Writer’s Block, Recovery, and Hope: David Deane Haskell on The Solarian Deep and Wounded Angels – The Writing Coach Ep. 242

Kevin Johns: David, welcome to the show.

David: I’m really grateful to be here. Nice to meet you, and great to finally meet face to face.

Kevin Johns: And you’re joining us bright and early from Japan. Let’s kick things off by letting us know what brought you to that part of the world.

David: Well, it’s an interesting, circular, long story. I came to Japan a long time ago, in 1998, actually. I worked for Disney at the time, and I played drums on trash cans for them at Tokyo Disneyland. That’s what brought me to Japan. Then I started a family here, and I kept coming back, and I’ve been here pretty much ever since. Last year I spent traveling around Southeast Asia, though, so I wasn’t in Japan last year.

Kevin Johns: Wow. I was going to kick off with the drumming question, but Japan just seems so interesting. I played in punk rock bands throughout my teen years, and I often draw on musical analogies when teaching writing or thinking about my own writing. So, as someone who actually worked professionally as a drummer, do you see that sense of rhythm carrying over to your writing life at all?

David: Rhythm, no. But the desire to connect and communicate, yes. It’s funny, because I’ve been talking about this stuff for a long time, and it always seemed like one thing and then another. I had a lot of imposter syndrome with the writing, because the drumming came first, and I was very good at it. I played professionally, so that’s kind of unassailable. I’ve got verified gigs, and other people said I was good. But with the writing, it was like, what am I doing here? It’s more of a solo effort, and it can be a grind. There’s a lot of shouting into the void. Is anybody even hearing me? And people can come along and drop you a one-star review on Amazon pretty easily, too.

So I went back and forth about how these were connected. What I realized, and this was when I wrote my nonfiction book, the inner-child trauma-healing book, was that it was always about not being able to have a face-to-face conversation like this. I wanted to communicate: this is where I’m at, this is what I think. I did it either through music on stage or through fiction I could hide behind, because that’s not me talking, that’s my character, and he’s the angry one, not me. A lot of it came from the same place, I think, which surprised me even when I realized it.

Kevin Johns: My understanding, anyway, is that your career in writing is tied in some ways to your path to recovery. Take me back to maybe the pre-pandemic days, when you made the decision that becoming sober was going to be an important part of your life.

David: Sure. There are two eras to my writing, if you will. The first four books I wrote, which are still on sale, I started when the Kindle boom came up. I thought, oh yeah, I can get rich and famous, I’ll write a book and it’ll sell. And it didn’t, so I thought, okay, I’ll write another one, and I’ll learn a little more about how to build a platform and all that. I wrote those four books between 2013 and 2019. I got sober in 2018, so that was my early Stephen King era. I don’t remember writing it, but it’s pretty okay, that kind of thing. I published Emergence, the book I’m most proud of from that early era, in 2019, shortly after I got sober.

Then I had a five-year writer’s block, which any writer out there might feel chills hearing about. I don’t pretend to be an expert on how to come out of it, because I couldn’t. I was doing recovery, I was doing trauma healing, and I didn’t have any more bandwidth for anything else. I was trying to write, and I really couldn’t. And I wondered, again with the imposter syndrome, should I just quit? Is this the universe telling me I’m not cut out to be a writer? But I had four books published, and I wanted to do it. I felt like I’d just gotten started. Then, finally, in 2024, right around New Year’s, the writer’s block lifted. Boom! I was writing more than ever. It was pouring out of me.

The first thing that came out was The Solarian Deep, the book I published this year. It’s a cyberpunk, sci-fi, distant-future, post-apocalyptic, under-the-sea story, and it came after a five-year writer’s block, so I guess I had some weird ideas built up, right? But in that same year, 2024, I also wrote Wounded Angels, my nonfiction inner-child trauma-healing book. I never wanted to write nonfiction. I never intended to. I had no interest in it, and I didn’t want to be a guru or teach people how to heal. But I had been doing that work for years. That was me in recovery, and it just started writing itself.

So now I’m juggling what to do with it. Am I supposed to separate myself from it? I don’t. My website’s just me. It’s got all the books on there, and I tried to design the coloration so it goes from sci-fi cyberpunk to warm colors for healing. So far, so good. That’s pretty much how that journey went. I feel like I’m in the next phase of my writing now, and it’s a lot different.

