The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Ashes in the Milk by Valerie Johns

Episode Date: August 7, 2024

Ashes in the Milk by Valerie Johns https://amzn.to/4cmOZRn When people think of trauma, they think of the extremes: veterans of war, survivors of genocide, or malnourished refugees. Our minds instinctively consider those who have been exposed to the harshest realities our world has to offer. But in truth, trauma is rather common and impacts millions of people. Trauma is often caused by interpersonal conflict, inflicted by one person on another. Meaning, those who suffer from the impacts are often the people we love and hold dear―and don't even know it. Or they are the strangers we see on our way to work, or out running errands. They are the adults walking around with small, wounded children within them―dying for a way to heal, recover, and live a fulfilling, healthy life―without the wounds of their childhoods. They are the adults who have suffered from neglect, mistreatment, and even abuse as young children―and their suffering has seen no end. Unrealized, these traumas are passed down from generation to generation even when most parents insist, they will do better than their parents did. This pervasiveness is exactly what Valerie Johns has noticed, and experienced, throughout her personal and professional life―and is what's driven her to spread awareness, connect with others who are suffering, and help create a path forward. Drawn to the subject of trauma and healing by her early childhood abuse, Valerie became an expert in all things healing, and found solace and comfort in the written word too, becoming a poet and published author. Throughout her healing journey, and her journey to help others, Valerie found that many books in the space are often too academic, too prescriptive, or too dry― leaving an entire readership unmoored, lost, and entrenched in insufferable pain. While prescriptive self-help and more hands-on help can be wonderfully helpful to those suffering, Valerie has recognized a need for something much more intimate, vulnerable, and creative. Using the written word, those who are wounded can discover the deep chasms of pain within themselves and feel inspired and encouraged to explore even more deeply. Drawing from her own personal experiences and professional expertise, "Ashes in the Milk" answers this call and bridges the gap between self-help, vulnerable narrative, and prose. Broken down into powerful, entrancing stanzas, readers are invited to find hope and solace in Valerie's writing, in search of their holistic healing and peace. "Ashes in the Milk" will remind readers that their greatest path to healing lies within―all they must do is walk down the path.

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As always, we have the most amazing authors on the show with us today. We have another one today. Valerie Johns joins us on the show. Her new book has come out August 27th, 2024, upcoming this year. You can get it in pre-order now it is entitled ashes in the milk i really like that title that's a really kitschy title she is she's doing in her latest book drawing from her personal experience and private expertise ashes in the milk that bridges the gap between self-help vulnerable vulnerable narrative, and prose. As she's traveled a path toward wholeness, she discovered proverbial stories that took

decades to unfold, all of which was corroborated by her mother. Her work is that of soul revival, retrieval, and some revival probably too, that leads to psychological healing, reclaiming the parts of ourselves that don't have language, but only unnameable pain and free-floating anxiety. Welcome to the show, Valerie. How are you? I'm well, Chris.

Thank you. Thank you for having me. It's funny to hear that out loud. There you go. I mean, people read my bio and I'm like, who are they talking about? Who are they talking about? What does that mean? Did I do all that?

It hurts. I can't remember. So, Valerie, give us a dot com. Where can people find you on the interwebs? Okay. My website is ValerieJohns.com, V-A-L-E-R-I-E-J-O-H-N-S dot com. Instagram, ValerieJohnsLA, as in Los Angeles. My talk is ValerieJohnsAshes.

And on Facebook, there's a, what is called a fan page or whatever now is Ashes in the Milk. There you go. So give us a 30,000 overview. What's inside your new book? Well, this is the third time I've written this book, and it's the first successful time I've written it. I've been trying to write it

for about 40 years. It's, I got in touch with memories from being a six-week-old baby, which is very unusual. I get it. And there's probably a lot of people out there that say you can't remember. But we've really learned that the body remembers. So when I was about seven years into becoming a therapist, I was in a hurricane on Kauai, and I had terrible PTSD afterwards. And I went for hypnosis, and the therapist took me into the hurricane. And instead of the hurricane, I was in a baby's body with my father yelling at me.

Oh, wow. Yeah. So I called my mom, and I asked her, is this real? Did that happen? And there was this long silence on the phone and she said, how could you possibly know that? Wow. That's pretty amazing. So it's been an unfolding journey through the rest of her life until she died.

