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  With thanks to Brad Krause as this week’s guest blogger, enjoy! Authors with stalled careers often recognize the same uneasy pattern: plenty of effort, fewer yeses, and a growing sense that the work isn’t moving the needle. That’s a career plateau in writing, and it usually shows up alongside creative motivation challenges like second-guessing ideas, avoiding the page, or pushing harder without feeling any clearer. The turning point isn’t more grit; it’s writing career revitalization that treats the career as something that can be reset and reintroduced with intention. This is about author professional development that brings momentum back. Create 3 Quick Videos to Reintroduce Your Author Brand Once you’ve named the plateau you’re on, a fast way to shake loose new attention is to show up on screen again, without needing a full production setup. AI-generated video tools can help you create compelling clips that act like a modern video resume: a quick book trailer to spotlight your latest work, a short author pitch that makes your voice and focus instantly clear, and a personal-story or thought-leadership clip that reminds people why you write and what you stand for. With something like Adobe Firefly’s AI video generator, you can simply enter a descriptive text prompt and the tool will generate a customized video clip. Follow a 6-Part Reset Plan for Momentum This Month When your writing life feels stuck, you don’t need a personality transplant, you need a reset you can actually schedule. Use this six-part plan for the next 30 days to rebuild momentum without burning yourself out. Pick one “North Star” goal (and make it measurable): Choose a single outcome for the month: draft 10,000 words, revise 3 chapters, query 8 agents, or sell 20 signed copies. Then break it into a weekly target and a daily “minimum” (even 200 words counts). This works because you stop renegotiating your priorities every morning, and you can win small every day. Build a 20-minute “skill snack” routine: Set a timer three times a week for one focused skill: writing stronger openings, dialogue, pacing, or scene goals. Do one tiny exercise (rewrite the first paragraph of a favorite chapter; cut 10% of a scene; write a two-page dialogue-only scene). Skill improves fastest when practice is short, specific, and repeated, especially when you’re a beginner. Use your 3 quick videos as a weekly visibility habit: If you made a short author pitch, a personal-story clip, and a simple book teaser, schedule them across the month, one per week, then reuse the best-performing one at the end. Pair each post with one clear invitation: “Want the first chapter?” or “Reply with your favorite trope.” Consistent, low-pressure posting keeps your author brand “warm” while you’re rebuilding writing progress. Do one networking “reach-out” every Tuesday: Keep it simple: one genuine message to a librarian, local bookstore staff member, book blogger, writing group organizer, or another author in your genre. Use a tiny script: “I loved your post about ___. I write ___. Would you be open to swapping newsletters/doing a short Q&A/letting me know your event guidelines?” This works because networking isn’t a talent, it’s a repeatable contact habit. Install burnout guardrails before you ramp up: Choose two non-negotiables for the month: a hard stop time (example: no writing after 9 p.m.) and one recovery block (example: Saturday is “no drafting,” only reading/walking). Track your energy for a week, if you’re dragging, reduce your daily minimum rather than quitting entirely. Burnout management in writing is about sustainable pacing, not heroic sprints. Run a “tiny experiment” to make writing fun again (and quiet self-doubt): Once a week, do a low-stakes creative experiment: write a scene from the villain’s POV, change tense, add a new setting, or write a 500-word micro-story tied to your book world. End each experiment by saving one sentence you love in a “proof folder.” Play breaks plateaus, and collecting proof gives you a practical defense against self-doubt on the days your brain insists you’re “not good enough.” Writing Plateau Q&A Authors Actually Ask Q: What if my confidence is so low I can’t tell what’s “good” anymore? A: Treat confidence like a meter, not a verdict. Pick one scene and do a single objective check, like clarity of action or strength of the first paragraph, then revise only that. If you’re too close to the draft, read aloud, discover inconsistenciesand fix what sounds confusing, not what feels “bad.” Q: How can I restart when I only have 20 minutes a day? A: Choose a tiny, repeatable task that fits inside the time, like 200 words, one paragraph edit, or five query tweaks. Keep a running list of “next micro-step” options so you never waste your session deciding. Consistency beats intensity when life is crowded. Q: How do I know which career stall solution fits me right now? A: Match the fix to the symptom: