When are you going to finish that book?

Posted on February 22, 2024 by David Joel Miller

Bumps on the Road of Life By David Joel Miller

By David Joel Miller, writer, blogger, and mental health professional.

When are you going to finish that book?

I had been struggling to write a book for several years. In fact, I tried writing various books off and on for about sixty years. But none of those books ever made it to the finish line. I could get the idea, and I could start writing, but I somehow couldn’t seem to finish the project. Maybe you’ve done that also? I thought that was all part of the process.

That “going to write a book someday” is a bit of a family tradition. I recall my father saying that he was going to write a book someday. He even took a class or two in writing. If he finished those classes, I never heard. But I do know that when he died, he hadn’t finished his book.

Then I get a nudge.

I was having lunch with a colleague. We had gone to graduate school together and tried to find time to sit down and talk about our journey toward becoming better therapists. Just to be clear, we didn’t talk about specific clients. That might violate the client’s confidentiality. But we did talk about ourselves and our struggles, both professionally and personally.

So, one day, the two of us were having lunch, and I mentioned that since I was well on my way to writing my blog, I was going back to working on my book. My friend looked me right in the eye and asked, “When are you going to finish that book?”

When am I going to finish that book?

So, I told her I didn’t know. There was still a lot to do on it. Her response startled me. “Can you promise me you will finish the book by the end of the month?” At the time, that question flabbergasted me. I thought books were supposed to take years to write.

I now know that there are writers who specialize in rapid writing and release. Writing rapidly is a skill, and it doesn’t always equate with producing a lot of usable material. NaNoWriMo is an excellent exercise for learning to write that first draft quickly. I’ll tell you about my experiences with NaNoWriMo and rapid writing in a future blog post. That experience was one of the stops on my journey, but it wasn’t the final destination.

I told my colleague that no, it wasn’t possible for me to finish the book by the end of that month. I thought that would put an end to that conversation. But she was not to be deterred so easily.

“Can you promise me you’ll finish it by the end of the year?”

That question really took me aback. At this point in my life, I was approaching seventy, and I was getting ready to put in for retirement. Something about that point in your life makes you stop and take a second look. I had to consider if I didn’t finish the book now, when would I?

One of the things I had learned from my mental health research was that as people get older and their abilities start to decline, regrets weigh on their minds. I had learned that what people regret is rarely the things they had done, even when those things had caused them problems. What many senior citizens regret are the things they’d always wanted to do but hadn’t done. While I wasn’t prepared to write myself off as a “senior citizen,” I had to consider whether I would regret never having finished that book. And the answer was a resounding yes.

I accept the challenge.

After thinking it over for a moment, I gave my friend an answer. Yes, I would finish my book by the end of the year. I took out a piece of paper that was in my pocket, my to-do list for the week, and wrote: “Finish my book” at the end of the list. I had learned from my work in substance abuse counseling that you can think about doing something, but that doesn’t make it a reality. But writing it down and telling someone else that you were going to do it really improves the chances you would take action. Since my usual habit was to cross things off my to-do list and recopy the list, I knew I was going to keep seeing that item on the list until I finished my book or gave up on it forever.

My rough draft becomes a finished manuscript.

Later that year, just before my seventieth birthday and my impending “retirement,” I finished that draft of my book. The question was, what was I going to do with the rough draft? I knew there were a lot of problems with the draft, but I just wasn’t sure what they were, so I started work on a system for polishing a first draft.

My apologies to readers who think that that’s all there is to it.

After completing that first draft, I thought I had a finished book. It turned out that the process of taking a first draft all the way to publication is a lot harder than just completing the first draft of the manuscript. You have to have a first draft, or you can’t publish anything. But as I was to learn, there were many more challenges ahead.

So far, my journey has been kind of like deciding to become a mountain climber and taking a hike from my house to the foot of the trail that leads up the mountain. Getting this far was hard, but it was only the beginning.

This is a revised version of a post which originally appeared on 12/6/22. Stay tuned for some new posts that fill in the details of my writing journey.

Staying connected with David Joel Miller.

Seven David Joel Miller Books are available now! And more are on the way.