Kevin Johns: Were the earlier four books sci-fi as well?

David: Most of them. Too Much Information was my first book, more of a techno-thriller about airport security and government overreach. I’ve been doing second editions on all the early stuff lately, to fix some things, and I looked back and Too Much Information got a lot of stuff right. I was traveling a lot last year, and I’ll tell you, things are worse than I predicted. Then I wrote a dystopian one. Basically, gravity changes in the universe, so when you’re walking down the street, all of a sudden your arm can get sliced off. That’s Dark Alignment. And Emergence is about AI, and I have another AI book coming out soon, called The Vibrants. So yeah, mostly sci-fi.

Kevin Johns: So let’s dig into AI, since that’s the hot topic of the hour.

David: Okay. No, I don’t write all my books with AI.

Kevin Johns: Well, the argument I try to explain to people is that I don’t think AI can write a book. All these people are like, “I refuse to read a book written by AI.” And it’s like, I don’t think it can. No, that’s not where I was coming from. But I am curious. You started thinking about this topic back in the teens, when AI was in its emergence phase, and then you saw it come to the fore in the last few years. What was it like having written about this stuff and then watching it take hold of popular culture?

David: Well, it’s kind of wild, I’ll tell you what. That book, Emergence, is free. You can go to my website and get it for free. It’s my permafree book, so please do. The funny thing is, I do think I got a lot of things right. I published it in January 2019, because I wanted to get a year ahead. But now that I’m in the future, I wish I’d published it earlier, because if it had been 2018, well, look at what I predicted, you know? I came up with a lot of stuff that was kind of on track. Except I was thinking much more along the lines of robotics, like a Commander Data kind of thing, walking around. My concept of that has changed quite a lot. The new book, which is about AI and creativity and what the human role in that is, is much more about AI within the machine, or little drones, or AI just materializing here and there. It’s not the big, clunky, humanoid-robotics coming-of-age thing that Emergence is.

Kevin Johns: Well, tell us about the new book, and what role AI plays in that story.

David: It’s huge. It’s so hard to talk about without spoilers, because this is going to be a trilogy with a prequel, and the prequel won’t be around for a while. The prequel takes place in the here and now, only with stuff going on that we have no clue about. If you look at OpenAI and the governments and whatnot, you might wonder. I’m only going to go so far as to say it involves a technological Cold War that none of us are aware of. That’s the backstory to The Vibrants, which takes place in the future. Basically, it’s about what happens when AI gets more and more sophisticated and people get more and more enmeshed with it when it comes to creativity.

Instead of taking out our phone and taking a picture because that’s the picture we want to take, we’re going to have a tiny drone behind us that notices we noticed the mountain, and, okay, the pictures are all taken. So all the raw material is being gathered all around us at all times. What do we do with that? What is the creative partnership with an AI that can’t write our books for us, as you say? And I agree with that.

I don’t want to be too harsh, but I think the writers who are freaking out about AI… I’m not freaking out, because it can’t write what I write. Maybe short stories or whatever. It can write entertaining stuff. But no AI is going to write my inner-child spiritual healing book, because that came from me. And even the sci-fi, I’m coming up with it by the seat of my pants, so the AI is not going to come up with it, because it’s new.

Kevin Johns: Do you have a kind of dystopian view of where it’s going to take us, or do you have a more hopeful view?

David: I really want to write hopeful stuff, because everything seems so dark these days, and a lot of things are very dark. Even the fiction, the future fiction, is always, “It’s going to be horrible.” But I grew up on Star Wars and Star Trek, the bright, beautiful future, Disneyland and all that. So I’m writing with an eye toward there always being hope. Even if things are going wrong, maybe we’ll be okay if we can figure things out together. Connection, again. I talk about healing in my nonfiction, and I talk about hope in my fiction. If we do heal, if we do come together, and everybody stops hurting each other, then maybe we can have this hopeful future that we all wish might be possible. I don’t want to sound too fairy about it.