low output needs a minimum writing habit, messy drafts need one skill focus, low sales need a simple visibility routine, and isolation needs one weekly reach-out. Try one lever for two weeks, then assess with one metric you can track. Q: Can I focus on visibility if my book isn’t perfect yet? A: Yes, if the goal is connection, not hype. Share process, themes, or a short excerpt and invite responses, while you keep drafting or revising quietly. Visibility works best as a gentle drip, not a launch-only sprint. Q: When should I take a break instead of pushing through? A: If you’re skipping sleep, resenting the work, or your word counts keep dropping, that is a data point, not a failure. Shorten the workload, protect recovery time, and return with one small task you can finish in a single sitting. Build Business Basics to Stabilize Your Writing Income One longer-term way to boost your skills, and expand your career options, is earning a degree that strengthens how you plan, organize, and follow through on the work behind your writing. Because an online degree is

  I remember when I found out Santa Claus wasn’t a guy who actually came down the chimney. If I’m being honest, I’d known about it for a while – I just hadn’t processed it.  As the holiday season approached, my older brother Larry and I became professional snoops.  Whenever our parents left us alone, or in the brief window between our getting home from school and their getting home from work, we went exploring. We dug into in their closets and looked under their bed, our eyes widened by the unwrapped treasures we’ve found.  We never saw it as “ruining the surprise”…we just wanted a sneak-peak at the stuff that would be ours on Christmas Day.  When that glorious day arrived, it never occurred to me to keep track of what presents were labeled “From Santa” and which ones came from mom and dad…I was too busy reveling in the delight our snooping had provided. One Christmas…I was six or seven…we were making the four-hour drive from Hyattsville, Maryland to visit my mom’s family just outside of Pittsburgh.  Our parents asked us if we wanted the presents (they were all wrapped) in the backseat.  That’s like asking a kid if they want another piece of cake. With the presents triumphantly placed between us, it took all of thirty seconds to see the first present marked “From Santa.”  That was it.  The gig was up.  I was inconsolable for the first hour of the drive. What happened? My mind had been presented with new information.  My body was still living with the belief that Santa was real.  The grief I experienced was the translation of that new belief into my body. I appreciate that people are free to believe what they want.  I honor that.  And, if you are weighing the traditions honestly, weigh this: among all the world’s religions, only one stakes its entire claim on a dateable, embodied, witnessed conquest of the one enemy that has never lost.  Every other belief system offers wisdom about death.  Only one offers victory over it. Neuroscientists estimate that by the time most people reach adulthood, approximately 95% of who they are is not a conscious choice.  It is a set of memorized emotional programs running automatically beneath the threshold of awareness – patterns laid down through years of repetition until the body learned to run them without consulting the mind at all. Remember the first time you drove a car?  You were conscious of everything: hands, mirrors, pedals, speed, distance.  Ten years later, likely with hundreds and perhaps even thousands of hours of driving under your belt, you arrive at your destination without giving the drive itself much thought.  The body has taken over.  Through repetition, it learned to do something the mind once had to manage consciously.  In sports, we call this muscle-memory. This is how beliefs are actually formed.  It’s not the compelling argument, or the persuasive paragraph.  Even a genuinely spiritual experience won’t do the trick, although it can be a great “nudge.”  Outside of a traumatic event, where the body is flooded with cortisol and adrenalin in an instant, beliefs are formed the way driving is learned – through repetition, time, and embodied experience, until the pattern is deeper than the thought. When this happens, the body becomes the mind.  The body is the accumulated, emotional history of everything you have repeatedly felt, done, and returned to.  Every thought you think releases a cascade of neuropeptides, chemical messengers that carry the emotional signature of that thought to every cell in your body.  Over time, the body becomes a living record of what it has been told. So, what does this have to do with faith? Growing up in a church-going family, the goal of Christian life seemed to me to be oriented to intellectual assent.  This meant believing the right things about God, staying in the lanes provided by the Ten Commandments, and giving thanks.  