My ALLi author guest this episode is crime novelist Ali Steed. After decades in financial journalism, Ali is winning awards in fiction—exploring the darker corners of the human mind through her police procedural series. We talk about what it took to overcome the fear of releasing that first novel, how she brings her investigative skills to crime fiction, and how life in Mallorca—and a bit of shamanic training—helped her embrace her creative path.
Listen to the Inspirational Indie Author Interview: Ali Steed
Inspirational Indie Author Interview: Ali Steed. About the Author
Ali Steed is an accomplished writer, editor, and broadcaster, and has worked as a journalist—both in-house and freelance—for most of the UK’s national newspapers, as well as the BBC, Channel 4, and local TV and radio stations. She has won eight awards for her journalism, and her debut novel, All It Takes, won the BIBA Suspense/Thriller 2024 category. This is the first book in the DCI Caroline Cramer series, with more titles due out later this year.
Ali is a strong advocate of using shamanic teachings to break through writing blocks, improve creativity, and increase the confidence of writers who often struggle to see their own talent and worth. She went through shamanic training to help her own writing and confidence and is now keen to help others in the same way.
All It Takes is available on Amazon.
You can follow Ali on Instagram or on Facebook. She is also currently building her shamanic profile on Instagram @theshamanicstoryteller
Sponsor
Our Self-Publishing with ALLi podcasts are proudly sponsored by Bookvault. Sell high-quality, print-on-demand books directly to readers worldwide and earn maximum royalties selling directly. Automate fulfillment and create stunning special editions with BookvaultBespoke. Visit Bookvault.app today for an instant quote.
Thoughts or further questions on this post or any self-publishing issue?
If you’re an ALLi member, head over to the SelfPubConnect forum for support from our experienced community of indie authors, advisors, and team. Simply create an account (if you haven’t already) to request to join the forum and get going.
Non-members looking for more information can search our extensive archive of blog posts and podcast episodes packed with tips and advice at ALLi's Self-Publishing Advice Center. And if you haven’t already, we invite you to join our organization and become a self-publishing ally.
About the Host
Author Howard Lovy has been a journalist for 40 years, and now amplifies the voices of independent author-publishers and works with authors as a developmental editor. Find Howard at howardlovy.com, LinkedIn and X.
If you’re a published indie author who would like to be interviewed by Howard for the Inspirational Indie Authors podcast, you need to be a member of the Alliance of Independent Authors.
Then contact Howard, including your membership number, explaining why you’re an inspirational indie author and what inspires you.
If you haven’t already, we invite you to join our organization.
Read the Transcripts
Howard Lovy: My guest this episode is Crime Novelist, Ali Steed. After decades in financial journalism, Ali is winning awards in fiction, exploring the darker quarters of the human mind through her police procedural series.
We talk about what it took to overcome the fear of releasing that first novel, how she brings her investigative skills to crime fiction, and how life in Mallorca, and a bit of shamanic training helped her embrace her creative path.
Ali Steed: Hi, I am Ali Steed. I am a journalist by training, now an author. My genre is Crime Thrillers, police procedurals, and my first book, which came out late 2023, is All It Takes.
I am working on book two, there's a bit of a backstory to that, so I'm sure we'll come to covering that later in the interview.
Howard Lovy: Your debut novel, All It Takes, has won some awards, so congratulations there.
Ali Steed: Thank you.
Early Life and Love for Reading
Howard Lovy: But first tell me where you grew up, and was reading and writing always a part of your life?
Ali Steed: Yeah, I grew up in Oxfordshire in England. It's a place called Wantage, which is basically a market town famous for being the birthplace of King Alfred the Great. That's its claim to fame.
I have always been very interested in reading and writing, actually. From a very young age, I was reading quite a lot, whether it was fairytale books when I was very young, and then probably around 12/13, I started trying to get a bit more serious, because I thought I should, and I was reading sort of Jane Eyre, a few of the classics.