In terms of my realistic outlook, I joke about this. I say the AI will come of age and become sentient, and either make pets of us, and then everything will be great because it’ll solve all our problems, or it’ll kill all of us. Either way, problem solved, right? But then a friend of mine came up with a third option. He said, “No, they’ll just suck up all the resources, wall us off, and let us die slowly.” That’s the really chilling worst-case scenario.

But I don’t know, man. There are a lot of jobs that are going to be lost. And one more thing: my daughter. She never watches my podcast, I wish she would, but I was hanging out with her yesterday. Her job is programming robotics in Tokyo, and she showed me a video of her. They were doing a news segment, and it looks cool as hell. She’s got this little device in her hands, and they’ve got a script where they’re programming the robotics. And I said, “You’re helping to take other people’s jobs away, right? Are you okay with that?” I was kind of kidding her, but yes and no, right?

Kevin Johns: Yeah, for sure. So in your writing, whether it’s the memoir or the fiction, my understanding is you focus on this idea that none of us comes through life unscathed, but it sounds like you have an optimistic take on that, that we can push on through. Can you tell me a bit about how those themes come through in your writing?

David: Yeah, I do. Somehow I always had hope, even though I had some really dark times in my life. I did have trauma as a kid. I suffered from a really low-bottom addiction: alcoholism and codependency. And weirdly enough, the codependency was every bit as bad. That’s more of what I write about in the inner-child work, the people-pleasing side of addiction and codependency, where I rely on you, Kevin, for my sense of worth. If we’re friends and you’re happy with me, okay, I’m happy with me. But if you say, “Oh, David, I’m sick of you today,” then I must be worthless. I felt like that for much of my life, and it’s not a healthy way to be. It comes from trauma.

In terms of how that gets into my writing, obviously the memoir is real-time healing writing. It’s just what I’m experiencing and sharing what’s working for me. But when it comes to the fiction, I’ve noticed that my characters are way deeper, just because I’m deeper, right? My characters back in the teens were as deep as I could be, which was deep in trauma, so I was writing more crazy plot scenarios that they got tossed into. Which is also good. I don’t say it’s bad. But now there’s more character depth alongside the plot.

I was doing a podcast with a couple of really awesome young women who had read The Solarian Deep, and they talked about these characters who aren’t side characters, but they’re not main characters either. They’re the parents of the main character, and they were very loving and warm and supportive. When I wrote them, it was kind of like the dream. I talk about inner-child loving reparenting, the parents we always wanted, who couldn’t show up for us because they weren’t well either, and I wasn’t well either. All of that kind of rolled into these characters, who weren’t even main characters. And I was like, wow, thank you. I felt that when I wrote it, but I didn’t think anybody else would catch it, because they would just sort of come and go. I didn’t write it like, “The sweet, lovely mother said blah blah blah.” I just wrote her speech from a place in my heart, thinking, what would a loving parent say?

So for that to land in a sci-fi book, and for people to notice it, really blew my mind. It made me feel very validated and gratified. You know how it is, right? When somebody reads your stuff and points out something you’ve spent real time on, it’s like, wow, that did land. That’s just so amazing.

Kevin Johns: You mentioned writing through the trauma. Do you actually see writing as a tool for dealing with the challenges of your childhood?

David: No. The thing of it is, I have personal writing, actual inventory writing, trauma-healing writing. That’s for me, and it’s nothing that I publish. I was doing the inner-child work for a long time, since late 2021, so it’s coming up on five years now. I was doing it almost every day, and I was in a very deep healing process when I started writing Wounded Angels, years into it. I felt compelled, or inspired, to write it, not because I needed it for my own healing, but because I think it was time to share it. So for me, the writing part is not the healing part. On the nonfiction, the writing part is the sharing part.

Kevin Johns: What are some of the big takeaways from that experience that you were eager to share with the world?

David: The inner-child experience. Hope is a big, big one. I don’t want to say that everybody makes it. Some people are deeply traumatized and deeply addicted, or both, though it doesn’t necessarily go together. Some people have terrible trauma and yet don’t become addicts or alcoholics. Other people have relatively pleasant lives and do. It doesn’t go hand in hand, necessarily. But it’s the journey, the painful part of everybody’s journey. Everybody goes through some stuff.