The implicit assumption was that if you got the beliefs right in your head, transformation would follow. Here’s the catch – the New Testament isn’t about intellectual assent.  It’s about transformation.  Paul writes of being “transformed by the renewing of your mind.”  The Greek word is metamorphoo – the same root as metamorphosis.  The caterpillar does not become a butterfly by learning new things about butterflies.  Its entire structure reorganizes. When the pandemic began, I experienced a series of events that led me to one conclusion – God is real.  These “nudges” were more than my nervous system could handle.  After a decades-long journey searching for something, wracked with doubt, I began processing that truth.  Over the next few years, I struggled in reconciling it into my body.  My mind kept renewing.  My body experienced the transformation…and still is. What I have come to realize and embody over the past few years is this – the thing that I have been most afraid of has already been walked through, from the inside, by someone who came back. That is the essence of faith. The story of Jesus is deserving of all the gratitude, awe, and reverence His story inspires.  To quote Dr. Jordan Peterson, it is the archetypal Hero’s Journey – the story that can’t be topped. The purpose of Jesus’ story is emulation. To believe in His story is wonderful.  The real question is: where in your body does His story not yet live – and are you willing to do what it takes to get it there?

  Anyone who spends anytime with me knows I love comic books. I hit my stride with them when my family lived on the island of Okinawa, Japan back when the earth was still cooling and the dinosaurs had recently gone extinct.  It was 1979. We had access to just one American television channel and, after school, the only thing on was General Hospital.  Yes, if you’re old enough to remember the Quartermain’s, I know all about Luke and Laura.  My best friend Jason and I alternated between that and watching Star Wars, which he had on BetaMax (ask your parents).  Otherwise, we read comics – Jason was big into Spiderman.  I loved the X-Men. Superhero stories were spectacular and fueled my imagination.  Before Hugh Jackman ever drew his claws as Wolverine on the big screen, I was captivated by the storytelling that came out once a month, when a new issue of the Uncanny X-Men was released. When superhero movies first came out, the stories and special effects were reflective of the times.  Christopher Reeve’s Superman was dazzling, and he epitomized the Boy Scout Man of Steel revealed in the comics.  The stories were campy, and almost every movie was a solo film.  Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy changed things tonally, as the films gave a more serious consideration for how a vigilante like that might be experienced in the real world. The X-Men films were good, but they lived in their own world, without the likes of Spiderman, the Fantastic Four, or Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. By the time the Avengers came onto the scene fifteen years ago, it was spectacular.  Things were shifting. The fact that Marvel was bringing heroes and worlds together was electrifying.  I feel no shame in admitting a tear came to my eye the first time Captain America and Iron Man shared screen time. Psychologists say life is best understood as a story. Story is the primary way humans create meaning, coherence, and identity out of seemingly random events. Through narratives, people organize experiences, link past, present, and future, and gain agency over their personal growth. Our stories are uniquely ours; no one has had your life experiences, and your skills, talents, and quirks make you distinctly “you.” This leads to a question…what story are you in? Story is how every tradition orients its people.  Like it or not, the world has been built on stories involving some kind of Creator.  To be sure, the story that we’re all here because of cosmic chance has gained popularity in recent years, as has a more “customizable” form of spirituality where people are free to believe what they want. This is easy enough to understand, given that so much of monotheism has emphasized a God who is external.  And yet, huge swaths of the planet have been shaped by the three monotheistic religions. Western civilization was founded on Greek philosophy, Roman law, and Judeo-Christian values.  The Jewish Torah gives law and covenant – God speaking to humanity, shaping a people through sacred obligation.  The Quran gives recitation and submission – God speaking through a prophet; the divine word descending into human language.  The Bhagavad Gita gives divine counsel – God speaking alongside humanity in its moment of deepest crisis and paralysis. And then there’s the Christian Bible. The Gospel makes a significantly different claim.  In the narrative of Jesus, God enters the human story.  God takes on a body, a name, and belongs to a family.  God is a carpenter.  God experiences hunger, rejection, grief, and death.  