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Mister Kitty on his very first night with me.

Living With Them is a book about so much more than the death of a beloved pet and what happened. It’s a book about what I’ve learned during my life from facing adversity, grief and the joy of life that came from the depths of dispair. It is about the strengthening of faith that comes from grief, about how God shows us the joy of creation, relationships and living. Living With Them is a celebration of what happens when you throw of the yoke of grief and grab the reins of life.
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The valley of the shadow of death thing – anyone who has been there knows that there are no words that can describe the depths of dispair in grief.
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Grief is a process of profound loss – grief is the emotion of our missing a loved one or even a loved object. It’s not about whom or what we’ve lost. It’s about us and should be embraced so that it can run it’s course naturally. It’s not about getting drunk or high to deal with it.
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Craig Johnson, a writer, penned a series of books titled “The Walt Longmire Mysteries” about a sheriff in Wyoming which is now a popular television series (which was picked up by Netflix and is now produced by them). Walt Longmire has a lot to tell us as he goes through his crime solving and has a wonderful and epic set of ethics that he does his best not to violate. Before the series started, Walt’s wife was murdered and much of the first few seasons revolves around that event.

In the pilot of the series, he has to inform a woman that not only was her husband murdered but he was murdered while he was trying to find his daughter that she didn’t know about. The wife asks him if the pain of the loss ever gets better. Walt answers her with this:

“Does it ever stop hurting? Not really. You see, the only way for it to stop hurting is if we forget about them. And that’s the thing. I don’t want to forget anything about them.” – Walt Longmire, season 1, episode 1
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You’ve heard the humorous axioms about doing something while chewing gum while doing something else.

“It is my indignant opinion that 90 percent of the moving pictures exhibited in America are so vulgar, witless and dull that it is preposterous to write about them in any publication not intended to be read while chewing gum.”
–Wolcott Gibbs

In my apparent series of articles about writing a book and what I’m learning along the way – using WordPress to write a book, my research library, what I’m learning about myself at the same time – is that this book writing thing, specifically the non-fiction category is fraught with pitfalls and research. Research I don’t mind doing but the number of mind numbing articles on the internet about any particular subject can be confusing, especially when you’ve spent an hour doing what you think is learning only to find out that all you’re reading is a marketing ploy designed to get you to buy chewing gum. Even with the massive reading library that I’ve developed for you to read, there are rabbit holes and false trails that abound with poor information. Thus, I have turned my attention to developing some rules for myself on the topic of research.

• How does one know whether or not one is finding accurate information?
• Is there a marketing ploy behind some scientific information?
• Are there politically correct motivations behind definitions?
• Does the scientific paper have good quality citations?

What I’ve found is that when you’re researching a particular topic to learn about is that one of the most important search terms to use when looking for good quality musings and research papers are three simple letters to include in the search.

PDF

Most missives that you find on the internet are like the one that you’re reading right now. Blog posts. Opinions, No basis in scientific fact. To get to the meat of a topic, it’s important to peel away the skin before biting into the research topic. What I’ve found is that most writings that are scientific in nature – that is written by someone that has actually done science to get to a conclusion – are available as a PDF document.

Blog posts and opinion writings are not typically done as a PDF. Live it, love it, learn it.

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Writing a book using WordPress is turning out to be an experience as good as I had hoped it would be. Being able to write on any device either in the browser or via the WordPress app is a great experience for a writer.

Obviously, I do a lot of writing using WordPress over the years for journalism and opinion column writing and as a HTML editor – once you remove your mental imitations, the sky is the limit.

But once you start writing a book using WordPress, you have to do the same thing that you do with your computers and devices – you need to back up your work.

I’ve found that the best and easiest way to do this is to use the Aspose plugin and download it to whatever device you happen to be writing on at the moment and then do whatever you like best with the file. Myself, I upload it to Google Drive as a poor man’s backup solution rather than using my normal backup softare (it gets backed up anyways) so I have access to that particular version of the chapters.

You certainly don’t have to use the Apose plugin to achieve getting a copy of your work – you can copy/paste it as well, however, I’ve found that Apose does a perfect job of converting the book into the format I want it in so I go that route.