I asked her a thousand questions about my early infancy. And during the pandemic, when there was nowhere to go but inside, I signed up for a writer's workshop with a storyteller named Ann Randolph and just started writing off of prompts. And the poems just started coming. The stories started coming. And every day that I wrote was like a pearl on a string of pearls and by the time I was done I had a book there you go sometimes these it folds a wild way sometimes these things where you know people just start writing and then there it is and you call it a poetic memoir yes tell us

you know you kind of mentioned the poet but why do you think it came together in a poem sort of way? Well, I was trained as a poet by a man named Jack Graves who does method writing, like method acting, back in my 20s. And then I became the poet in residence at an elementary school in Pacific Palisades. And so I've been a poet long before I became a therapist. And so I've always used my metaphorical skills, if you will, in working with others. And when this story began to unfold, the narrative just came out as poetry. And somebody in my writer's group, we would post our daily writes that we wrote. Somebody said, have you ever heard of a poetic memoir? And I said, no. And he said, I think you're writing one.

Oh, wow. Keep going. Keep going. And so I kept going. There you go. Keep going. Sometimes that's the best way through is to just keep going and going and going. And now you've written it, and it's out, it comes out on august 27th the tell us a little

bit about your upbringing did you were you always writing that when did you finally kind of notice that you had a knack for writing well in second grade i wrote a poem and this is best put it to music and the class sang it and i was hooked it was like I'm a writer. I'm a writer. I knew I was a writer. And right after I knew I was a writer, I was kind of like at the peak of my career, if you will, at eight years old. A neighborhood teenager hit me in the face with a croquet mallet. Oh, wow. Yeah. That's not cool at all.

Trauma. Big trauma. At a time in life when we didn't know about traumatic brain injury, cubans pointed missiles at washington dc that year and i couldn't do math anymore oh wow i couldn't focus and so i really i got creative in order to get myself straight a's and kind of bs my way into way into life as a creative person, because I was somehow a little handicapped, a little behind the eight wall and always felt like everyone else knew something, had been given like a key to like figure out how to be in the world. And nobody gave me a key. It was just, you're fine. You're great. Thank God you didn't

lose your eye. You know, the story, the mythology from when I was a baby was Valerie went over to the bottle without a fuss. And that was their story. I was just always, I was the miracle child, firstborn. They couldn't wait to have me. And so when I showed up as depressed and anxious, they were just like, what's wrong with you? We made you a perfect life. Why can't you be happy? And I just was like this dark, tortured child, writing dark, tortured poetry from third grade on. Trying to survive. So you think you had traumatic brain injury then, huh? I'm pretty sure. Yeah. Cause I had another one about five, five years ago. Now I got thrown off of my horse on trail and knocked out cold. Yeah. I've had friends that have gotten that. We've had people

on the show. They've written books about their traumatic brain injuries. One was their daughter and it's a big deal. It changes people. And, you know, people can have a hard time in public. They can have a hard time functioning. It's a really big deal. And so, yeah, it's something that people struggle with. Yeah. And it pretty much is for life, too.

It's something that sticks with you. I don't know. I kind of feel like after the concussion five years ago, I started telling stories at the Moth. I did all of this internal work to write this book. Yeah. And I feel like through the dream work that I've done, I studied with a guy named Steve Azenstadt, who started the Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara. And Stephen helped me, along with a cohort of about 70 or 80 people,

unlock dreams that told stories about parts of ourselves that we didn't have conscious access to. Oh, wow. And so that is what arose through the poetry and into the book, were weaving these dreams that got my baby back, that got my six-year-old was living inside a tsunami nightmare that I kept having. My eight-year-old was in there. My 19-year-old when I almost died,

and I dropped my body at the bottom of the ocean when I was 19 years old, and I retrieved her through doing dream work. Some of the things about trauma is saving the child that you lost when you were a child. You know, the trauma took away your childhood sort of thing. Yes. I think. That's my theory. But, oh, you did the moth thing.

We've had the folks from the moth on for their book. And I think we had two or three of them on from the moth speaking series. How was that? It was being one of my comic friends at the improv used to call it being intimate with terror when you get on stage. With terror. It's only my first 10 marriages. Yeah, my first two. But it's like you get up there and the spotlight's on you and you've got five minutes to tell a story.