Jesus walks the path from inside the human condition – fully God and fully human – all the way through to its darkest end and out the other side. This is what makes the Bible story unique among the world’s great narratives: it is not primarily a story about what God requires of you.  It’s a story about what God became for you – and what that becoming makes possible in you. For most of my life, the story I was in involved dying and then learning if I’d lived a good enough life to make it into heaven.  I didn’t go to church, didn’t talk much to God…I didn’t like my odds.  To be clear, much of my life had been focused on God…but I’d been searching for something – a bridge of sorts.  I had no idea where I would find it, when I would recognize it.   Through thick and thin, I believed with all my heart it was out there. It sounds dramatic to call it a quest and by most standards, my life was completely unsensational.  If value is measured in relationships, professional or financial success, I was woefully average. And then, in the first month of the pandemic, a strange thing happened. I saw what I’d spent my entire life looking for. I saw the “compelling why” that was going to lead me into the Bible story so I could figure out how to get out of the Bible story.  Growing up with the idea, the belief, that God is outside you…well, that makes it extremely difficult to participate in Jesus’ story. I realized, as much as I had observed Easter in the past, and intellectually understood the idea behind the Resurrection, I wasn’t living from inside the truth of His story. It is a far more daunting prospect to reconcile the opposing idea – that God is within you. In the weeks ahead, I’ll share more updates about my forthcoming book, Resurrection: Breathing with God due out this summer.  I’ll also be peeling back the curtain on the accompany course, Resurrection: Crowned with Christ. The story of Jesus is the promise of everlasting life. What story are you in?

Hi everyone! As many of you know, I’ve been pouring my heart into a project called Resurrection: Breathing with God. At its heart, it’s about waking up what’s already inside of you. I’ve just launched my Publishizer campaign to get this into the hands of those who need it most. If you feel moved to support or just share the link, it would mean the world to me. You can see the cover and the story here: https://publishizer.com/resurrection/ Grateful for your love and support! David Here is a sneak peek into the book’s Introduction: INTRODUCTION: The Elephant in the Church               This book is for people who don’t go to church, and this book is about resurrection.             This is not a “Bible for Dummies” translation of the Good Book; that book has already been published.  Nor is it an attempt to validate the Bible as a history textbook; for many, a story that lacks forensic exactness loses its authority.  Most importantly, this is not a defense of the historical Jesus.  I am not interested in arguing that the resurrection happened; I am interested in the implications of its truth.             There is an assumption that the reader has a general awareness of the Bible story.  In the pages ahead, we will explore an uncommon perspective of its narrative.  We do so with a very specific intent. This book is intended to resolve the Bible story by fulfilling what is its most overlooked and least understood promise.  Its omission in modern theology no doubt stems from the fact that, at first glance, this promise appears to apply to just one person.  This character’s story persists across the entirety of the Bible and is married to Jesus’ story in an unbreakable bond.  God keeps all His promises. To start with, I will stay in the convention of modern Christianity, in that I will refer to God as He…in my case, the “He” I am referring to is Jesus.  I will not however, stay in this convention long. What follows is the perspective that the Bible is a consciously engineered, covenantal narrative designed to carry consciousness across collapse, exile, and resurrection. This perspective is non-denominational, intending instead to strike at the story’s universal appeal at evolving our collective understanding of what it means to awaken. In these pages, I have attempted to be as honest as I am curious. This journey requires a willingness to stand in the tension between the majestic scope of the Divine and the raw vulnerability of being human.  As Brené Brown says, “Vulnerability is the new courage.”  To explore the architecture of the soul, one must be willing to walk through its most hollow spaces.             It is not quite fair to say that I abandoned my faith over the course of my life although, if attendance at church is to serve as the benchmark by which faith is measured, I do not receive a passing grade.  It wasn’t that I abandoned my faith.             It was that I was looking for it in the smallest possible window. My life became a quest at an early age.  