For me, I was really low-bottom. I was a hundred pounds heavier than I am today. I was hospitalized. I was dying. I had kind of checked out of life. I felt like this life just didn’t work out. That’s where I was in my mid-forties: despondent, really dark, and that’s in the book too. I was a hermit for about eleven years. I didn’t open the curtains. I just stayed inside, made just enough money to get by, didn’t have any friends, didn’t communicate with people. I was trolling on the internet, stupid shit like that. But that was also when I was writing my books. I was still trying to reach out. I was still trying to communicate. I thought, at least if I write this book, maybe you’ll hear me. If you read my early stuff, you can probably imagine that’s where a lot of it came from. There’s a whole lot of the little guy shaking his fist at the machine.

I wrote The Gold Club, my second book, and it’s the only one that didn’t qualify for the ISFDB, the Internet Speculative Fiction Database. Do you know ISFDB? It’s a database for speculative fiction, and it has real moderators. If you put your book in there, they check it, but it doesn’t have to be popular. It can be indie. If you’ve written any speculative fiction, you can be on that database. I’m just saying it for others, if they’re curious. The ISFDB took all of my books except The Gold Club. They said it’s not speculative fiction, not sci-fi. And I was like, yeah, it’s got sci-fi elements, whatever, but it’s really more of a white-collar crime caper thing. What it really was, was my passive-aggressive backlash at Amazon for not making a bestseller out of my first book.

The Gold Club involves a guy who works for a mega-conglomerate called Sahara. Amazon, Sahara, right? And they basically start gaming the algorithm. It’s a scam within a scam. They’re working for the big company, but they’re also saying, “If you want your book to be a bestseller, just talk to me, and I’ll take care of the algorithm for you,” that kind of thing. A lot of my early stuff was like that: how can I possibly get ahead when everything seems to be set up against me? That’s kind of how I was feeling at the time. So my writing definitely reflects where I’m at. It’s been an interesting journey.

Kevin Johns: The idea that you hit writer’s block once you got sober does not surprise me. I write so much better when I drink. Or, no, I don’t write better, it comes easier, right? So I can definitely see someone who’s heavily addicted to something, and then, once they get sober, no longer having that easy entry point into the writing. So what were the steps you took to finally get over that and get back to the page? Was it switching over to the nonfiction, or were there other things as well?

David: None of that, actually. It just happened overnight.

Kevin Johns: Wow.

David: It was almost five years to the day, which is so crazy, because I was in the middle of it thinking, it’s been two years, it’s been three years, should I quit? At this point, it seems ridiculous. I hated the fact that it was such a stretch. But now that I’m on the other side of it, I can say, “Hey, I had a five-year writer’s block.” That fits the story so nicely, doesn’t it? Because it’s true, and five years is a really good stretch. But I was healing. I’m not saying I’m well, but I’m a lot better than I used to be. So I think the floodgates just opened. And I didn’t start with the nonfiction, either. The Solarian Deep came first.

Kevin Johns: Oh, it was…

David: Wounded Angels was published first, but The Solarian Deep was the first thing I wrote, and I was mostly writing fiction at the time. Wounded Angels I wrote in about six weeks. It just came out of me.

And oh, by the way, if anybody’s looking for cures for writer’s block, I don’t have any answers for that. But one thing I use a lot, and I think it works great, is voice-to-text writing. You can write so much faster that way. I use ChatGPT for that, but I have a special prompt, because otherwise it’ll go and change your stuff, and then it has written your book, right? ChatGPT has the best speech-to-text, so that’s why I use it. The prompt is: “Format this for paragraph breaks and punctuation only. Do not tamper with the text. Text as follows.” And then I just talk for two minutes, five minutes. I’ll talk a scene. I’ll talk a chapter. It prints it all up, and I can get so much creative writing done that way. I love it.

Kevin Johns: I’ve never heard of someone using it for that. In fact, I have lots of clients asking, “What’s the best voice-to-text software?” Should I be telling them ChatGPT?