And it's a fabulous audience. Those people really want you to do well. And I just, they're up on YouTube. They were a blast to tell. And then bang, the pandemic hit and everything shut down. And so it went into a book but it's all it's it's all what i would call moth word worthy stories yeah there you go it's it's yeah i think they have another book out i think we're trying to book them for a second book that they have out

or they were coming on they might be booked i have to check but yeah they're they're really good at what they do and those those i'd never heard of the Moth series or anything. I guess they're real popular back east. And so when they came on, I found out, you know, I learned all the data on the stuff. And I was like, wow, this is just freaking amazing what you guys are doing here. So good stuff. So now you've written the book. And how do you feel about, you feel about finally getting it put on paper?

It's amazing. Makes me cry. I retrieved all these parts of myself fashionable therapies out there about trauma retrieval. But I've been digging myself out of hell for almost 40 years through 12-step programs. And in those programs, we tell our stories. And I've been telling that story and telling it and this collection of it and making it into art instead of it being just a boo-hoo trauma dump. These bad things happen to me. It's like you can weave it into gold. And so in the alchemical process where the alchemists believe that you could take ore and through a series of hot kilns, turn it into gold. I feel like my soul retrieval was about taking all of this awful childhood pain,

all these different broken parts of me and weaving them into a whole self that when I read the book now, I just every time I look at something that I might want to read out loud, it's like a breath comes into me, a breath of life. Like there's no more concussed girl. I had a dream that I was out on the trail in Agoura Hills, walking on the trail, looking for a woman and her horse who were lost. And a cowboy rode up. He looked a lot like Harrison Ford, which was kind of cool, in Yellowstone. And he pulled up on his horse and he said can I help you miss and I said yeah I'm looking for a woman and her horse and he pulled me up onto the back of

the saddle where I could see and I could find myself and the part of me that had flown off of PJ and out into the weeds and I was able to bring her up into me and integrate her. Wow. Yeah, magic. Yeah, it's interesting how our subconscious, you know, there's some times where we suffer trauma, we suffer issues. And our brain kind of masses or hides it or buries it because we can't deal with it at the time. Have you been through trauma therapy? Have you gone to, done all that?

That's probably going to be some interesting work to go through. Well, as a therapist, you start going through trauma therapy the day you go into your first process class in graduate school. I was the only sober person out of maybe 40 students. I was the only identified patient in the room. Everybody else were like the brothers and sisters and mothers of the problem child. I was the problem child. So I've been unearthing this stuff for a long time, but I've done clinical hypnosis with very wonderful teachers, EMDR, experimented with some psychedelic therapies, all different kinds of things,

all for the spirit of retrieving that which was held safely in the unconscious, but generates massive anxiety. I mean, think of it, Chris. When we're born, we're the only mammals who can't get up and get the milk. That's true. We're lying there. We're helpless. And so everybody else imprints to,

oh, I'm a cow or I'm a horse or I'm a whale, I'm something. And they know immediately that they're empowered to do that. And we lay there and hope somebody comes and feeds us. I'm still laying there waiting for milk. Can somebody give me some milk, damn it? But in a way, everybody's anxiety stems from that. They call it basic anxiety. And if we're not honored for who we are in our anxious selves, we mask that.

And we all put on these masks and say, I'm fine, I'm fine. You know, we have a saying in the 12-step program that said, fine. Can I cuss on here? Yes. Yes, go ahead. Fine stands for fucked up, insecure, neurotic, and exhausted. I'm sorry. I shouldn't laugh at that, but that is brilliant.

I like that. We should have named the podcast that. Yeah. This should be my name badge or something. I don't know. So there you go. I like that. That's very funny.

So as you went through this, when did you first get in touch with your six-year-old self? I think it was. That's my favorite. When I was six, I had a cowgirl outfit with a red skirt and a red vest with white fringe and red cowgirl boots and a six-shooter. And back in those days, there was this man called the Market Man who came into neighborhoods and sold women eggs and milk and stuff because nobody had two cars in those days. It was one car, and we went downtown with Dad to the Treasury Department every day day and we were stuck at home so i went with a nickel and i bought some gum and i rolled it into a cigarette and i went sashing through the living room of my mother's house and leaned on the door jamb and took a drag off my cigarette and said howdy partner

she grabbed me by my my arm and started spanking me wow sp. And my mom was not a hitter. She was not a yeller. And she spanked me. And then she turned my little face back toward the living room. And I had tracked dog shit across. So that's gone. I'm not going to remember that. When I was 16, I started having tsunami nightmares. Really? So during the writing of this book and in the dream work, I had a tsunami nightmare where a man came standing next to me in Hermosa Beach, where my office was until last month. And it's Samuel Beckett, the playwright, and he's standing beside me. And here comes the wave. And I turned to run.

