance.

sixth one hit up with around: 2012

Let's figure out a way to make this happen. Which was easier said than done because at that point, I had had the corporate gig for over two decades. I had a very n salary.

We had a big house, we had cars, we had a boat. Our lifestyle was expensive, so we couldn't just walk away from that because we had to pay for it. The monthly nut was pretty extensive.

She came up with this crazy plan. We sold everything that we owned. We bought a tiny little duplex in Pittsburgh. We rented out one side and lived in the other side.

And then basically sat down at the kitchen table and looked at our bank statement and figured out that I had about 18 months worth of savings to write that first book. I was able to walk away from the day job and do that, and I got really lucky.

The first one took off and I kind of got on that roller coaster and it hasn't slowed down. Wow.

Chaya: 00:05:05

The first thing that popped out is, in my mind is that you had such a supportive partner who recognized that. That need in you to express through writing and encouraged and was with you on that journey. That's just wonderful that you had that support.

J.D. Barker: 00:05:22

Yeah. I would have never been able to do this with.

Without my wife, you know, kind of twisting my arm to go down that path because, you know, as an autistic person, patterns and repetition are extremely important to me.

So even though I hated that day job, going to that day job every single day, knowing that I had a guaranteed salary, you know, knowing the outcome of that was, you know, something I didn't. It was a boat I didn't want to rock, you know, but. But she pulled me out of that comfort zone and forced me to have to make that change.

And I know I wouldn't have done that without her because, you know, I hadn't done it in the past. You know, I could have pulled the trigger on this at any time. You know, literally 43 years, you know, but I was 43 when she talked me into it.

And, like, it took that. That push in order to make it happen.

Mike Cornell: 00:06:02

Yeah, that's why safety people are so important, I think, when it comes to neurodivergent community, just having somebody there to be able to kind of push you along a little bit because of those need for routines and kind of sameness.

And I felt the same way whenever I kind of made a career change a few years ago and, you know, having to kind of like, go to people that I trusted, like, okay, I really need you to break this down for me, because I'm giving up what makes sense in my head to be able to do this, and especially when you kind of, like, are excelling at what you were doing at the time. And I want to talk a little bit about ghost writing and book doctoring.

What brought you to your own understanding of your neurodivergence in regards to how it applies to. Directly to your writing and how you craft plot?

And also how that kind of applied to the ghost writing job and sort of breaking down other people's plots and improving them?

J.D. Barker: 00:06:54

Well, that was something that kind of came into play later.

So, you know, as an autistic person, if I'm in a social situation, a lot of times I find myself mimicking what I see the people around me do, you know, which I guess we all do on some level. One of the things that I learned, though, early on is I can not only mimic people in real life, but I can do it on paper.

So if I read a couple chapters written by somebody else or some text written by somebody else, I can pick out their vocabulary, their cadence, their writing style, and I can duplicate that, which was a fantastic tool to have when I was doing the ghost writing stuff, because I could pick up a book, that somebody started it and I could finish it for them, and it would be seamless. Nobody was able to tell. One person left off and the other one picked up.

When I wrote memoirs, which I did quite a bit of as a ghostwriter for politicians, for sports figures, a lot of times I would sit down with them. I would interview them over the course of several days and get some conversations on tape. Once I had that, I would transcribe them.

This was in the days before AI So I had to listen to it and physically type it out.

But by the time I got through that process, their voice was in my head so I could continue writing that story as them, you know, which was a skill set. You know, I got. I wasn't diagnosed with any type of autism until 22. So I didn't realize that any of these things were actually stemming from that.

It was just things that I kind of stumbled into that I was able to do, and I doubled down on them, and they kind of gave me that career path. I didn't realize that it was something that, like, I just assumed everybody could do it, you know, like, it wasn't something unique to me.

And once I started talking to people about this, I realized, no, not. Not everybody can do this.

It's something that, you know, I've Got this weird skill sc, or I'm able to take something, you know, from, you know, what some people would see as a negative and basically turn it into a positive.

Chaya: 00:08:33

You recognize your gifts and you did more of it.

J.D. Barker: 00:08:36

Yeah, well, we. We. We call them superpowers. So when I was diagnosed. Let me backtrack a little bit. So I was working in finance. I was.

I was a chief compliance officer at a brokerage firm, which is as horrible as it sounds. I was basically like. It's kind of like being internal affairs at a police department.

You have to monitor everything that's happening, every transaction that flows through the brokerage firm. I had to compare that to rules and regulations from the sec, from finra, all these regulatory bodies.

I was fantastic at that portion of the job because it was dealing with data. You know, I could always work with data.

