David Joel Miller, Writer

Getting back up on the proverbial writing horse.

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

Time to try to restart my writer’s blog.

I hope you recognize the expression. Getting back up on the horse was a saying that comes from our country’s early days, the colonies, and the westward expansion. In those days, 93% of the US population, give or take a few percentage points depending on the decade, worked in agriculture. Today, it’s the other way around, with most people working in the tech sector creating products made of electrons. Intriguing how many of our idiomatic expressions come from agriculture in preindustrial days when most of the kids these days have never seen how our food is produced.

How my writing got started.

My writing career got off to a good start. First, I started writing a blog about substance abuse, mental health, and having a happy life. I was working in the substance abuse and then mental health fields at the time. That one blog briefly expanded into two blogs. Then came a nonfiction book and, eventually, a series of novels.

I’m outlining this so that you have an idea of the journey I’ve taken. Not that I’m an especially good writer yet. I have a long way to go to be the writer I want to be, but I have made some progress. They tell me that starting that first book is itself a good sign. Finishing book one is an even better sign. In future posts on this blog, I’ll tell you more about that journey. Sometimes, it helps to listen to someone else’s travel story just so you know the landscape, where the quicksand and the sheer cliffs are situated.

Over the last five years, my writing has gone essentially nowhere.

I can’t blame much of my lack of writing over the last four years on Covid. But my writing career was already slowing down even before the pandemic. Life just got hectic.

I had been teaching four different classes in the substance abuse counseling program at the local community college, and I had been teaching the class in chemical dependency for clinical counselors in a master’s program.

Suddenly, it became a frantic effort to move all these classes online. This meant learning initially to and subsequently, three separate learning platforms. Some of these classes were synchronous, meaning I needed to master running a live class section. Others of these classes were asynchronous.

For the asynchronous classes, I had to add sound to my PowerPoints and then convert them into videos so the students could watch them at any time. All of my quizzes and tests had to be converted to online versions, and of course, I had to learn to read and grade term papers in the virtual environment.

Sometimes, our personal lives get in the way of writing.

One of my family members who had been staying with me began to experience a decline in her health status. Eventually, she was placed on home hospice. In June 2023, she passed away. Having people come to your house to care for someone is a disruption. Getting up multiple times each night to care for someone who is sick is a challenge. I’m not asking for sympathy here. I’m still digesting all of these experiences, and of course, I’m still dealing with some of the elements of grief.

As if those challenges weren’t enough, a colonoscopy discovered that I had a mass in my descending colon. Between the colonoscopy, the endoscopy, the treatment, and eventually surgery, which went from three hours to over seven, it all really set me back.

I feel remarkably fortunate to have gotten through all of that, and I am incredibly thankful for the doctors and medical personnel who got me through it.

All these life experiences shifted my focus.

When you’re floundering in the swimming pool, you don’t worry about your lap time. Your primary concern is making it to one of the sides of the pool. What I had run up against was the combination of a major pandemic and many life experiences related to aging. I have noticed in my private counseling practice that I’m seeing more clients who are past retirement age, and the issues of aging are constantly on my mind. My posts about that topic will eventually appear on the counselorssoapbox.com blog, where I write about mental health issues.

I reevaluated my fiction writing.

After taking several years off from writing novels and trying to catch my breath as life accelerated, I realized my books were not as good as I wanted them to be. Recognizing that you have a lot more to learn sometimes comes just before an improvement in the quality of your work. Unfortunately, it remains to be seen if that applies to my creative endeavors.

Over the last four years, I’ve tried to learn to be a better writer.

Even as I was publishing my first seven books, I had the nagging feeling that those books weren’t as good as they could be, but I didn’t know how to fix that. So, I began taking writing classes, listening to podcasts, watching webinars, and an occasional view of the YouTube video about writing.

As a result of all that self-imposed education, I’ve learned a lot about how writing teachers teach writing. Unfortunately, that knowledge hasn’t so far impacted my own writing. I can’t tell if my writing is any better now than it used to be because, so far, I haven’t written anything other than some blog posts that are

David Joel Miller, Writer

David Joel Miller, Writer

ready for readers to evaluate.

There’s the outline of what has been going on. I plan to write more of these posts describing my journey to getting those first seven books out into the world and my efforts to write new and better books.

If you enjoyed this post, please click the like button, leave a comment, or both. And I especially appreciate any of you who subscribe to this blog. Once I get into a rhythm, I hope to post at least once a week about my life experiences and my writing journey. If you got to this point, thank you for reading.

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