For these and my upcoming books, please visit my Author Page – David Joel Miller

Want the latest blog posts as they are published? Subscribe to this blog.

For more information about David Joel Miller’s work in mental health, please visit the counselorssoapbox.com website.

For my videos on mental health, substance abuse, and having a happy life, please see Counselorssoapbox YouTube Video Channel

Creating my first book.

Posted on February 15, 2024 by David Joel Miller

Creating a Book.
photo courtesy of Pixabay

By David Joel Miller, writer, blogger, and mental health professional.

Polishing my first book.

So, what happened to the first manuscript I had finished?

The first book I wrote was definitely an experiment, though I didn’t know it at the time. My conclusion has been that the steps in becoming a writer are the equivalent of a musician practicing the scales. It may not sound pretty, but it’s a necessary step to perfecting your craft.

I thought that I had a pretty good handle on the book. I had written a nonfiction book specific to the field I worked in. I felt that if I worked at this every day, I should know enough to write a book on the subject. Knowing about the subject matter is not the same thing as being able to write about it.

My topic was how people overcome the difficulties of everyday living. People who work in the mental health field would call this an adjustment disorder. Professionals have a phenomenally long list of problems of living that can cause people difficulty. Most of this stuff is normal reactions to life’s problems. But when someone has an excessive reaction to the problem, that can be diagnosed and needs treatment.

I started compiling my first book.

At this point, I had been writing a blog on mental health for about six years. I’d written some technical posts about adjustment disorders and had also written some things that were meant to be helpful for people who were struggling with life’s challenges. So, I started by pulling all those blog posts together and putting them into the correct order.

By this point in my journey to becoming a writer, I had been reading several blogs on writing. I had read multiple posts about “blogging a book.” I understood that to mean you could take a bunch of blog posts, put them together, and turn them into a book. It’s a lot harder than it sounds.

I can’t blame any of the authors of those posts for the way my first book turned out. The problem was not with the suggestions or even the advice. It had to do with the execution. Later in this series, I’ll talk about which writing blogs I have found most helpful.

I probably should’ve started with an outline of what I was going to write on the blog and gradually posted sections, making sure to utilize the feedback for my revisions. But at this point, I still wasn’t clear on what I wanted to end up with in the book, so I just kept doing more research, writing additional blog posts, and adding some of them to my manuscript. Trying to turn all those pieces into a book was quite a challenge.

I knew I needed to get some other eyes on the manuscript.

I kept feeling there were parts of the story that were missing in my book and that I needed to include. So, I asked several friends and some coworkers in the mental health field to read the book and give me their feedback. I got some beneficial ideas, which I incorporated into a second draft. But I shouldn’t have stopped there.

A lot of what my first couple of readers discovered were proofreading issues, grammar, and spelling. I don’t think any book is ever written that doesn’t have those kinds of errors in it. I recently reviewed a book from a big-name publishing company for the class I teach, and sure enough, I found some proofreading errors and even a couple of factual problems.

I ran my book through a second draft.

The second draft consisted mainly of fixing grammar and spelling and adding more passages to cover things I left out of the first draft. At this point, I thought I had a book ready to send out into the world to see what other people thought. So, I decided my next step would be to study the publishing process.

Close to my retirement date and not sure about my finances, I decided to self-publish my book and do as many things as possible myself. I learned a lot from this process. One major thing I learned was that self-publishing is a lot more difficult than it appears. You need to learn many new skills to navigate the self-publishing process. I’m thankful that Amazon and several other companies have made this process feasible. Still, I’ve also learned there are many possible mistakes, and you need to practice each skill repeatedly until you can get good at it.

I made a lot of mistakes in this process.

I seem to have a genuine talent for making mistakes. Not just once, but I make some of the same ones repeatedly. Just because I figured out how to do something once five years ago does not mean I will remember how to do it again today.

I try to avoid being a perfectionist.

One of the mottos I live by is progress, not perfection. But it’s embarrassing sometimes to look back at something I did in the past and realize how much better it could have been. Not everything that was wrong with that first book was necessarily a mistake, but there sure were a lot of things that I needed to learn if I wanted to improve my craft.