But where the problems came up is if I found a trade that was a particular issue, I had to step out of my office and actually talk to somebody. And communicating those problems to somebody else is where I really dropped the ball.

And my boss, basically, you know, to his credit, he recognized that I was very good at my job, but I was seriously lacking with people skills. He thought that maybe I needed anchor management classes. He wasn't quite sure what the issue was, but that's kind of what he honed in on.

So he sent me to a therapist specifically for that. We got about 20 minutes into our conversation, and she stopped and she said, hey, have you ever been tested for autism?

And, you know, again, I didn't really know what that was at the time. And she said, well, I've noticed through our whole conversation, you haven't made eye contact with me.

You're constantly rubbing your thumb and your forefinger together, basically coinciding with whatever you're thinking, you know, you're making that particular emotion. But she started pointing out all these things that I was doing and told me that they were. They were traits of an autistic person.

So ultimately, she got me tested and landed on a diagnosis of Asperger's syndrome, which, you know, in today's world are just on the spectrum. They don't really label it. But once we did that, you know, we sat down and we made a list.

You know, here all are all the things that, you know, have been a problem for me my entire life, you know, attributed to this.

And then we made another list of all the, you know, the positive aspects of it, because it did afford me a lot of things that other people couldn't do. I was Very good at computer code, you know, writing computer stuff. Very, very good with music.

You know, anything with a pattern behind it, I could recognize it. And in my mind, books have a pattern too. You know, like I grew up reading.

Like, I see that structure in my head and it's funny because I've never had any formal training, but if you take any one of my books and you drop them into like a three act structure, they always fit. But it's because I, that roadmap is ingrained in my brain. You know, I write to a certain point. I know that a twist has to happen here.

I know the climax needs to start here. I know we need, you know, like everything makes sense. And if I write beyond that, it's almost like taking a wrong turn on the highway.

Like I, you know, I mentally feel like I have to back up and go back and, you know, get back on the right street. So like all of that is there because it's patterns, you know. But again, I, at the time, I didn't know that I was autistic.

I didn't know where this stuff was coming from.

Chaya: 00:11:02

So once you recognize that you were autistic, you made a list of all your strengths, your superpowers and your weakness and you started doing more of your strength. And that's what I feel we should all do. Because if we start doing more of our weaknesses, we are not going to get there.

And I mean, we have one life, right? I'm going to maximize this life just doing more of my strengths. And it's just beautiful what happens when that. Offering that to the world.

J.D. Barker: 00:11:32

Yeah.

One of the things that she had pointed out is that if, you know, I could either hide from these things that I saw as problems or I could try to rectify them.

And what I found is that the more often I did something as uncomfortable as it might be, like putting myself in a social situation, the more often I did it, the easier easier it got, you know, So I, you know, even to, in today's world, you know, it's been 30 years since I got that diagnosis. I still force myself to do things that are outside my comfort zone just because the more often I do that, the easier it gets.

I mean, even doing a show like this, you know, like my ideal place is at that desk back behind me, you know, sitting by myself with my headphones on and not talking to anybody. But that's exactly why I have to do shows like this.

It's exactly why I do interviews, it's why I go on book tours and get in front of crowds and talk and speak. You know, it's. I step out of my comfort zone, and the more often I do it, the easier it gets.

Mike Cornell: 00:12:19

Yeah, doing this podcast is always hard for me, no matter how many times I've done it. But I'm glad I do it for the reasons you described. Thinking about writing styles and issues with socialization.

I think it's always interesting that writers who are neurodivergent are always very adept at writing either dialogue or conversations or doing that kind of social character work.

And I think a lot of it, at least for my opinion, I'd have to do with the fact, because we are able to pick up on a lot of uncommunicated social cues in basic conversations, we actually kind of have a deeper understanding sometimes of how people communicate, even if we struggle with it ourselves. I was wondering how that often applies to your work.

J.D. Barker: 00:13:01

Well, I think a lot of it, it stems from the memoirs that I used to write. I had mentioned. I would sit down with an individual and I would interview them for days at a time.

So I'd get 8 to 10, 15 hours worth of tape of actual conversations, and then I would take those tapes, and I would sit down at my desk with my headphones on, and I would transcribe it. And I think seeing, you know, hearing the real words in my head, putting them down on paper, seeing how that he looked on.

On paper when, you know, they were actually there, you know, that, you know, kind of set the groundwork for me to write dialogue, you know, later in life. Because, you know, most.

Most conversations, like when authors fall short on dialogue, it's because, you know, it doesn't feel like a real conversation. You know, people speak, you know, if they're excited, they speak in clip sentences. You know, they may leave words out.