David: ChatGPT, by far. OpenAI owns something called Whisper, and Whisper is the top of the line. I tried Microsoft’s, and it’s garbage. You can go try ChatGPT, and it nails it. The only thing that really kills me is that it always misspells my middle name, D-E-A-N instead of D-E-A-N-E. My website is David Deane Haskell, and you need to spell my middle name correctly to get to my website. And the other thing is The Vibrants, the book that’s coming up. The humans in it are the Vibrants, and the AIs are called the Resona, and that’s book two. It misspells “Vibrants” as “Vibrance,” V-I-B-R-A-N-C-E, and I’m like, no, I’ve told you a million times, it’s V-I-B-R-A-N-T-S. But other than that little thing, those are first-world problems right there. A couple of misspellings.

Kevin Johns: For sure. That’s what I find so fascinating about the AI stuff. Even after I asked you the question about your take on it, I realized I was perpetuating this classic online, kind of American thing of “it’s this or it’s that,” with no complexity. I asked you, is this going to destroy us all, or the opposite? Where of course the reality is it’s going to be somewhere in between. I think it does everyone a disservice to just say, “Oh, it’s evil, never use it.” I’m talking about different ways to use it. I think the picture people have in their heads of how it can be used is so different from how people actually use it. Whether it’s me using it to organize beta reader feedback, where we get twenty different people’s feedback on a book and it’s like, let’s organize that, let’s see where there’s convergence between ideas, or you using it for voice-to-text, none of this is the AI writing the book for us. It’s all finding new ways to use an insanely powerful tool. I think it’s that power that makes it frightening, but it’s also probably useful.

David: It is, and it ain’t going anywhere. That’s the thing. There are a lot of writers out there, and again, I don’t want to call them Luddites or anything, but they’re on Facebook or wherever saying it’s horrible, it’s theft. And it’s all true, actually. The large language model training is basically stealing all our ideas. However, if that’s a crime and the powers that be want to criminalize it, I’ve got no control over that. If you want to say somebody should go after OpenAI, well, nobody is. We’re living in an age where you can be a trillionaire and get away with it. That’s nothing to do with me. I’m just a little guy. And you know who else is using AI? All the big guys. I was watching that really crappy, crappy, crappy movie, and by the way, I’m a Star Wars fan, but The Mandalorian and Grogu, what a piece of crap that movie was. And I swear to God, ninety percent of it was AI.

Kevin Johns: You think?

David: I’m sure. I mean, the CGI, the rendering, all of that. There were AI elements.

Kevin Johns: Oh, sure.

David: They were using all kinds of powerful computers to make that stuff go down, right? And then everybody tells the indie people, “Don’t you dare touch it, because you’re a bad person if you do.” We have enough trouble trying to compete as it is, never mind being told that we can’t use what everybody else is using. And I bet you a million bucks that the big publishers are leveraging it too. They’re not having people write books with it, but they’re using it for every other purpose, probably including proofreading and feedback and all that stuff.

Kevin Johns: I think a lot of the people who have problems with it also aren’t paying their bills with their art. Here’s a simple example. I was having a book launch party with another author, and I made a poster that said “Book launch party coming up” to post on my Facebook feed. She posted it somewhere else, and they were like, “Shame, shame, burn the witch! This poster was made with AI.” And I’m like, if I have a choice between making a poster in thirty seconds and then spending the next hour with my daughter, or spending an hour on Canva, and I’m not a designer, just moving fonts around… I’m sorry, but life is short. I have bills to pay. I have a family to take care of. If I can get an image created quicker just to throw up, saying, “Hey guys, I’m having a by-the-way, in-real-life party where you can come and talk to writers and buy real books,” if you’re so into real life, then instead of criticizing the poster, come to the event, right? But anyway, it’s weird.

David: Weird times we’re living in, man. I think that’s all going to work itself out over time.

Kevin Johns: Yeah. From now, we’ll look back at this and go, “Oh, silly Kevin, he was so naive. Remember back in ’26?” Is the new one your first-contact book?

David: Yeah, I call it first contact. It’s kind of first contact under the sea. It’s a bit of a convoluted story, because there are mysterious societies in this book. That’s all I’ll say about it. But yeah, first contact. I consider The Solarian Deep a first-contact book, similar to first contact with, say, the Atlanteans. It’s not alien aliens, so I’d like to qualify that.

Kevin Johns: Yeah, okay. Well, that’s obviously where my mind went, knowing it’s an underwater first contact.