I read quite a lot of E.M. Forster as well, just because that really piqued my interest at that stage. It was also because I wanted to, it's a strange thing for a 12-year-old to think, but I was actually actively doing that to increase my vocabulary at that stage as well.
Journey into Journalism
Howard Lovy: So, you eventually went into journalism. Was your love of reading and writing the reason or were there other factors?
Ali Steed: Yeah, originally, I wanted to be a doctor.
That was my big ambition when I was going through secondary school. My dad was a nuclear physicist, so I grew up in a very kind of scientific household.
So, medicine was everything/ I wanted to do medicine. I wanted to be a doctor. I didn't know what sort of doctor, but I just knew that was what I wanted.
And it was when I was 17, doing my A levels, one of my English teachers did a test. I didn't know this, but he did a test in one of our English classes and it was a poem by Robert Frost, and we had to analyze it, talk about it, discuss it. When we finished and the class had ended, he actually said to me, Allison, can you stay behind? And I thought, oh, what did I do? Because I have the world's worst guilty conscience. If someone says to me, oh, can you just wait behind? I'm thinking, oh, no, what did I do?
Howard Lovy: You did something wrong with Robert Frost somehow.
Ali Steed: Yeah, exactly. But he actually said to me, do you know what that was?
And I said, quite innocently, a poem by Robert Frost. He said yeah, obviously, but actually that was the Cambridge University English entrance exam. And I said, okay. And he said, you were the only person in the whole class to pass it.
He actually said to me, he said, you've got to rethink what you're doing. You have got to rethink being a doctor because I think that your talents lie elsewhere, and my immediate reaction was to say, nope, I still want to be a doctor.
What happened was my chemistry A Level wasn't actually good enough to get me into medical school.
Howard Lovy: Oh, okay.
Ali Steed: I retook it at evening classes while I was also working as a blood analyst in the day, and it still wasn't good enough to get me into medical school.
It was at that point I thought, I really have to rethink this now.
Howard Lovy: What did your parents think of all this? Were they grooming you to become a doctor or did they let you choose?
Ali Steed: No, my parents were great, actually. My mum's still alive, my dad sadly passed away, but they always have let me do whatever it is that I have thought I wanted to do. There's never been any pressure to be a doctor or to be a lawyer or to be anything other than something that made me happy, which is amazing.
Howard Lovy: Yeah, that is amazing. I'm the black sheep in my family. I come from a family of doctors and engineers, and I'm the only one, I went into journalism and then writing. But yeah, there was never any pressure on me either, which helps.
Ali Steed: Yeah, absolutely. They've always been very supportive of whatever I wanted to do and the thing that I've always found easiest, and I use that word advisedly, but the thing that I've always found easiest is writing.
So then, 18/19, I felt like the ground had actually been taken away from under my feet because I'd been so determined to be a doctor for such a long time that I didn't then know what to do. So, I thought about journalism, and I thought, is it really because I want to be a journalist or do I think it's kind of glamorous, or do I think it's something that it isn't really?
So, I did some work experience, found that I absolutely loved it, and did an 11th hour UCAS application and got into two of the hardest universities to get into for a journalism degree.
So, at that point the doors started opening and all of a sudden, I realized that was actually the path I needed to be on. So, that's how it started.
Howard Lovy: That's great. So, it wasn't so much your writing talent, although you must have had natural writing talent, but your ability to interpret a Robert Frost poem, I suppose, was what did it, right?
Ali Steed: Yeah, it was a really interesting scenario because, if I'm honest, because I grew up in Oxford I didn't want to go to Cambridge, because I loved Oxford, but I also didn't want to go to Oxford because I grew up in Oxford, so I wanted to move away from there.
So, I actually ended up going to what was called the London College of Printing and Distributive Trades, which is a bit of a mouthful, is now part of the University of the Arts London.
I did my degree there in journalism, which at the time you couldn't actually do pure journalism as a degree in many places.
Howard Lovy: So, after you got your degree, what did your career look like?