You know, they communicate half a thought. You know, there's a lot of ums in there.

Sometimes if somebody talks, there's, you know, all those little things, you can work them into a writing style. And I. And I think I did that, you know, so much as, you know, working on memoirs that it just got ingrained in my head.

I'm also a big fan of Thomas Harris, who wrote the Silence of the Lamb books.

He's one of those guys, like, if, you know, I've studied him as an author, if you go through and you look at just his dialogue, he could take any sentence, you know exactly who is saying it. You know, you. You don't need all the words surrounding it, just, like, from the dialogue itself, you can Tell who it was.

And that's important because a lot of authors, when they write, their characters come across as very flat because it's basically them. It's one person communicating their thoughts. So it's one person having a conversation with that same person. So you have to somehow get beyond that.

When I write, it's a very weird scenario. So I basically create my characters to the point where they're real people to me. I know every aspect of.

I've got a serial killer series set in Chicago, and the lead detective is a guy named Sam Porter. I could take Sam and I could drop him at the end entrance of Disney World, and I could tell you what ride he's going to go on first.

I could tell you what he's going to eat for lunch. I could tell you what his favorite song was in high school.

None of these things will ever make it into a book, but those are the things that make him real to me. So when I get characters to that point developed, to the point where they're real, I can take them and I can drop them in a scenario.

I can follow their reactions. And that's essentially what I'm doing when I write the book.

It's almost like watching a movie play out in my head, and I'm just writing down what they do, what I see and hear, because they're real. And one character is going to react to a situation very different than another person would just in real life, you know.

So I think that's partly where that stuff comes from.

Chaya: 00:15:18

So from being a ghost writer to writing from your own thoughts and your own inspiration was a journey. So how did you go about making that shift? Letting go of other people's thoughts and ideas and just tuning into your own and trusting yourself?

J.D. Barker: 00:15:37

Yeah, I mean, it was a tricky thing because it, you know, there's. It's. I liked being behind the scenes to a certain extent.

I liked working on all these projects and being able to step away from it and it, you know, not be in mine anymore. I could move on to the next thing and not have to worry about what I had just finished.

But, you know, like I mentioned, like, I saw people, seen some, you know, rather strong success from words that I had written, and they were basically getting credit for it. And after a while, I just. I knew it was time to set out on my own.

So, you know, at that point, I mean, I had done this for, I think it was 23 years, you know, so I had a lot of experience behind me and, you know, and a lot of A lot of that experience came from things other than the actual writing. You know, like I got hired by a lot of agents. You know, like an agent would get a book that they loved, but they couldn't.

They weren't able to sell it to the publisher because it needed a little bit of work. They would go back to that original author and tell them, you need work on your dialogue or you need to cut this scene, you need to trim this back.

A lot of first time authors aren't able to do that because they're too close to it. That's their art. You have to be able to step back though, and look at it as a product. I would come in as a hired gun.

So when I had those conversations, a lot of times I had zero problem making those changes as an author in today's world.

If I have a publisher that wants to communicate a problem in one of my books, even today, they will call me up and they will tell me two or three things about the book that they absolutely love.

Then they give me that one thing that they actually want me to fix, and then they finish up the phone call with another two or three things that they love. They kind of sandwich the problem in between all that stuff.

When you come in as a hired gun where they're paying you to actually fix it, they don't sugarcoat anything. Like they would tell me everything that this person was doing.

And after hearing that for so many years, I really got a strong handle on what the folks in New York really wanted to see in a bestselling book. So I felt totally confident when I sat down to write that first one on my own. I knew I wouldn't have any trouble selling that.

Chaya: 00:17:21

Very cool. So how do you find your inspiration today? Do you get a lot of thoughts and ideas and then something happens where you say, I'm ready to write now?

J.D. Barker: 00:17:32

It comes from a lot of different places. So I've got a note taking app on my phone where I basically throw every idea in there. I'll give you an example.

I had a book last May that came out called Behind a Closed Door. The husband and wife, the two main characters of the story, their names are Brendan and Abby Hollander.

I had them in mind for the longest time as characters that I wanted to write. It's a husband and wife. They've been married for about 10 years. They still love each other, but they both work full time jobs.

So they see each other first thing in the morning, they see each other again at night. They watch Netflix for a couple minutes. They pass out and basically start their whole day over again. So they've drifted apart over these years.

So I knew I wanted to have them as characters. I knew at some point, Brendan is going to have something that's going to be a little bit of a slip.

I didn't want him to cheat on Abby, but I wanted him to come very close.