As a child of 4 or 5, when we don’t question the presence of “imaginary friends” capable of holding discreet conversations with us from the unseen realm of our interior, Jesus informed me that a woman would lead me back to God.             I received this message with delight, wonder, and a blossoming sense of anticipation.             Church was a regular part of weekly life in my family.  Sunday School too, for a while.  My drift away from organized religion began in high school, matured in college, and settled in as I became a Marine Corps officer.  I still believed but felt disconnected from the passivity of sitting in the pews on Sundays.   I didn’t know how to be an active participant in the story of Jesus.  And, at some unspoken level of my psyche, I didn’t believe I was going to find this woman in a church.             I stopped reading the Bible because I couldn’t understand it and, in general, had difficulty focusing.  My grades in school and my life reflected the fact that my attention was scattered.  This was likely the result of a blow to the back of my head I received when, in a fit of rage, my best friend threw a hammer, knocking me unconscious.  The incident occurred in 1975 and resulted in an out-of-body experience, where I watched his oldest brother carry my limp body to their house.  I was six.  I did not confront the memory again until the pandemic forced me to reconcile its implications in my life.             As I grew older, something felt “off” about going to church.             It was something I could never quite place a finger on.  Only recently did I come to fully appreciate the dilemma I experienced in what I expected from attending church services. Maps and Territories             In a culture trained to skim, sample, and scroll, we often encounter Scripture in fragments.  A verse here, a sermon there.  This book is not written against the church, nor against those who love it.  It is written against the subtle way righteousness can become a shield against transformation. When we treat the text as a menu, we risk consuming fragments and never encountering the story that is meant to consume us.  It’s not because the verses, dished out as portions, are untrue, but because the story they belong to is larger than any single passage can hold on its own. The Bible is a vast and demanding journey.  Its writing is sprawled across centuries.  It repeatedly tells the truth about human failure with unsettling honesty, and it speaks the truth of divine faithfulness with even greater depth.  For many, it is easier to rest in the familiar comfort of the 23rd Psalm than to descend with David in the silence of Sheol, yet only in the wholeness of his descent can we

  I am excited to share that my next book, Resurrection: Breathing with God is nearing completion. If you’re unfamiliar with the symbol on the cover, that is the Messianic Seal of Jerusalem. This book makes the case that the highest aspiration of any spiritual or religious journey is co-heirship with Christ.  In it, we explore what’s been lost in translation as the Bible evolved from Hebrew to Greek to Latin and eventually English; language plays a significant role in shaping perception.  We uncover the life-changing impact the alphabet had on the development of the human brain, and how the Bible is less a record of historical events and more of a journey of consciousness.  We dive into the wedding motif that unites the Old Testament and New, and examine what role neuroscience plays in faith.  Critically, we explore the promise made to King David, the cost he bears in breaching the covenant, and how the promise made to him is democratized for everyone. I invite you to participate in the book’s creation.  Subscribe to the campaign, and review the different options to support the book’s publication. In the coming weeks, I’ll share updates on the writing process as well as excerpts from the manuscript. https://publishizer.com/resurrection/ Thank you for your support! David

Hey everyone! I trust 2026 has started out in grand fashion and you are truly living your best life.  2025 was a productive year, as I published Becoming One with Christ, created two courses to go along with the book’s release.  The book is available on all major platforms and the audio version was recently completed.  I’ll be sharing more information on its release soon, as I just completed a short interview about the book and its purpose.  I also became a Results Coach for Tony Robbins AND am now putting the finishing touches on my fifth book.  I’ll share more on that in my next post. To crank up the blog engine once more, the amazing and incredible Brad Krause recently reached out with a helpful blog on sustainable personal growth.  Brad, I truly appreciate your contributions…thanks so much!  