Ali Steed: So, I started off on a pensions magazine. I went for a job originally at a magazine called Portfolio, which was a monthly, and I saw that, and I thought, oh, that would be amazing. International travel, talking about money. Yeah, I could definitely do a bit of that. I did the interview and the guy who actually owned the company, he decided that he wanted me instead for his magazine, which was a magazine called Professional Pensions, which sounded very much less exotic, but it was a weekly, and the training that I got there was perhaps some of the best training I could have got anywhere.
I had an amazing news editor there. She was just incredible to sit and listen to in terms of how she interviewed people, how she got the information that she needed, and was still able to maintain really good relationships with all of the people that she was interviewing. So, I took so much knowledge from being in that environment.
Then, I was actually headhunted quite quickly from there to go to the Financial Times Group, which was a newspaper called Financial Advisor, which is a more sort of broad topic base. So, it was anything, sort of, financial services; investments, mortgages, pensions, health insurance, pretty much anything that you can imagine.
I was there for, I think it was about 18 months, maybe less, actually, maybe 11 months, I can't remember. Then I was actually headhunted from there to go to the Daily Telegraph to be on the personal finance desk at The Daily Telegraph, which was amazing.
I was there for seven years, and I was the Deputy Personal Finance editor when I left.
Howard Lovy: That's amazing, you had quite a quick rise in the journalism field.
Ali Steed: Absolutely, yeah. I actually had an ambition that I didn't really tell anyone, but I had an ambition in my head. I wanted to be on a national by the time I was 30, and I did it at 27. So, I was really pleased with that.
Transition to Crime Writing
Howard Lovy: So, meanwhile though, did you have this a secret novel that you wanted to write in your head, or did that come later?
Ali Steed: No, I did, actually.
The novel that I have actually put out has been in my head for probably nearly 30 years, if I'm honest. It's gone through various iterations, as you can imagine, over that time, but I had an idea.
I can't go into too much detail about the idea itself because it gives the game away of the novel, but there was a particular book that my then partner had, and it was on our bookshelf, and I was just flicking through it, and I suddenly thought to myself, what would it be like if someone did this today? What would actually happen if someone did this right now? That was the germ of the idea that then developed into the novel.
It took me a long time to actually really knuckle down and do it.
Howard Lovy: It was one of these, someday I'm going to write this book, and then finally it bubbled to the surface.
Ali Steed: Yeah, it was actually a little bit more involved in a way, because I had written parts of it, and my dad had always been a very strong sort of advocate for my writing.
I was, I don't know, eight or nine. I wrote this, it was a really silly thing, more Barbara Taylor Bradford than Patricia Cornwall, but it was a really silly thing that I put together, and my dad happened to read it, and I overheard him talking to someone about it and he said, oh, actually, it's really good. He said, I know that she's my daughter, but I'm really impressed by what she's written.
I was so touched by that, and it became much more poignant in a way, because the year that he actually died was the year that I thought, I've got to take this seriously. I've got to do it because if I don't do it now, when am I going do it? That was the trigger for me, that made me really start taking it seriously.
Howard Lovy: That the boost from your father must have really helped, too.
Ali Steed: Yeah, absolutely. That's why the dedication in the front of that book is to him, actually.
I went to the, I forget what it's called now, but it was at the University of York, and it was the Jericho Writers Event. I was there, and there was about 10 or 12 of us on a table, and everyone was going around and asking each other what they were writing. Lots of people were doing YA at the time, and I was the only one on the entire table that was doing crime.
They hadn't realized what I was doing, and everyone then started this conversation saying, oh, crime is dead, no one's doing crime anymore, and I was just sitting there patiently thinking, oh, okay, that's interesting.
They got to me, and they said, oh, what are you doing? And I said, I'm doing crime, and they all looked at each other as if to say, oh, we probably shouldn't have said that.
All I said to them was, well, it's been doing pretty well since Chaucer, so I'm not overly worried.
The Inspiration Behind the Novels
Howard Lovy: So, what did attract you to crime, because in your day job you were writing about finance, what was the transition from finance to crime?