And essentially the two of them had to have a come to Jesus kind of moment where they had to decide, do we want to save this thing or do we want to move on? So I had that idea for the longest time, but I wasn't sure what to do with it.

Then one night, my wife and I, we were sitting around at dinner discussing a house that she just bought. She does a lot of real estate, and she bought this big house in Georgia. It had seven bathrooms in it and it needed to be renovated.

Just casually discussing it. I mentioned a company called Bath Fitters, and we just talked about it. That was it.

But, like, that night on our phones, we both started seeing ads for Bath Fitters pop up in our social media feed feeds. We saw commercials on television for Bath Fitters.

So I started researching this and realized that in the terms of service for our telephones, we give them permission to listen to literally everything that's going on around us. So right now, my phone is sitting next to me. It's listening to this whole conversation.

It's grabbing keywords, and it's putting that into a database, and they're going to use that later to try and target me for advertising. So I started thinking about, like, what happens if that data, that ability, falls into the wrong hands. So I paired that up with Brendan and Abby.

So at the start of this book, they're sitting in a therapist office. Brendan just had this moment where he almost cheated, but he didn't.

And they're sitting in a marriage counselor's office and trying to figure out what their next step is. And she recommends that they download an app to spice up their marriage. And that's kind of where this starts.

So that app is tied to the people that actually have all of this data. So, you know, I took those two different things. They came.

You know, I thought of Brendan and Abby four or five years before I had the Bath Pitters idea. But those two pieces come together and it's like peanut butter and chocolate. All of a sudden. It works. I love that.

Mike Cornell: 00:19:44

I love the idea of creating characters completely separate from plot and then smushing together and then seeing, well, okay, now that I have these fleshed out human Beings. Here's a concept I'm putting them in the middle of. How do they react specifically to that concept?

Now, like, now that I kind of know them inside and out.

J.D. Barker: 00:20:01

Yeah. Well, a lot of authors go about it the other way around. They come up with their plot, and then they create people to go into the middle of it.

I do an exercise. I do a lot of teaching with writing students, and one of the exercises I do is we pretend we're going to write a story together.

So in this particular story, we've got an airplane that takes off from Los Angeles. It's on its way to New York, and right after it gets to about 30,000ft, World War III explodes below, these bombs start going off.

So this plane is in the air while this is happening. It's only got so much fuel. It can get to the other side of the country, but that's pretty much it. So I give my. My students that idea as a plot line.

Then I ask them, okay, who. Who should we have as characters? Let's make a list. And we get the whiteboard out, and they always have. They. They name off the same people.

You know, they've got the pilot, we've got a flight attendant. We've got maybe a TSA agent or security person. But they start rattling off all these people. People.

And it's what you would expect to find in a story like that. So after we go around the room, then I'll just start to point at random people. I'll say, well, what do you do for a living?

And this guy raised his hand, and he's a plumber. This woman is a housewife. This woman is a computer program. Those are the names that I actually write down on the whiteboard.

And they become our characters, because now all of a sudden, we've got a real mix of humanity in that story. And a plumber is going to react to a situation very differently than a flight attendant would, or whatever, the expected people.

And that's what makes the story fun. So I do that kind of thing all the time.

Chaya: 00:21:22

Yeah, I think when you're open, right. And that. That's when creativity happens, when you allow messages to come to you.

Our conversation, for instance, today, our podcast, will lead us to many thoughts. And, you know, sometimes those thoughts are garbage, but sometimes they actually turn into something meaningful.

So I think to create, we should have an open mind to begin with.

J.D. Barker: 00:21:45

Yeah, you have to. I mean, it's. It's. If you get stuck when you're writing a story, like, a lot of times just staring At a blank screen isn't going to get it done.

Like, I go for a run every day. I do about four. I live on an island in New England and I go for a lap around the island. It's four miles, four and a quarter miles.

And a lot of times my ideas will come to me then, you know, like I solve problems when I'm not actually trying to solve the problem. You know, I could be doing dishes and like that's when the answer comes to me. Yeah. So you have to, you have to trust your subconscious. You're.

Even though you're not necessarily thinking about the problem in the story, your brain never stops and you have to be open to receiving that and acknowledging it.

Mike Cornell: 00:22:20

And those moments are great because that's pure creativity. You know, you weren't thinking about it and it pops in there.

And then being able to figure out plot and break it while I'm in the shower was always kind of like an amazing, like, oh crap, I've, I need to quickly get out and write down notes and stuff. Going back a little bit to your childhood, I was curious about your fascination with the, the unknown, things like that.

And wondering what you thought about why you gravitated towards that.