If you’ve been reading these WordPress book writing posts you know that I started using WordPress to do the writing because it’s a fumbling, stumbling pain to try to cloud the files because of having to use different software on different devices and that most cloud solutions for doing this are cumbersome to use. I much prefer coming to the website and just wriitng rather than opening different software, downloading the cloud version, opening it, writing, saving it, clouding it back up and then wonder why I was only able to write one paragraph in the time allotted.

Next up, remodeling your kitchen with WordPress!

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There are several articles and how to pieces on the internet about writing books online using WordPress. This article goes into more depth than most do. Yes, it’s a longer read and goes into the weeds several times but it’s worth it to not have a bunch of false starts, especially if you’re a first time book author like I am.

I’m also happy to help (on a limited basis) other authors who have trouble setting up their WordPress for writing. Just us the contact form on the site.

Many of us choose to write books. Each year, 200 million of us at least think about it if you believe the statistics. The point is that a lot of people don’t write the book they want to either because they don’t know how, don’t have the time or realize how much work it is once they start. The motivation and time are only two of the issues for writers.

In my opinion and experience as a first time book writer (I’ve got 40 years of experience in journalism to light my path in the darkness), the most difficult part is not creating the words but how to put them in a coherent format that makes sense to your brain so you can write instead of thinking about how to write.

I searched for book writing software, explored various cloud solutions and generally stumbled around and didn’t actually do any writing simply because I was worried I’d find something better and have to move everything I wrote to a new format.

The Device To Write On

Whether it’s a typewriter, a pencil and paper or in electronic form, you have to choose a format to write on and stick with it. One of the great aspects of all the devices we all have from smartphones to tablets, PCs, net-books and even our vehicles is being able to write anywhere, any time. But the big hangup (for me) is a seamless way to use the cloud effectively where you can edit at will without apps, programs and not knowing if you’re editing the right version of your work.

Another real pain I’ve found – actually two pains – is that some clouds save the document under a different name each time so you may have dozens of copies of the same document and woe be you if you edit away on the wrong version and then have to combine them all together.

As divine providence would have it, I’m writing a book about grieving and have been having all sorts of issues trying to write effectively using the cloud. When you’re using a variety of platforms every day – Windows XP, Vista & 7, various android versions, maybe an iOS, you will come across doing gymnastics just trying to save the thing let alone being able to concentrate on writing. I used one program that has a great “save to cloud” feature so you can, as they bill it, write on any device, only to find out their Android app doesn’t have that “save to cloud” feature. Losing!

After weeks of this, I stopped writing and set out to find something easy and effective as well as having the ability to share it all easily for the eventual editor, not to mention those experts that agree to help me with technical information about the topic. I am happy to report that there is an astoundingly simple solution, that once set up is seamless and I’m going to show you how to do it.

The Solution For Writing Anywhere, Anytime

Almost everyone knows about blogging. You can get a very inexpensive web server account for just a few dollars a month at places like Bluehost or any other good hosting company. The great thing about this is that once you get an account with a web hosting company, you also have your book site. Which of course goes beyond the scope of this article in that you need to choose a web address as well. You will find out that when using the most inexpensive web server accounts that you share that server with other websites. If you start to get a lot of traffic on your site, you’ll need to upgrade your account – keep that in mind when you choose a hosting company! Be sure you can upgrade your account.

Next, you’ll need an installation of WordPress. This is super easy using “one click install” features on web servers. WordPress, if you’ve never used it, is a free, open source blogging/content management engine that drives vast numbers of websites. You probably visit WordPress powered sites all the time and don’t realize it. I’ve found it to be intuitive and as time goes by, become more and more advanced.

Next, you’re going to need what are called “plugins” which are nothing more than little scripts that extend the features of WordPress. Here’s what you need.

This is important. You need to think ahead, not just willy nilly screw around. You will need to, just like any technology, test it first by creating a test document with all the parts you plan on having in it from footnotes to tables of contents to font styles.