Ali Steed: I've always been fascinated by serial killers. I can't put it any other way.
The idea that someone has such a different mindset to me, and to what you might consider, although I guess it's a moot point, right thinking people, to have such a different mindset to be able to do that, to act on those kind of impulses, without any conscience, I find astonishing, disturbing, and enthralling in equal measure.
Howard Lovy: Is it a need for you to get inside the mind of a serial killer or the general scenario?
Ali Steed: It's a bit of both, I think, because the way that I write my books, I write them from different points of view. So, most of the chapters will be the lead detective or the detective team, but then one or two chapters will be from the victim's perspective, and then other chapters will be from the killer's perspective.
Howard Lovy: Sounds like your journalism training gave you the ability to really research what you're talking about, too.
Ali Steed: Absolutely. It's been key, Howard, to be honest.
Just allowing the freedom to get into that mindset without actually getting into the mindset, to learn enough, to understand where it comes from, and then interpret that to a fictional character, that I find part of the challenge and also part of the excitement of writing books.
A lot of people have said to me that some of the chapters they found quite difficult to read because it is written in that way, particularly if it's from the victim's perspective.
In a way, for me, that's the point because I want people to understand the position that person has been put in through no fault of their own, and it just helps to immerse people more in the story than it does to just have it from one person's point of view. Because I know that the unreliable narrator is quite common in a lot of writing, but I don't find that to be the best method for me. Actually, having different points of view, I feel gives a more rounded story and creates a more rounded book.
Howard Lovy: If you're not stuck inside just one person's head.
Ali Steed: Yeah.
Howard Lovy: So, what's the inspiration behind your main character, DCI, Carolyn Kramer?
They say that first books are always semi-autobiographical. Is this the police inspector version of you?
Ali Steed: I would say no, but other people might disagree. No, I don't think she is particularly like me. Our backgrounds are very different. The one thing that made me write her the way that I've written her is I got fed up of reading about a detective who is an alcoholic or a detective who is a drug addict or a detective who was a bad actor within the job, and while there's absolutely nothing wrong with that, don't get me wrong, I just felt like it was done so often and so much that there was room for something that was very different.
Howard Lovy: Over here in America I watch the BBC, or BritBox, and every single English police drama, has a police inspector with a shady past, every one of them.
Ali Steed: Yeah, exactly. That was the thing that I wanted to get away from with her. She has some problems. No one goes through life without any problems, so it would be unrealistic for her to be completely without any baggage, but it's just different and it's coming from a different place. Her approach is slightly tempered by her background as well.
In terms of how I write her, I think she's much less forgiving than I am. In terms of work, I would say that I'm not easy to work with, in the journalistic sense, because everything that I've done, with finance particularly, it has to be so precise. It's either 0.75 or it's 0.5, it can't be a bit between one or the other. So, everything has to be very exact, and that's how I've been trained and that's obviously how I've trained other people.
So, in the sense of being very driven and trying to get the best out of other people, I would say there's a similarity there, but I don't see much of myself in her and vice versa, if I'm honest.
Howard Lovy: Confusing the author with the main character is a trap that many readers fall into and it's not often true.
Life in Spain and Writing Process
Howard Lovy: Now, you also work in a physical environment that sounds very beautiful, in Spain. How's the environment influenced your writing process or the themes in your work?
Ali Steed: That's a really good question because I actually haven't found it to be too distracting, if I can put it that way, because a lot of the stuff that I'm writing is very dark. People who know me, they are quite surprised at the books that I write because I'm very easy-going, chatty, really enjoy having a laugh. Then when they read my books, it's a bit like, oh, wow.
The environment here, because as you say it is, it's incredibly beautiful and it's very much led by nature here, which is one of the things that I absolutely love, it's really nice to have that contrast because sometimes when you get engrossed, I don't know if you are the same Howard, especially with writing or journalism, but when I get really into the flow, I can lose six hours and not even realize that six hours have gone by.