J.D. Barker: 00:22:45

That, you know, I'm honestly not sure. But it, it, it's definitely something that I've, I've liked my whole life.

That we lived in a, in a giant house in the middle of a forest in Illinois, in Crystal Lake, Illinois, which had nothing to do with the, the Friday the 13th movies for anybody who remembers those. But yeah, like my dad actually built the house.

I knew it was brand new, but because of the way it looked, you know, it was a big English tutor was sitting up on a hill in the woods. Like all the kids in town thought that it was haunted. I mean, it's a brand new house, so it couldn't possibly be, you know, haunted.

You know, the conventional methods anyway. But stories about that just floated around and I wasn't scared by them. I kind of encouraged them.

We lived in the middle of a forest, so we came up with stories on our own about this forest being haunted and the backstories behind all that. So this has been. Even the stories that I mentioned that I used to write for my sister, I found a couple of those. They were all early horror tales.

So I don't know why I gravitated towards that, but that's been there from the get go. The first scary book that I actually read, what I considered to be an adult book was Dracula. My mom owned an Antique store.

And she used to go to a lot of garage sales, yard sales. And I remember going with, to one with her once and there was a box of books there.

I saw Dracula sitting on the top of this, you know, the box, it was 25 cents. It was like a tattered paperback. And I picked it up and I looked at the COVID and like, it was scary.

And I was like, there's no way my mom's going to let me buy this. But she, she let me get it.

And like, I read that book and like the feelings that it evoked, you know, actually frightening me to the point like where I didn't want to, you know, turn the lights off at night. Like, I, I thrived on that, you know, so then later in life I discovered Stephen King, Clyde Parker, you know, some of these other guys.

And, you know, that's always been my go to.

It's been my favorite though, like as an author, you know, like I've been told by my publishers, my thrillers far outsell the scary stuff that I write, you know, almost 10 to 1. So I bounce back and forth. I'll write a horror novel, I'll write a thriller novel, then another horror novel just because I enjoy it.

I want that in my life.

Mike Cornell: 00:24:33

Kind of adjacent anyway, you know, I always find kind of come from a similar place.

J.D. Barker: 00:24:38

Yeah. If you.

I think you were reading earlier from my Wikipedia page when you introduced me and you know, like my common thread in all my stories is this bad. You know, it's right at the top of the Wikipedia page. It says he writes suspense novels which may include elements of sci fi this, horror this, that.

As long as suspense is there, the readers seem to come along. The common thread needs to be there.

I don't think I could jump from romance to thrillers or back and forth unless I included a suspense element in it.

Mike Cornell: 00:25:04

Yeah. Do you feel that early reading of Dracula influenced your style of writing at all?

J.D. Barker: 00:25:09

I think it did. To know, like, I like the fact that it could evoke emotions, you know, at the time I didn't pick up on like, how it was written.

It was written in an epistolary format. So the entire book is basically letters and things like that, which I picked up on later.

It's one of those books that I've reread over and over, you know, probably every five, ten years I pick it up and read it again and I notice something different about it or it takes on a different meaning to me. Yeah. So like, there's always been that getting to work on that project was. Was incredible.

You know, I had access to all of Bram Stoker's notes and everything that he had on his desk when he wrote the original Dracula, which was incredibly fun. So it gave me a totally different level of insight into that sort of thing. But even back, like I mentioned, I used to read Charles Dickens.

He was probably still is my favorite author, but it's the scary stuff that I like from him. And he hasn't written an actual scary book, but he's got scary moments in those books. And those are the moments that I remember.

Mike Cornell: 00:26:02

I remember when I read Fourth Monkey, I thought this evokes for me a very similar style to Stoker style. I kind of get where this sort of almost led to Dracul in a lot of ways.

When you were doing Dracul, the kind of jumping around from that first person perspective, did it make it you feel easier to write or do you prefer more of the omnipotent style?

J.D. Barker: 00:26:24

I've always had trouble sticking with one character through the entire book. I wrote a book called she Has a Broken Thing Where Her Heart Should Be. It's almost a thousand pages long. It's the longest book I've ever written.

And my intent when I was writing that was I'm going to stick with this main character through the entire story. And I think I got maybe three chapters in where I felt like I needed to put another point of view in there.

When I'm writing, it helps me to kind of get past certain hurdles.

So if I get stuck in writing with one particular character, I can jump into another character's head and write their storyline for a little bit until I figure out what I'm doing with the first one and then I can bounce back again. So it helps me do that.

There's a lot of things from a storytelling standpoint, if you're in one person's head the entire time, you just can't get away with because you have to basically stick with that character. So it limits you in a lot of ways. Personally, I like bouncing around.