David: Right. I want to make sure, because when I hear “first contact,” I think E.T., and it’s not that. The Solarians are probably my first truly alien beings. They’re telepathic, they live undersea, and all that. I haven’t done much in the way of deep space or alien stuff. I’m not opposed to it. But the one thing about my sci-fi writing, and I realized this as I was writing The Solarian Deep, is that I started out thinking it would be fantasy, and it didn’t turn out to be fantasy. It turned out to be plausible, evolutionary sci-fi. I realized that for me, it has to have some kind of logic. I’m not hard sci-fi. I don’t have to justify the physics of light speed or anything like that. But in my mind, it has to be, “Oh yeah, if this happened in real life, I might buy it.” You know, aliens contacted us from light-years away, but they don’t have super Corvette spaceships, whatever. My writing has to make sense in my mind, so I haven’t written a whole bunch of galaxy-spanning alien stuff, because to me that’s not plausible in my world.

A lot of my stuff is connected to Earth and connected to us in one way or another, whether it’s near-future or techno-thriller. AI has a lot to do with what I’m writing, because I think about it a lot. I was really into the singularity idea, the singularity that Ray Kurzweil talks about.

Kevin Johns: Yeah, fill it out for the listeners.

David: Oh, sure. There are two parts to the singularity notion. One is coming up soon: 2029 is the prediction that AI will become smarter than humans. Scary. We’ll find out in three years, right? But that’s not the singularity. The singularity is 2045, and it has to do with the notion that, just like the event horizon of a black hole, we can’t see beyond it. It’s about whether humans and AI will kind of merge together. Kurzweil talks a lot about immortality, that by 2045, after the singularity, everybody could live forever if they want. Or maybe we’ll have to live forever. This could be dystopian, who knows.

I’ve got an idea for a sci-fi book, and it’s just in my head so far, where that sort of happens. You’ve got a very spiritual guy, because spirituality is big for me too, who decides to check out at age 120, and he’s trying to explain to his loved ones, “This isn’t suicide. This is my lifespan. This is what I’m comfortable with. I don’t want to live a million years.” So that’s an idea that’s coming. I’ve got a million ideas. Getting them to the published phase, that’s the problem, right?

Kevin Johns: It’s interesting. One of my very successful clients, Mr. Leonard, is Catholic and also writes sci-fi.

David: Okay.

Kevin Johns: So it’s interesting to hear that you write sci-fi too, which I think of as such a science-based storytelling form, and yet spirituality is important to you as well. Tell me a bit about how you see the metaphysical and the spiritual coming together with speculative fiction.

David: You know who was a very spiritual writer?

Kevin Johns: Who?

David: Isaac Asimov.

Kevin Johns: Yep.

David: Have you ever read The Last Question?

Kevin Johns: No.

David: It’s about ten pages long. It’s free, you can grab it on the internet and read it in fifteen minutes. It’s the best thing I’ve ever read. That’s what inspired me to write. Please read it, everybody who’s listening. The Last Question by Isaac Asimov spans the history of time, from now until the end of time, and the meaning of God, all in ten pages.

Kevin Johns: Very cool.

David: I did have a spiritual awakening in June of 2020, and it was related to recovery. I wrote about it, and it’s on my Substack, so you can read it. I’m not out to convince anybody of anything. I’ve got my own beliefs, and that’s where I’m at. I could be delusional, but I definitely feel more of a sense that something’s out there than I used to, and it definitely goes into the writing, more and more. I think The Vibrants has a lot of elements of that. And we’ll see how many more books I can churn out before I get to the end.

Kevin Johns: I don’t generally have authors on this show who aren’t my clients. I normally interview people who work with and support writers. But what I really appreciated about your pitch was this idea of coming through recovery and coming out the other side, and this message of hope you have for other writers out there. Obviously, artists seem to be more susceptible to addictions. So if there’s a major lesson you can share with the listeners experiencing this interview right now, and maybe struggling with their own trauma issues or their own addictions, what do you have to say to them?