Howard Lovy: Exactly.
Ali Steed: And then having the ability to go out and have a walk, for example, in just some incredibly stunning scenery, or we've got some caves near to us that are beautiful, and just being able to go into that sort of natural environment and have a bit of an antidote to all the work, it's very balancing, and I love that.
Awards and Marketing Strategies
Howard Lovy: Yeah, it is. Whatever you did, it worked. You won an award. Tell me about what you won.
Ali Steed: It's the Best Indie Book Award. I won the suspense and thriller category for 2024.
Howard Lovy: Wow, that's wonderful. That must have been a real confidence booster for you.
Ali Steed: Yeah, amazing. I got the email quite late at night, and I was just about to go to bed. I was about to shut my computer down and this email came up, and I opened it, and at first, I had to read it a couple of times before I really realized that they were saying, oh, congratulations, you've won this award.
I was thinking, oh, did I enter that? Yeah, I must have entered that. Then suddenly the penny dropped, and I was like oh, wow. I said to my wife, I was like, oh, look what's happened. Yeah, it was really exciting. I was so thrilled.
I spoke to the organizer of the awards because I wasn't clear on, essentially, what you can do when it's announced, and I wanted to do a press release, which I haven't actually sent out yet, which is bad. But I wanted to ask a few questions about, is this the most number of entries you've ever had?
Howard Lovy: You're being a reporter.
Ali Steed: She said they had the highest number of entries that they've ever had for that award that year. It just made me feel so grateful and very excited to have actually won in a year that was so competitive as well. So yeah, I'm thrilled. Still thrilled.
Howard Lovy: How has that translated, if at all, into sales?
I guess the second part of the question is, how do you market your books?
Ali Steed: So, translated into sales, it has a little bit, I need to do more marketing is the crux of it. I do Amazon ads, which are not too bad, but I need to tighten up my process and improve that.
I'm looking at doing Facebook ads because I've been monitoring and reading a lot of the Matt Homes information, and I found his stuff very useful.
So yeah, I still have quite a lot of things to do though. I need to sort my newsletter. I need to boost my Facebook author page and get more engagement, and yeah, all the things that I absolutely need to do. But I've been really trying to get book two out. Last year I spent writing book two, and it turned into book three, so this year I've been writing book two and I'm at the stage now, I have an amazing editor called Rebecca Miller, who is one of the best crime suspense thriller editors out there, and I value her input so highly, I can't even begin to tell you. She's so professional, she really knows her stuff.
We talked about my original book two, we both agreed it would work better as book three. So, I then wrote book two, the second version, and I sent it to her early in January, and we talked about it at the end of last month, and we both decided that actually the first half of book two worked really well as book two, but the second half might work better as book four.
So, I'm currently in the position where I've got the second half of book two to write and the first half of book four to write, and then by the end of this year, I should have four books in total out.
Howard Lovy: Oh, that's wonderful, that's great. Four in one year, that's amazing.
Balancing Writing with a Day Job
Howard Lovy: Now, in the meantime, are you still working full-time?
Ali Steed: I am, yes. I mainly do corporate writing now. I've got a few clients that I write, some finance, some in other areas. So, it's juggling a lot of balls and trying to make sure I don't drop any. That's the key.
Howard Lovy: I know how that feels. Is this eventually what you want to do when you grow up? Is this eventually full-time and quit your day job?
Ali Steed: I would love it to be, and in fact, Howard, I listened to the podcast you did with Orna Ross the other day, where you said about giving up journalism and going full steam ahead into editing and writing.
It really struck a chord with me, so yeah, I would absolutely love to do that. I obviously still need to pay the bills at the moment, so I'm going to have to do a transitional phase, rather than literally leaping from one to the other. I feel a little bit like I can't afford to let go of this vine that I'm holding onto before I cling onto the next one at this stage.
Howard Lovy: A lot of my transition, the decisions were made for me because newspapers were just no longer hiring. But my identity, ever since college, was wrapped up in journalism.