It's a very tricky thing to do because you don't want to lose the reader, you don't want to confuse them. But I think I'm able to keep the voices different enough where they follow along and everybody seems to enjoy it.

Mike Cornell: 00:27:21

Yeah, it's really something amazing to read as far as being neurodivergent. Obviously you're able to really focus in on when it comes to writing work.

Do you ever have difficulties where you find yourself over focusing and everything else starts to Fall away or even have moments where the focus starts to wean.

J.D. Barker: 00:27:40

I've been very careful to not fall into that because I could lock myself in my office and probably work 247 on, on books and not talk to anybody and I would be perfectly happy doing that. So I, I again, like I mentioned, I do a lot of things that I find uncomfortable. I challenge myself and I push it, you know, outside the envelope.

So for me personally, like I. My or my winning bell rings at 3:00 from the business side, I leave my office, I get out, I go for that run around the island that I mentioned.

Then I spend the rest of the night with my daughter and my wife and just enjoy family time.

And I think by forcing myself to do that, you know, it helps alleviate some of those, those things is I could see myself, you know, like, even if they go like on vacation and I stay home again every once in a while we do that because of business. I can't travel with them or whatever.

I see myself falling into that pattern where, you know, I could just stay in my office and talk to absolutely nobody and be okay with that. But I don't want to be that again. So I force myself to not do that.

Chaya: 00:28:35

You mentioned AI a little earlier in our conversation. So I was wondering, as a creative, what are your thoughts on AI taking over creativity and taking over away creative jobs?

J.D. Barker: 00:28:49

Well, at this point it's not able to do that. I've studied it very closely. I've used ChatGPT. The one that is my personal favorite right now is called Claude. But what I find is talking to them.

I mean, I think of them sort of as individuals, but using one of them, talking to one of them, whatever. However you want to look at it, you're basically talking to an encyclopedia.

You're talking to something that's been taught, it's memorized data, information, but it's not capable of an original thought. It can only regurgitate what it's already heard.

I think if it gets to the point where it can have an original thought, I think some of these creative type jobs might be in trouble. I've got author friends that try to use it for brainstorming. I've tried to do that and to me it doesn't give me anything original.

For an AI, one plus one always equals two. When you're writing in a thriller, one plus one needs to equal three. You have to come up with something unique and different.

You had mentioned I write books with James Patterson. I think we've done five together now.

So when we get on the phone and we brainstorm an idea, he will come up with some stuff that is crazy out of left field that, you know, even I wouldn't have come up with. And like, I'm never going to get that out of an AI, or at least not in today's world.

And that's, you know, the level that the AI would need to be at to be useful. Now it is good for other things. You know, I've taken an entire book and dropped it in there and said, give me an outline of this.

And, you know, it can spit out an outline in 10 seconds. You know, that's a huge time saver when I need to write the copy for the back of a book. You know, a lot of times I'll start with A.I.

you know, I'll feed it the book and have it, you know, give me 200 words described in the book. And it gives me a good starting off point that I can edit, turn into something. So it's a useful tool when it comes to certain things like that.

It's great at coming up with copy for like Facebook ads and Amazon ads and those types of things. But as far as replacing authors, I don't see that happening anytime soon. What sells my books is my voice, my writer voice.

That's not something AI is going to be able to duplicate.

I had a conversation, I guess, about a month ago where somebody was saying, well, if we fed it every Stephen King book, it could write like Stephen King. And the truth is that's not true.

If you wanted an AI to write like Stephen King, you would have to feed it every experience that Stephen King ever had, you know, from the moment he was born to the present. And, you know, then you might have a shot at getting something similar. But like, you're not going to get it just out of the books that he's written.

There's so much that actually shapes us as, as authors which, you know, shapes our minds and the thoughts that we have. You're not going to be able to get that in there.

That being said, you know, again, like, once it comes up, is able to have a creative thought, I think it's going to be able to do this on some level. And it may come up with a writer voice all its own. You know, that's. That's different. Who knows? But it's not there. It's today.

Chaya: 00:31:16

Yeah, I agree that it cannot replace. It can mimic, maybe, but. But if you're using every bit of creativity and, and your experience and your personality and your soul, It.

It cannot, because it doesn't have emotions, it doesn't have soul. So the more we are ourselves and. And that's what we need to do, you know, just. And.

And that's why I always push for authenticity, because that authenticity is where we all should live in.

J.D. Barker: 00:31:44

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, you got to double down on humanity because that's all you've really got.