And he says, can I i help you because there's a wall suddenly behind me and i'm going to get hit with this wave and i say no and i wake up in a panic so when we tend to the dream we freeze the action and when beckett says can i help you i said yes please and i thought he was going to give me a boost over the wall, right? Because that's what he'd do. He'd offered me his hands like a boost. Instead, he turned to the wave like Moses. I'm not kidding.

And parted the wave. And out of that wave came a six-year-old kid sobbing her ass off. Wow. And that was my little tsunami cowgirl. There you go. There she is. She was buried in the ocean right next to my 19-year-old self, who I left there when I almost died.

I dreamed that I left my body at the bottom of the ocean, and I never thought to go back and get it until I wrote this book. There you go. And this is part of the poetic things that you find in the book as you write about your life. Can trauma be healed? I think you touched on that. Do you really feel like it could be completely healed

if it's given enough focus and stuff? Well, there's an old Jungian analyst named James Hillman that was known for being the bad boy of psychology and I'm kind of in his camp where I think that we sell people the myth of arrival that we're going to get you somewhere and you're going to be fine but remember what fine stands for right so what it's a process and I believe that it's a process that we're going to undergo. Whether you believe in life after life or not, at least until they put you in the smokestack or in the ground, you're in a process unfolding into wholeness. And there's no shortcuts for that.

Therapy helps. I've been in therapy on and off with multiple therapists. I've treated well over 200, 300 people in my career. It's been 33 years of seeing patients. Wow. Plus teaching. I taught graduate school students for a dozen years. I treated 110 people inside one person with multiple personalities.

And it's all a process. Even when she came together from 110, she came down to like three or four people, not into one person. Wow. Because we all have parts, you know, like there's a part of me that wants to, a part of me doesn't want to go on podcasts. A part of me doesn't want to show my book. A part of me doesn't want to be that vulnerable. And another part of me says, you're grown up now, you can do this. Yeah, you can. It's 2024. That's what I tell my child parts when they go, we can't. I say, no, look at me. It's 2024, you guys.

Good news. We made it. Yeah, you made it. You know, the great thing about telling your story is by sharing with other people, other people that might have maybe had a similar journey or gone through similar things, they can sit there and go, oh, wow, I see, I see what's going on. And she has a way to get through this. So I can, I can follow her lead. And that's the great thing about sharing stories. You know, I've, I, I told one of the stories that's, you know, past where my dog one time died, had a seizure, and just immediately within 30 minutes was gone.

And it just hit me like a ton of bricks. You don't think things are going to move that fast. And so I downed a pretty good load of vodka and kind of poured out my heart into a facebook post and i was like oh god no one's gonna care about this this is just so selfish and me me me me me and blah blah blah and everyone's just be like oh drama queen chris voss what are you doing and in reality i i posted it and then went to sleep that night i woke up the morning and it had touched so many people and it still touches people still remember this day and they it it I had people that said you

know because of what I wrote it helped them cathartically realize they had never close they had never gotten closure on their you know their dog's death or their parents death or some of their family I mean it was just amazing how many people it touched. And I was just like, wow, I didn't know that, you know, it seems selfish to share this story. But, man, it sure touched a whole lot of people. And so, you know, it's just amazing how we can share our stories and help others. You know, Chris, especially coming from a man,

showing grief is sort of against our culture. You know, the John Wayne-ism and all of that, tough guy. And so being vulnerable allows other people to grieve with you and to touch into their own grief. I mean, what I tell my patients all the time is that a death of any kind is like an earthquake. And then there's a tsunami. And inside the tsunami is every loss you ever suffered, that you didn't grieve because you had to pull it back together to go to school or to go to your wedding or to take care of your kids or whatever

you were doing. You had to set yourself aside and carry on. And that grief eventually is going to bite you on the butt one way or another. I mean, in the pandemic, three months after we went into sheltering, my horse PJ wrecked himself and had to be put down. Oh, no. And I'd never chosen death for my two dogs died at home. Naturally, they just they died and I grieved them fully. But I had to choose PJ's death. And then 14 months later, my horse that I had for 25 years wrecked himself and had to be put down.