I'm a journalist, this is what I do for a living, and it was hard for me to say, no, I have these journalism skills in research and in writing and in editing, but I could use them in other ways. It was hard for me to switch that identity from journalist to editor and author.
Ali Steed: I totally understand that because I agree with you. It becomes so much a part of who you are. Even to the extent that, I can be writing a message down for somebody, and I'm still writing it in T-Line shorthand. It's crazy, things like that.
Howard Lovy: Yeah, even texts I send are full sentences, grammatically correct. People make fun of me for that.
Ali Steed: Absolutely, I'm with you. I'm totally with you. So, I do understand that, and I think the first time I really experienced that feeling was when I left The Telegraph, because being on a national, you had lots of people who were interested in you because of your job, they weren't interested in you because of you. Sometimes it was easy to tell who those were, and sometimes it was a little bit harder, and that was the first time that I really felt that, oh, okay, so you are not actually interested in me as a person, you're interested in me because of what I can give you.
So, that was quite an eye-opening transition, going freelance.
Then moving into a separate phase once again, I think that I'll probably have a similar kind of feeling. I don't think I'll have the same experience because, obviously, I'm not in that same role now. But I think it's going to be a similar kind of feeling and I absolutely agree with you about newspapers not hiring.
I was talking to someone yesterday and I was saying to them that if I look back now to, even 15-20 years ago, as to what I was earning, doing freelance work as a journalist, that hasn't really changed that much, and we are a lot further on now and things are a lot more expensive.
Howard Lovy: Exactly, the salaries have not kept pace at all.
Ali Steed: Absolutely. So yeah, ideally, if I could actually become a full-time author, that would be not only a dream fulfilled, if I'm honest, but it would be an absolute pleasure. Not that I don't like doing the writing that I do, because I absolutely love it actually. Any kind of writing, I think it's amazing that people pay me to write, because it is such a joy for me. I love taking things that are complicated and making it easier for people to understand, which is obviously why finance was an ideal space for me.
Fundamentally, I really like helping people. So, being able to write in finance and knowing that what I was actually writing, rather than say the football scores or something like that, but what I was writing was actually capable of changing people's lives.
I did some campaigning work while I was at The Telegraph. I worked on uncovering an investment scandal. I took a lot of government departments to task for things that they were doing wrong. I won a particular award, because I've won eight journalism awards in my time as well.
I won an award for a campaign that I did on long-term care, where people were being forced to sell their houses in the UK when the government should have been paying their care bills.
I worked with the Health and Parliamentary ombudsman on that, and we managed to get a lot of money back for people.
Another campaign I did was, the Ministry of Defence was habitually taxing war pensions, and they should never be taxed. That was another campaign. Again, we got them to go back a long way and a lot of families whose relatives had died, got money, and also people who had been taxed when they shouldn't have been, got money as well.
So, those are the things that really excite me. Just being able to help people, I think, is really key. So, I'm also thinking about writing some finance books, because I have all this knowledge.
Howard Lovy: That's great. You'll be one of the few authors out there who actually knows about finance.
Maybe after we're done with this podcast, you can help me with my taxes.
Overcoming Creative Blocks with Shamanic Training
Ali Steed: Now, one thing I was going to talk to you about was the difficulty that I had actually getting my first book out, because that was one of the reasons it took me so long.
Now part of that was because I was a journalist, I don't know if you felt the same way, but for me, being a journalist and presenting articles, you are essentially taking other people's words and presenting an argument that people will either agree with or they'll disagree with, but you present both sides in terms of fairness.
The thing that I found very difficult with actually writing a book was that this had come out of my own head, and therefore for me, it felt very much more personal and slightly more scary to release into the world.
I don't think it was something like imposter syndrome. I don't think it was anything other than, what are people going to think of me? What are people going to think of what I'm writing? Am I good enough?
All of the things that I know lots and lots of people think.
Howard Lovy: I know exactly what you're talking about.