Without further ado, here’s Brad. Busy parents juggling work and wellness, early-career professionals trying to “get it together,” and students building adult routines often start personal development for beginners the same way: by pushing too hard, too fast. The core tension is simple, progress feels urgent, but the pace that looks impressive on paper can quietly drain energy, confidence, and joy, making avoiding burnout in growth journeys feel impossible. Sustainable self-improvement protects work-life balance while building mental resilience, so effort doesn’t collapse the moment life gets busy. The goal is long-term motivation that stays steady. Understanding Sustainable Personal Development Sustainable growth starts with a simple definition: sustainable personal development is steady progress you can keep up, even on messy weeks. It means improving in ways that build confidence and skills without draining your body, mood, or relationships. Burnout is what happens when effort outruns recovery, and your mind begins to protect you by shutting down motivation. When you’re depleted, small tasks feel heavier, focus gets patchy, and quitting starts to look like “being realistic.” Slow, consistent steps plus planned rest keep your momentum alive. Think of it like training for a long walk, not sprinting one day and needing a week off. A 10-minute habit you repeat beats a 60-minute push you can’t recover from. With this mindset, you can choose goals and daily habits that challenge you without overwhelming you. Habits That Build Growth Without the Crash These habits turn self-improvement into something you can repeat, not something you must “power through.” Pick a few that fit your real schedule, and you will stay motivated longer because your plan includes both progress and recovery. Daily Top 3 What it is: Write three outcomes for today using clear daily goals. How often: Daily Why it helps: You focus effort where it counts and avoid overload. Minimum Baseline Day What it is: Choose a tiny fallback routine you can do when energy is low. How often: As needed Why it helps: Consistency stays intact, so quitting feels less tempting. 10-Minute Body Reset What it is: Do a short walk, stretch, or mobility flow, then drink water. How often: Daily Why it helps: It reduces stress and restores attention fast. Weekly Time Map What it is: Plan your week around priorities, buffers, and rest using time management is moderately related to wellbeing. How often: Weekly Why it helps: You protect recovery so growth stays sustainable. Skill Variety Slot What it is: Rotate one growth activity each week: learning, fitness, creativity, or relationships. How often: Weekly Why it helps: Variety keeps motivation fresh and prevents obsession. Your Sustainable Growth Checklist This checklist turns motivation into simple, repeatable choices so you can grow without running yourself into the ground. Skim it in the morning or before bed to stay clear on what matters, what to drop, and how to recover. ✔ Set three priorities for today and ignore everything else until they’re done ✔ Choose one “tiny version” of your habit for low-energy days ✔ Schedule one recovery block and treat it like a real appointment ✔ Track effort in minutes, not perfection, to reduce pressure ✔ Review your week for one win and one lesson learned ✔ Rotate one skill focus to keep your growth interesting ✔ Celebrate a small milestone with a healthy reward you’ll actually enjoy One checked box today is how long-term change gets built. Common Questions on Growing Without Burning Out Q: How can I prevent feeling overwhelmed while pursuing multiple self-improvement goals? A: Pick one primary goal for the next 2 to 4 weeks and put the rest on a “later” list. Then shrink your daily action to the smallest repeatable step, like fit in 10 minutes of practice, reading, or movement. If your mind feels cluttered, do a two-minute brain dump and circle only what you can influence today. Q: What strategies help maintain motivation when progress seems slow or stalled? A: Switch your scoreboard from outcomes to inputs: minutes practiced, pages written, or attempts made. A helpful mindset is aiming to continue being motivated long enough to reach your goal, not to feel inspired every day. If you feel flat, change the environment or add a tiny challenge so it feels fresh again. Q: How do I balance pushing myself and allowing time for rest to avoid burnout? A: Treat rest as part of training, not a reward you earn after you collapse. Use a simple rule: if sleep, mood, or focus dips for three days, reduce intensity and keep only the easiest version of your habit. You can still grow while you recover, as long as you protect your baseline energy. Q: What are effective ways to celebrate small achievements to keep momentum going? A: Name the win out loud and connect it to identity: “I’m someone who shows up.” Choose a reward that restores you, like a relaxed evening, a walk, or a favorite meal, and keep it proportional to the effort. Capture it in a quick note so future-you will have proof that you are progressing. Q: What steps can I take if I’m feeling stuck and uncertain about the direction of