And I thought the grief was going to kill me but the outpouring of support and love when you share your grief with others brings like waves of healing back to you so it's not just bodies and grief and sad and all the times you had to move as a kid or whatever you did, all of those count as losses. And they come back in and you share them. And I wouldn't say you're healed permanently because the next dog, the next horse, the next friend, the tsunami is going to bring back some of the same losses.

Yep. But we get better at it. We get better at it. I know now after my horse Bodhi, and I thought it would break me. The survival that you do after something like that then helps others. They see you and go, wow, she's still standing. She survived. I can survive.

Exactly. The stories, and we say, too, the stories are a fabric of our lives. I mean, we have good, bad stories. We have stories really of survival, cathartic moments. And these are the stories that happened to us. And in doing so, we learn to grow from them. And so they really are us. I mean, you may not like all your stories, but they really are who you are when it really comes down to it.

Because if you didn't have some of these stories you probably wouldn't be the person you've developed in today and i i think i think some people believe that there's people in this life that get a free pass that they just soar through life and they're you know it's a perfect ride like movie stars or something you know they're like oh nothing bad ever happens to them. And when really, really, when in reality, it seems like everybody seems to go through things that are challenging to themselves and that they're going to struggle with. And yeah, it's just one of those things that you talk about 12 step programs, recovery programs on trauma.

Do you think you've done this without giving up drinking and drugs or other obsessions? Not a chance. Did you have to do that? Were you having issues with that? Or have you seen other people that you've worked with? No, when I was 19, when I turned 20 in the hospital and they put me back together again, I went straight into a bar and I played music in bars and I just kept running. I dropped out of school and I moved to Hollywood from Washington, D.C. and I drank and drugged my way through my 20s. I always say people took a gap year, I took a gap decade, just trying to outrun

the trauma. And when it finally caught up with me, I hit a bottom. I hit a bottom where a voice inside me said, if you keep going tonight, you're going to die. And so I called a friend who was already sober. And I went to a meeting the next night and I stood up and I said, my name's Valerie and I'm a speed freak because I couldn't say alcoholic or addict, but I love speed made speed fix the traumatic brain injury chris oh really it almost killed me but it it really made me feel very very smart and very cohesive and it it it served me until the day it didn't and when i said that out loud i sat back down in my chair with this little newcomer chip and hands people's hands just came and held my head and my neck my shoulders i've never been hugged so much in my whole life is that right

there you go well you know that's what is it admitting is the first part of the of the the whole experience but no it's interesting you know like a lot of people do medicate with drugs, and they'll medicate, and like you said perfectly, sometimes it works until it doesn't. And you're always chasing that high with drugs and alcohol and everything else. And it's never as fun as the first time, and you're always just trying to make it work, and eventually you can never get to it you know i did i did a thing where i i drank pretty heavy for a good 20 years of my life i mean i didn't have a

drinking problem per se with addiction but i drank pretty heavy and abused myself and you know i was like hey i'm gonna tie one on for the night before i go to bed and i'll sleep better and you don't sleep better it's just dumb he's just a con job you're telling yourself. And so, you know, these are the things you go through and you just realize that, you know, hey, you need to change your life. So did things really start to prove for you at that point? Yeah. I finished my bachelor's degree.

I thought I was going to go get a MFA in poetry, but I didn't get into the only MFA program in driving distance at the time. There's six applicants a year. So I got on my knees and I said to the universe, like, what the do you want from me? What would you have me do? And a voice as loud as like LAX calling the flights. He said, call the Jung Institute. And I'd read Carl Jung as a teenager, but you couldn't be a Jungian back then. You had to have an MD.

And there was no way that this brain was going to go to medical school. So I called the Jung Institute and I said, so what do I need to be a Jungian therapist? And they said, go get a master's degree in clinical psych. So I was enrolled that fall. And going through the clinical psychology program at Antioch LA was like a deep excavation into my own stuff so that I could then be with the stuff of other people. So I've been developing. When I would teach psychology, I would always say, like, here's the ego, and here's you living over here and all of your defenses and it doesn't want you to go through pain it goes i i don't want this i want to go over here and have a drink go over here and eat a sleeve of oreos go over here and sleep with someone else's husband go over here and

and go shopping go scrolling go anywhere. And when you go through the pain, and my pain had no words. It was just capital T, capital P. I'm hurting. But when I went through that pain enough times, there's a real self on the other side of it. There you go. And that's how you find yourself, really, when it comes down to it. Yes. So anything more we need to talk about about the book?