Ali Steed: I actually, went on a bit of a journey because I ended up doing some shamanic training as part of understanding what my blocks were to releasing this book, and it has helped me not only in terms of getting the first book out, but also in actually creating a better balance in the way that I work.
Like I was saying earlier on, about nature and working with nature. So, I've done quite a lot of shamanic training, which I have found incredibly helpful with my writing. It's something that, in the future, I would actually really love to start doing some retreats or some courses or something to help people get over the same kind of blocks that I had.
Howard Lovy: Sounds fascinating.
Ali Steed: Yeah. I appreciate lots of people will think this is really woo, and that's fine, because if you said to me 10 years ago, I'd be doing this, I would've laughed.
Howard Lovy: No, there's something to that. I come from the world of non-fiction, my entire career, and my first work of fiction is coming out in April, and it's nerve wracking for me because, like you say, it came from my head. I made it up, and it's a whole different kind of writing for me.
Ali Steed: Yeah, and you feel exposed.
Howard Lovy: Yeah, you seem exposed, and I have to give myself permission to say that this is okay.
Ali Steed: Yeah, absolutely. It took me quite a long time to get to grips with that, and I think the lessons that I've learned and the tools that I now have, if I'm able to help other people with that, I would love to, and that's something that I'm exploring, slightly informally at the moment, but I'm looking at it, particularly because I live in such a beautiful place. It's something that I would love to do in maybe a year or so, just to run a retreat for writers and using shamanic tools, to not only help them with any blocks in a similar way that I helped myself, and learned to help myself, by working with tutors and mentors. But also, to give people the tools to actually tap into creativity in a way that they actually can't do in a day-to-day run of the mill state, if you're literally running after the kids or you are doing 10 jobs to make ends meet while you're also trying to become an author.
Howard Lovy: Exactly, yeah.
Ali Steed: There's so much going on and I think it would really help people.
So, the shamanic training is, if you think of a traditional shaman, so you would think of a healer, for example, or you would think of someone who might be able to see into the future or something like that. There are so many aspects to shamanic work.
There's the creative side, which is very much what I tap into. There's the love of the earth in terms of working with nature, using nature as a way to help people heal, because I do a variety of shamanic work. I actually do help people with trauma responses and things like that, which is part of it, but it's a kind of meditation, is the easiest way to describe it.
It's called journeying. But you use drumming as a way of changing the brainwave state from the beta state, which is our normal state, to the theta state, which is still conscious, but you are more open to being able to expand your conscience and your knowledge.
There are no drugs involved. People can do that with various things. That's not what I do. I'm not into that. It's not something I think would help me because the journeying aspect I find very much easier without any kind of, even cacao or coffee, caffeine would get in the way for me.
It's very much more, allowing yourself to open your mind to information that you would find very difficult to access in your day-to-day life. It's hard to explain without actually doing it.
Howard Lovy: No, I think I understand. Like you, I have a day job that pays the bills, and I do my creative work on the side, but it's hard to say, okay, sit down now, be creative now.
Ali Steed: Exactly. For example, there's an archetype called the creatrix in the Shamanic training, and you can call on the creatrix to actually help you to be creative.
Again, as I say, it's the kind of thing that some people will think, yeah, okay. But I would've been the same, as I say, 10 years ago, but it really has made a difference to my ability to get information, even if I'm struggling with something more mundane. I can do a journey to find an answer.
Howard Lovy: Sounds fascinating. It doesn't sound, woo to me. It sounds like you're on your own journey. You have your own character arc from hard-nosed journalist to someone who's more open to these other avenues of creativity.
This has been a fascinating conversation, Ali. I look forward to hearing more about your work in this other field. So, maybe we can have you back on once you write your how to books on that.
Ali Steed: Great, love to.
Howard Lovy: Wonderful. Thank you, Ali. I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me and best of luck with everything.
Ali Steed: Thank you, and thank you for having me on, I really appreciate it. Hopefully we'll catch up again soon.
Howard Lovy: Okay, bye.
Ali Steed: Thanks, Howard.