Mike Cornell: 00:31:49

Yeah, I remember I'm kind of paraphrasing Stephen King here, but he said, you try to put subtext into a story and it's never going to be the subtext that actually ends up in the story. Your subconscious is always going to be working something out and putting something in. And I've looked at.

There's actually some AI written books you'd find on like the Kindle Store and stuff. And out of morbid curiosity, we'll look at it real quick and read it. And they all kind of read the same.

I'm reminded of a scene from Cronenberg's the Fly where he teleports a steak. And the teleported steak tastes wrong because it tastes synthetic, because it is the telepod's interpretation of what a steak is.

It can't actually teleport matter. It's just recreating it and recreating it in a very synthetic way where it has the shape of the thing.

I find AI writing to be very similar, like you said.

I think it's really useful for things like copy or getting, like the mind working for some of that that's already kind of robotic sort of work and able to like latch your own creativity onto it. But it's missing that actual human element that creates almost folly in the writing and creates that. That touch of authenticity.

J.D. Barker: 00:33:01

Well, we have to be careful. Is like, I use the Apple News app on my phone.

I've got an iPhone, you know, which is basically just takes a bunch of headlines from various sources and dumps them all together into one program that I can scan through and read almost like a personalized newspaper. Newspaper. One of the things that I've been seeing lately is a lot of these companies are now using AI to write those stories.

So they're, you know, not only are they writing the text, but they're monitoring, you know, what people are reading.

You know, so if you click on a story on Apple News and the moment you click on it to the moment you click on something else, all that information is cataloged. They can tell how far you've scrolled in that story. You know, if you only scroll Halfway, and they see a lot of people only scrolling halfway.

AI will jump in there and it'll tweak that story to try to get them to scroll a little bit further.

AI will take that data, and if it sees a lot of people clicking on stories about a particular subject, it will write more stories about that particular subject, and it's getting its data to write those from the other stories that already exist.

So it's kind of like this echo chamber where it feeds itself, which is very dangerous if you think about it from a society standpoint, because if something is put out there and it's not true, but it's put out there enough, the AI will continue to repeat it over and over again because people are reading that not true statement and can just exponentially feed it out to the rest of us. So I think we're all going to have to be very careful of this, at least for a little while.

I wouldn't be surprised if they come up with designations at some point. Some type of system where we can tell what's human written and what's not, that would be fantastic. But the money's not there, unfortunately.

A lot of these publications, they can't afford to pay humans anymore. The only way they can stay in business is to use AI, which is very unfortunate.

Mike Cornell: 00:34:36

Speaking of trying to create programs to be able to identify AI, there was actually a story recently of a school that implemented, ironically, an AI program to go over essays and reports to ensure they weren't written with AI and identify AI.

The irony of this, and back to sort of what this podcast is, it would spit out that the autistic students or the ADHD students, their writing was written by AI, because it would assume that the way they wrote particular words they used, well, that indicated that this is written by AI, but it wasn't. It was just the way that neurodivergence kids would kind of communicate and speak and misidentify the kids as being AI. So it's.

It's a very broken system that has weirdly recreated neurodivergent people just in like a virtual space and without. Not to be, like, overly dramatic, but without the sole component of them.

And I think it also kind of showed the way that people would look down and stuff neurodivergent individuals, particularly students, like, in a box, for the way they communicated or the way they did those reports or essays, as not doing them correctly because they wrote in a certain way or they used words that were a little bit more advanced. So they must be cheating.

J.D. Barker: 00:35:53

Yeah, I Mean, I've studied a bunch of those too, along with, you know, trying to play with all the different AI systems.

The problem is there's multiple AI models, you know, so, like, if there was only one, you know, when you dump it into an AI checker, it's basically asking itself, did I write this? And it's going to be able to tell, you know, give you a pretty high percentage score.

But if you take something that was written by ChatGPT and you dump it in Claude and ask that same question, question, it's not able to make that designation and may see it as a human writer or something other than a chatbot or other than an AI. Just because it's a different model, it's almost like it's coming from a different computer brain.

I think that's where a lot of those problems come from. I've taken stories that I've dubbed it's a lot and said, was this written by a human? Or I'll give you an example.

So a lot of my books get translated into other languages. I'm in like 150 different countries.

So when I hire a translator, I'll take their text that they send me, you know, let's say it's an intelligent stallion.

I'll dump into Claude, I'll dump in the original text, I'll dump in the translated text, and I'll say, was this written by an AI or was it written by a human?

And Claude will tell me, and it'll break it down and it'll give me specific examples of why it's human or why it's AI and that, you know, it could give me 10 pages of specific examples. And then if I ask it, are you sure question mark, it will completely reverse its answer. You know, like, it'll tell me it was AI.