In my next post, I’ll describe some of the mistakes I made, some of the things I wish I had improved on, and the lessons I learned from this process.

This is the revised version of a post that was originally published on 12/20/22. Stay tuned for some new posts that continue this story.

Staying connected with David Joel Miller.

Seven David Joel Miller Books are available now! And more are on the way.

For these and my upcoming books, please visit my Author Page – David Joel Miller

Want the latest blog posts as they are published? Subscribe to this blog.

For more information about David Joel Miller’s work in mental health, please visit the counselorssoapbox.com website.

For my videos on mental health, substance abuse, and having a happy life, please see Counselorssoapbox YouTube Video Channel

Getting the writing done.

Posted on February 8, 2024 by David Joel Miller

Getting the writing done.
Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com

Getting the writing done.

By David Joel Miller, writer, blogger, and mental health professional.

It’s a miracle that my first book of mine ever got finished.

Looking back on my writing journey, I’m a little surprised that any of my writing ever saw the light of day. Even more surprising is the idea that some people have read some of the things I’ve written.

In the early days, I wrote blog posts. For a couple of years, I even struggled to write a new blog post each day. There were a lot of lessons about creating content I needed to learn, and writing something each day destined for publication kept me on track. A lot of the lessons I learned were painful. I’ll share those lessons, the good and the bad, with you as we move through this series of blog posts.

Turning out a daily blog post of 1000 words, more or less, Taught me a lot about my writing process, but pivoting to writing full-length books pointed out the difference between mastering a process and getting good at writing content.

Blogging consumed a lot of time.

My first blog was devoted to mental health, substance abuse, and having a happy life. I still try to post on a regular basis over at counselorssoapbox.com, but working on books and a lot of the other changes in my life over the last five years has been quite challenging.

The writing process I developed for producing a daily blog post got the words written, but there were many more lessons I needed to learn to transform my writing into a full-length book. One of the reasons I started writing blog posts was that it spurred me to research and learn new things. Many of the things I researched for my blog have been incorporated into my work as a therapist, a teacher, and a clinical supervisor.

The first two books I published were experiments.

My first book was a nonfiction book about adjustment disorders. Going through school, practicum, and internship, I heard very little about adjustment disorders. Adjustment disorders are those everyday problems that we don’t necessarily think of as a mental illness but which cause a whole lot of pain and suffering. These are things like a breakup, divorce, or job loss. When I started seeing clients, adjustment disorders were something I saw a lot of; hence, I did the research.

That first book was produced by taking many of those blog posts, stringing them together, and then editing that content into something that made sense. I ended up writing a lot of new content to fill in the gaps, but looking back, that book didn’t have a plan, and it could have been a lot better.

When I started writing, I expected to write more nonfiction books about mental health, but I discovered that after working with clients all day and the grueling process of writing a blog, I was running out of the energy and interest needed to write a second nonfiction book.

What do you do once you have that manuscript?

That first year, I refined my process so that I could start and finish a book. There are as many different ways to go about that as there are writers. I’ve tried writing from an outline, starting with an idea and pantsing my way through. They’re pros and cons to both. I may have made a wrong decision, But I decided to take the self-publishing route. Starting at age 70, I wasn’t thinking I had a lot of years to spend querying publishers. I had also concluded that self-publishing and e-books were the wave of the future, and I wanted to see how far I could go.

If any of you are familiar with positive psychology and the idea of character strengths and virtues, let me share with you my top three of the 24 commonly accepted character strengths and virtues. You can find a free test at viacharacter.org.

My top character strength is “love of learning.” Number two is “creativity.” And in 3rd place is “curiosity.” For the record, coming in last at number 24 is “prudence.” so it certainly made a lot of sense, at least to me, that learning the process of writing and publishing a book was at the top of my agenda.

Over the next two-plus years, I repeated this process seven times.

Then came COVID. In the early months of the pandemic, I finished book #7, and then my writing career took a detour. Next on our agenda, I’ll tell you about the steps it took to turn those finished manuscripts into books available for purchase. After that, I want to talk a little bit about why, having written and published seven books, my writing career has taken a different direction.

FYI that is not me in the picture, but I am left-handed.