David: Yeah, thank you. That’s a good question, and as you say, it does seem to hit artistic people a lot. I think people who go through trauma can be highly sensitive. Music is what saved me for a while when I was young. Everything was turning to shit, but I could at least play the drums, and that was something I could control. For some people, it’s a notebook, and they can control that. Even with the writing, I took a creative writing class in college, and I spent a lot of time trying to shock the other students with my writing, because you can really write whatever you want and get reactions. That’s creativity, right? Experimenting with what kind of power my words have, what kind of power my talents have. And again, if you read Wounded Angels, you’ll see that when I was playing piano in third grade, I was able to not be bullied for a few days because I was good at playing music. So a lot of that stuff gets wrapped up together. It’s all hand in hand.

But what I would say to somebody who’s struggling, whose life isn’t going well, or is even falling apart while they’re trying to keep it together and also do creative stuff, is: don’t give up, first of all. And it’s so hard to ask for help, but help is out there. There’s a lot of free help in the world, and that’s what I did. A lot of that’s in my book too. I don’t talk so much about addiction recovery specifically, but I definitely talk a lot about healing, where I was at, and what I did to get on a better path.

It’s funny, because there’s so much self-condemnation and low self-esteem among creative people. I’ll tell you a story. There’s a woman named Julie, and I’m going to tell her to watch this. Hey, Julie! She’s probably the best musician I’ve ever met, or in the top three. She’s a genius, a virtuoso. She was my leader in the percussion section in college, and I used to be intimidated by her. I used to think, I suck, and she’s great. We got together a couple of years ago in Tokyo. She just happened to be passing through, and we hadn’t talked in decades. I was talking about my imposter syndrome, and she said, “Oh, I felt like that too. What are you talking about? You’re amazing.” She’s a pro musician, very high level, with an incredible sound, incredible everything, and she felt like an imposter too. She said she didn’t think she played the snare drum well enough, or this and that. And I’m like, what are you talking about? You are so richly talented.

But I am too, and that’s the thing. I felt very much like an imposter with the writing. I’d think, I’m not creative enough, or, this scene sounds like crap. And I look back at it now and say, “Wow, that was pretty well written. I could fix this plot hole, but man, that’s good stuff.” The reason I thought it was crappy was that I felt like I was crappy. Even with the drumming, I’m a highly skilled drummer, but I used to think my ideas weren’t very creative. They were lame, you know? That wasn’t my drumming or my writing. That was me thinking badly about myself because of trauma. Now, thanks to the healing, the inner-child work I write about in Wounded Angels, I’m better. I feel better. I like and love myself, and so I can enjoy my work. And yes, I am a creative guy.

Kevin Johns: Fantastic. Well, if folks want to learn more about you and your writing, where should we send them?

David: DavidDeaneHaskell.com. You don’t have to worry about anything except getting the middle name spelled right: D-E-A-N-E. That’s a family-name thing. You can find Emergence there, and you can get it for free. You sign up for my mailing list and get Emergence to read. There’s other free stuff there too, and links to my Substack with more free stuff. And I actually have some stuff for sale as well.

Kevin Johns: Fantastic, David. I see a lot of author websites through this show and through working with my clients, and you have a really nice-looking, slick website. I encourage folks to check it out.

David: Can I tell you something? AI.

Kevin Johns: Sure.

David: Thank you for saying that, by the way. I did design my website with AI. For years and years, I was so ashamed and embarrassed of my website. It was bad. I’m not very visually artistic, I was trying to do WordPress and all that, and I don’t have the money to hire a designer. Then this year I used Lovable, the AI website creator, and I was like, “Oh man, this is great! I love it.” So thank you. Yes, I think my website is pretty cool, and I hope everybody checks it out.

Kevin Johns: Well, you’re the second person I’ve spoken to recently who’s having fantastic success with Lovable, so I’m definitely going to have to check it out as well. You did mention the free story on the website, right? Lots of stuff to check out. Thank you so much for joining me today, and for taking some time to come on the show and talk about writing and the healing journey.

David: Thank you so much, Kevin. It’s been amazing, and I’m really glad for the connection. I hope we can talk again when the next two books come out. The Vibrants is in process, and there’s also a follow-up to Wounded Angels, another inner-child continuation. I just changed the title yesterday. It’s called What the Child Knows.

Kevin Johns: All right, so What the Child Knows…

David: …is coming soon.

Kevin Johns: That was great, David. Thank you very much. Thanks so much.