And I ask it, are you sure? And like, you know, now that I'm looking at it more closely, I think it was human. And here's 10 pages of what? Why? You know, so.

So it's all very confusing. And, you know, this is beyond the written word at this point. You now we've got deep fakes, we've got visual stuff going on.

You know, I was on TikTok last night and there was a filter that allowed me to turn myself into Elvis. You know, like in. In, you know, like live video, you know, like it literally just popped Elvis's face on mine. And any. Every movement I did was.

Was mimicked, but as Elvis, that, that's scary because, you know, you know, sometime very soon, you know, Literally now, like we're not gonna be able to tell what's real and what's fake anymore.

Mike Cornell: 00:37:42

No, I did, I did content evaluation for YouTube for a while, and by the end of that, thankfully I don't do it anymore. But by the end of that, I was getting AI videos of like, presidential addresses, of like news addresses and things like that.

And then read the comments and people are 100% believing what it is. And it's, that stuff is horrifying. It's, it's very worrisome.

J.D. Barker: 00:38:02

Think of how YouTube works, you know, so you, you load up, you, you'll, you know, type in a subject probably on Google, it'll bring up a YouTube video. So now all of a sudden you're watching that YouTube video. Now you've got a box next to. There are other videos that are like this one.

You see start going down that rabbit hole where you're watching video after video. But as of today, each of those videos was created by a human. And a lot of them are collecting advertising revenue based on those watches.

So Google is spending money to those creators. What you're going to see happen is pretty soon AIs are going to be able to create that same video on the fly.

So it sees what your patterns are, what you're watching.

And rather than having to curate through a database of existing tech or existing videos, it's going to be able to create one for you right there on the fly and put it in front of you, you know, bypassing the creators altogether.

They could still charge for advertising if they want to on that, but now they're paying themselves, which gives them the incentive to actually create all that from a business model. You know, so humans are getting squeezed out.

Mike Cornell: 00:38:59

It's a, it's a very alarming, changing space.

Chaya: 00:39:03

I think we are, because we are here on planet Earth and we have to constantly evolve. And if we don't embrace that flexibility and be open to reinvent ourselves, we are stuck.

Think that's what we are being called for, is to find that new thing that's still us and we are not sacrificing our soul. I, I feel AI is going to do that.

It's going to make us very humble and let go of a lot of things that are not serving and, and just find that authentic self over and again. And, and I think that it cannot wipe humanity, one would hope.

Mike Cornell: 00:39:38

Not that I wouldn't mind Skynet occasionally, but before we let you, we let you go. I just wanted to ask, what kind of takeaways do you want people to have.

In regards to neurodiversity and your work, why is that platform important to you?

J.D. Barker: 00:39:52

One of the reasons why I talk about this is I'm fairly successful at this particular career, but I remember what it was like being on the flip side of that. And I speak to a lot of parents in today's world that have an autistic child.

And they may have a kid that's 18 months old sitting on the floor, banging its head against the wall to the point where it bleeds, just screaming. And they're asking each other, how are we going to get through the next 18 years of this? And that was me as a kid.

Kid, you know, so there is a light at the end of that. That tunnel. I mean, for me, like, I got lucky. I found, you know, writing. I found my superpower.

I found that one thing that, you know, kind of drew me outside of that closed little bubble that I was in and allowed me to interact with other people. So when I talk to parents of autistic children, a lot of times I help them identify what that one thing is in their own. Their own child.

And sometimes it escapes them.

But, you know, once you find that one thing, thing that their child gravitates towards, they get excited about it opens a door that allows them to expand beyond that. They can now communicate about that. They can talk to their kid about it, their kid will be excited about it and want to do more and want to do more.

And I think by opening that door, it helps alleviate some of these problems. So personally, I get out there and I just try to talk about this as much as possible.

Something that I didn't have when I was younger, that I'm thrilled that we actually have in the world today.

Mike Cornell: 00:41:07

And thank you for doing that and wanting to do that and all the work that you do using your platform for those reasons. So before we let you go, what do you have coming out soon that you'd like to promote?

J.D. Barker: 00:41:18

Talk about? I've got a bunch of books. So the one behind me, it's called We Don't Talk About Emma. That one comes out in February.

tairs. It comes out in May of: 2025

Mike Cornell: 00:41:33

Awesome. Very excited for that. And I'll be sure to put any links for anybody in the show notes so they can find you, find your books.

And seriously, you have not read a J.D. barker book. Get yourself a favor and put your eyes on it. As for myself, as for Chaya, as for JD we will talk to you next time.