Staying connected with David Joel Miller.

Seven David Joel Miller Books are available now! And more are on the way.

For these and my upcoming books, please visit my Author Page – David Joel Miller

Want the latest blog posts as they are published? Subscribe to this blog.

For more information about David Joel Miller’s work in mental health, please visit the counselorssoapbox.com website.

For my videos on mental health, substance abuse, and having a happy life, please see Counselorssoapbox YouTube Video Channel

Creating my first blog

Posted on February 1, 2024 by David Joel Miller

My first blog

Creating my first blog

By David Joel Miller.

My writing journey began with creating a blog.

My first tentative steps along my writing journey began in 2011 with the creation of a blog. I started this journey without any clear picture of where I was going. Back in Graduate School, I had to ask one of my fellow students what a blog was.

Writing that blog served many purposes. It kept me studying the fields of therapy, counseling, life coaching, and having a happy life. It was also very useful in teaching me the process of starting with an idea and ending with a finished piece. Writing a blog has taught me a lot about creating, and it continues to do so. My efforts on the original counselorssoapbox.com blog have fluctuated, but I still enjoy creating these posts.

Here are my thoughts about creating a blog.

You can write the blog simply as a form of self-expression. There’s plenty of room for a blog that expresses your thoughts, but the most successful blogs seem to have a narrower scope that attracts readers with a particular interest. I believe it helps to have a more specific topic or direction.

Your first task probably should be to get clear on why you are writing the blog or what your subject will be. I created this blog to separate my creative endeavors, mainly writing, from my mental health and counseling posts. The two blogs are aimed at different audiences, though there is some crossover.

Creating your blog can be simple or complicated.

I’ll briefly describe the process of setting up a blog once you have an idea of your topic, your intended audience, and the kind of content you’ll be creating. Some people really get into this. Clearly, you can have a lot of fun creating your blog. But you don’t need to be tech-savvy. Remember that if this old man could create a blog in his late 60s, almost anyone can.

Not being a tech-type person, I will use analogies here so I don’t get the details wrong and mislead you.

So, what are some things you’ll need to do to get this blog moving?

Decide where your blog is going to live.

Your blog will reside somewhere. If you already have a website, you can put your blog there. But if you’re new to this, you will probably want to house your blog on a site that specializes in blogs. I had two websites/blogs. One lived in a small house I built. And the other is housed in a condominium development called WordPress. I believe WordPress is by far the largest housing development for new blogs. I have noticed some bloggers use a variety of other sites.

Since I use WordPress, let me try to explain how I use this site. This will be an extremely simple description. I recommend you spend some time exploring the neighborhood before you decide where you want to move into. They have lots of information available and even some humans who can help you.

You create an account. You give your blog a name. They will check to make sure that someone is not already using that name. This name becomes your mailing address for information coming to your blog and going from your blog to readers. For example, my blog’s name is counselorssoapbox. The free version of that site would use the web address counselorssoapbox.wordpress.com.

You can elect to buy a web address. I purchased the web address counselorssoapbox.com, which is set up to send traffic to my location at counselorssoapbox.wordpress.com. I chose to buy the web address because I expected to use it over a long time and wanted to be sure it was mine. If you buy a blog name, you will pay a small annual fee, kind of like homeowner’s association dues. Since I bought counselorssoapbox.com, I could move to a different web neighborhood, called a “host,” If I ever wanted to.

For a while, I had a second counseling blog that resided in a planned community developed by a web hosting company. If you plan on becoming a large enterprise with multiple sites and doing e-commerce, you probably want your blog and your other web pages on your own site.

Let me tell you a little secret. I discovered it was a whole lot easier using the site hosted on WordPress.com than it was managing the self-hosted one. That second blog is now defunct.

When I decided to create a third blog specifically dedicated to my writing, I went back to WordPress and again purchased a domain name (davidjoelmillerwriter.com)

You need to pick a “theme” for your blog.

I think of the theme as the floor plan for my house. Do I need a large, brightly lit room to display my photographs, or do I need a room with lots of bookshelves and file cabinets for my papers? If you go with WordPress.com, they have a number of free “themes.” The nice thing about having my blog live in the WordPress.com housing complex is that if I change my mind about the floor plan I need, they let me move to a different “theme.” Not only did they let me move, but they moved all my stuff into the new theme for me, for free.