1. A really simple theme for your WordPress site. Themes are what the public sees when they visit your site. It’s the presentation of your information. The one I chose for my book writing site is called “A Dream To Host. it’s a really simple, basic no frills theme that is astoundingly fast to load and work with. it’s designed to be a breeze to modify and change to your liking or just use it as it is. If you like the way it looks here, use the contact form and I’ll help you get it just right.
2. A table of contents creator. You may or may not decide to use a TOC plugin. I decided to NOT use one and created my table of contents by.
   
3. A footnote creator. I tried several of them and came up with a solution that works the best (for me).
   
4. Conversion Tool.A tool to download what you write into a Word or other format so you can send your book to publishers, convert it to an ebook format and be able to do the final editing on your computer of choice.
   
5. A privacy tool to keep the general public from seeing your work unless you want them to. This is a great tool because the experts that you might be getting to help with your book can have access to the drafts of your chapters while the general public only sees what you want them to.
   
6. Extended Editing Tool. WordPress has a basic control system for fonts, font sizes and other doodads that you might use. There are plugins that extend this to font sizes, type faces, colors, inserting of dates and other handy tools.

Really,  that’s it. I installed all of this in less than an hour and it works beyond great. The creators of WordPress even have a neat tool to write without even going to your WordPress installation. Another winner in the formula is that when you get done with the book,  you can also use your WordPress site to market your book, collect email addresses, let interviewers read parts or all of the book and probably dozens of other uses I haven’t thought of.

Here’s the list of plugins that I use on my book site:

Advanced Image Styles – this lets you control how images and graphics look from borders to white space.

Apose conversion plugin – winner, winner chicken dinner. This handy tool converts and saves your work in just about any format you want for easy editing in your word processing software/app. NOTE: Apose also has a document importer and an ebook generator so make sure you’re installing the right one.

Hide this – lets you hide whatever you want from the general public using “shortcodes” – i.e. putting a bit of text in brackets that gives WordPress a command to follow. Example: [a bit of code]

Zotero – NOT a WordPress plugin but a footnote tool. Works as a stand alone program or as an addon for your browser.

WP Superedit – Extends the stock editor in WordPress a LOT!

Private Content Plus – Sets permissions for individual pages and blog posts so the public can’t see it.

FD Footnotes – I have found this to be the perfect footnote generator (for me) and transfers seamlessly to other document styles like Word and PDF.

Add To Any – Sets up social network sharing buttons (Facebook, Twitter, Google +, etc.) so visitors can share your site with others.

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In October of 2015 our 22 year old cat, Ted Bird passed away.

The grief and depression was horrible and enlightening. We experienced the miracle of life and the agony of mourning for a wonderful companion.

Ted Bird passed away at home on the deck that she loved to lay on every summer, basking in the sun.

The experience taught me a lot and I am writing a book about what I learned and felt. It is my hope that this book will help others through the pain of losing a companion and family member.

This is a painful process, recalling the passing of all of the wonderful pets that I have had the honor of knowing. It is also a wonderful therapy, recalling all the great experiences I had with them.

I want to include the experiences of other families that have lost one of their own, no matter what kind or breed of companion. Contact me through the web site below or by phone if you want to tell the world about your wonderful companion and what they meant to you and your family.

You can also help by downloading this post as a PDF and printing it out and posting it on your church, community or vet’s office bulletin board.

Get the PDF   

[contact-form to=’[email protected]’ subject=’book comment’][contact-field label=’Name’ type=’name’ required=’1’/][contact-field label=’Email’ type=’email’ required=’1’/][contact-field label=’Website’ type=’url’/][contact-field label=’Comment’ type=’textarea’ required=’1’/][/contact-form]

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My book, Living With Them is about what I have learned about during my lifetime about death, the grieving process and how to use a single axiom to help yourself through this pain – the pain of grief.

This book, Living With Them, will be free for everyone to read. It will be serialized on this site in as many formats as we can create from normal web pages to pdf to mobi and possibly Kindle format.

This book is a long term project as you can imagine that reliving painful episodes in my life isn’t the most pleasant experience. But it needs to be done which is why I’m releasing the book for free. Every day, many people have their pets leave them. Like myself, the pain and sorrow of losing a pet is a horrible pain. If my book helps anyone, whether it be a few or many, then my work is a worthwhile endeavor.

Simply use the menu to access the chapters of the book.

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