There are also a lot of premium floor plans (themes) that are available for a small one-time charge.

Themes can be customized.

Whether you decide on a free theme or buy a custom one, there are many options. You can change the colors, move the doors that lead from one part of your blog to another, and so on. Themes also allow you to create some storage sheds (called widgets) that you can line up along one side or at the bottom of your theme. I use some of these to store things like a list of the topics I write on and links to take readers to those topics.

If you like the idea of building your own house, you’ll love self-hosting.

Some people prefer self-hosting so that their blog is built on their own property. This allows you to do many other things with your website and blog but adds to the labor. A little secret you might want to know. If you decide to self-host, you can still use all the WordPress blueprints, which are available through WordPress.org. Keep in mind if you self-host, there will be more maintenance. If your blog lives in the WordPress.com development, they do most of the maintenance for free.

So, at this point, you have the keys to your new blog. Next, you’ll need to decide about the furnishings and where you will put them. In the next post, I want to give you some do’s and don’ts for moving into your new blog. Don’t forget, if you have questions, please ask them. Otherwise, I’ll just keep rambling on with the story of my writing journey.

This is a revised version of a post that originally appeared on counselorsoapbox.com on 8/9/2018.

Staying connected with David Joel Miller.

Seven David Joel Miller Books are available now! And more are on the way.

For these and my upcoming books, please visit my Author Page – David Joel Miller

Want the latest blog posts as they are published? Subscribe to this blog.

For more information about David Joel Miller’s work in mental health, please visit the counselorssoapbox.com website.

For my videos on mental health, substance abuse, and having a happy life, please see Counselorssoapbox YouTube Video Channel

My first creative writing project was a blog.

Posted on January 25, 2024 by David Joel Miller

My first blog

My first creative writing project was a blog.

By David Joel Miller.

My writing journey began with creating a blog.

Writing that blog served many purposes. It kept me studying the fields of therapy, counseling, life coaching, and having a happy life. It was also very useful in teaching me the process of starting with an idea and ending with a finished piece. Writing a blog has taught me a lot about creating, and it continues to do so. My efforts on the original counselorssoapbox.com blog have fluctuated, but I still enjoy creating these posts.

Here are some of my thoughts about creating a blog.

Creating your blog can be simple or complicated.

I’ll describe briefly the process of setting up a blog once you have an idea of your topic, your intended audience, and the kind of content you’ll be creating. Some people get really into this. Clearly, you can have a lot of fun creating your blog. But you don’t need to be tech-savvy. Remember that if this old man could create a blog in his late 60s, almost anyone can.

Not being a tech-type person, I will use analogies here so I don’t get the details wrong and mislead you.

So, what are some things you’ll need to do to get this blog moving?

Decide where your blog is going to live.

Let me tell you a little secret. I discovered it was a whole lot easier using the site hosted on WordPress.com than it was managing the self-hosted one. That second blog is now defunct.

When I decided to create a third blog specifically dedicated to my writing, I went back to WordPress and again purchased a domain name (davidjoelmillerwriter.com)

You need to pick a “theme” for your blog.

There are also a lot of premium floor plans (themes) that are available for a small one-time charge.

Themes can be customized.

If you like the idea of building your own house, you’ll love self-hosting.

This is a revised version of a post that originally appeared on counselorsoapbox.com on 8/9/2018.

Staying connected with David Joel Miller.

Seven David Joel Miller Books are available now! And more are on the way.

For these and my upcoming books, please visit my Author Page – David Joel Miller

Want the latest blog posts as they are published? Subscribe to this blog.

For more information about David Joel Miller’s work in mental health, please visit the counselorssoapbox.com website.

For my videos on mental health, substance abuse, and having a happy life, please see Counselorssoapbox YouTube Video Channel

My creative journey

Posted on January 18, 2024 by David Joel Miller

Creativity
Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com

My creative journey.

By David Joel Miller, writer, blogger, and mental health professional.

I started this blog to separate out the posts I write about my writing career, my fiction books, and my other creative endeavors from my work in mental health. Just to let you know where I’m at now in this writing journey, I’ve been publishing a blog on mental health since 2011. In addition, I have self-published seven books on Amazon, and I have a YouTube channel. Being creative has not been easy, and I wanted to share a little bit with you about where I started, my struggles, and where I see myself going in the future.

There’s a difference between scribbling and writing.

The purpose of this blog post is to share a little bit with you about my writing journey. It’s taken me a long time to get to where I am, and I’m not to my final destination yet. When I mentioned some of my struggles, please don’t think that I am feeling sorry for myself or asking for sympathy. I’m frankly quite happy with all the things I’ve accomplished in my life, and I am mentioning my challenges, hoping that that will encourage you to follow your dreams the way I have followed mine.

I have always been an avid reader. As a child, I spent a lot of time alone, but books were always my constant companions. We moved a lot, and I seem to have missed out on some of the things other people say they learned in their early education. In my seventies, I’m still filling in some of those missing pieces.

My very early years are still fuzzy. Not because of any emotional trauma but because of extremely poor eyesight. At age 8, I was prescribed glasses, and suddenly, the things the teachers were writing on the blackboard became considerably clearer.

That last sentence reminds me of how much our culture has changed across my lifetime. I fully expect it will continue to change at an ever-increasing pace. So, while I write on the whiteboards at the college where I teach, my memories of childhood are inhabited by boards that were, in fact, black or sometimes dark green.

I struggled academically all the way through high school, and then suddenly, during my first semester at the community college, things changed for me. I’ve written about those struggles in the last couple of posts. While it was never diagnosed, I suspect I have more than one learning disability. Spelling remains a mystery to me. I learned to spell phonetically and can spell the same word several different ways in one sentence. Thank goodness for Grammarly, spellcheckers, and other writing programs. Without them, this blog post would be unintelligible.

Talking has always been easier than writing.

For me, talking has always been easier than writing. I participated in speech and debate in middle school and took public speaking in high school. Along the way, I became certified as a trainer in several areas and have always enjoyed teaching a class. Eventually, I decided I needed to tackle other forms of creativity, which set off my journey as a creative person.

What is a blog?

My first real exposure to modern creativity came during my graduate program to become a Marriage and Family Therapist. Some of my fellow students were discussing resources, and the word “blog” came up in the conversation. I had to ask one of my fellow students the very simple question, “What is a blog?”

I want you to know that despite my advanced age, I’ve always considered myself an early adopter of new technology. I bought one of the very first fax machines. I almost installed one of those gigantic satellite dishes, but the man who was supposed to come to give me a quote couldn’t find the house, and that satellite dish never materialized.

My first computer was a RadioShack TRS-80 model two, with a whopping 64 K of memory. My first experience with a portable phone was one of those large brick phones. Unfortunately, it proved so inconvenient that I gave up on it and delayed getting a cell phone until after I was licensed as a therapist and told that I needed one to stay in communication with the office and my clients.

I have transitioned to a smartphone and have mastered the fine art of answering texts with the help of one of my interns, who was patient in teaching me how to respond to her text messages after I told her to call me.

I tell you all of this by way of background so that you can understand how writing a blog felt like exploring a strange continent and publishing my first book was my personal equivalent to signing up to ride a rocket to the moon.

That seems like a good place to stop for today. I’ll pick up the story in my next post, and we will see where it goes from there.

If you’ve enjoyed reading this post, please give it a like or, even better, share it.

If you are wondering where my story goes from here, please subscribe to this blog.

Either way, this old guy would appreciate any encouragement you send my way. And yes, at seventy-five, I am entitled to say, “old guy.”

Staying connected with David Joel Miller.

Seven David Joel Miller Books are available now! And more are on the way.

For these and my upcoming books, please visit my Author Page – David Joel Miller

Want the latest blog posts as they are published? Subscribe to this blog.

For more information about David Joel Miller’s work in mental health, please visit the counselorssoapbox.com website.

For my videos on mental health, substance abuse, and having a happy life, please see Counselorssoapbox YouTube Video Channel