We want to tease it out, of course, so the people will pick it up. Anything more we need to tease out about the book? I just want to tell you a cool thing about the dream work. In the midst of my training as a dream tender, I had a dream of a red dress. And it was dancing in space. There was nobody inside it that you could see, but it clearly had a dream of a red dress, and it was dancing in space. There was nobody inside it that you could see, but it clearly had a woman's body dancing and dancing, beautiful dancing.

And this voice came through the dream that said, red dress medicine, red dress medicine, over and over again. Like, don't forget this, Johns. When you wake up up write it down And I woke up. I wrote it down later that day. I painted the red dress To like just kind of embody it and a couple weeks later when we were in class. I shared that dream And one of my cohorts said that she had written her master's thesis on a red dress project in Canada where an artist in 2011 I believe had hung entry empty red dresses from trees

each one for a missing or murdered indigenous woman oh wow so it was like that came through the dream time, through the unconscious, the collective unconscious where we all are connected, all races, all genders. There's a collective place where we all meet. And when I shared that, one of my mentors said she went running for a drawing that she had made of a red dress dream. Oh, wow. Okay. And so I put it out there to other people. And there's another woman in the UK who did the red dress embroidery project where she took a dress to, I think, 110 countries

where different women from different cultures embroidered on the same dress. And the dress is now on tour all over the world. It just was in South Africa. But there's this red dress energy. It's also the symbol for the American Heart Association. Everybody dresses in red to save hearts. Yeah. But that wasn't on my radar in this dream.

It was just the metaphor for red dress medicine. The way the unconscious speaks is red dress. When you spell it differently is redress. Redress. Which means repair. And that's what I'm doing, Chris. I'm repairing me. I'm repairing the people I've worked with.

And now hopefully through writing this book, which is very, it's like really fucking vulnerable. Yeah. It's really, my husband, I don't think my husband's read it yet. Like, I don't know if he wants to really know me this well after 21 years. Because it's like, it's all out there. It's all out there so that other people could say me too. Or I feel like that too. Because that's how AA worked in the beginning.

It was just two guys at a kitchen table in Akron, Ohio. And one was sober and one was drunk. And the drunk one said, me too. And they started this thing that has changed millions of people with millions of problems. Oh, yeah. And that's really what my book, I couldn't have written it without sponsors and mentors and a huge cohort of people that I have in my phone to reach out to and say, I'm not feeling good today. I never feel like drinking anymore, but I sure feel like eating cookies. And I can't eat cookies like a lady either.

That's been off the, you know you know i mean everybody's got something to take the edge off and my message is sit on the edge sit on the edge come to the edge old irishman wrote a poem that said the master said to the people come down to the edge and they said we can't we'll fall off and he said come down to the edge and they said no we can't, we'll fall off. And he said, come down to the edge. And they said, no, we're scared. And he said, come down to the edge. And they came down to the edge and he pushed them and they flew. Wow. They flew, Chris, they flew. That's what happens when you come down to the edge. There you go. That should be a t-shirt or make a great book title or what else? Coffee mug, that was the other thing I was thinking of.

Yeah, yeah. And I like the Red Dress. What was it called? Something Red Dress? Red Dress Medicine. Red Dress Medicine. That would make a great novel. Yeah, that's next.

That's my next book. Oh, is it? Okay, there you go. Yeah, on the fourth draft. There you go. I like that. That's a great title. Thank you.

It just evokes great images. We've had a lot of novelists on the show with these cool titles that are just, you're just like, yeah, that's really cool. And, yeah, that would be awesome. So, give us your final pitch out to people that pick up the book, wherever fine books are sold in your dot com. Oh, yeah, yeah, of course. Jeez, forgot that part it's on amazon and barnes and noble and every place that books are sold online pre-order till august 27 when it'll be in the mail to you and the ebook is available now i think on every single ebook platform it's available in

india i have a friend in italy who just bought it a friend in the UK, Canada. It's everywhere on e-books, iBooks, Nooks and Kindles and all that good stuff. And I just have to show you the cover because I made the cover from two pictures, one of milk in a saucepan and the other one of cigarette ashes. And then an artist put it together to make it into like a real piece of art mine was just a wannabe piece of art there you go well congratulations on your first book this is always fun when you get it published i mean you've got it published technically but then when you cross the bridge and you start seeing the sales of the book go out and people start commenting on it you know it's it's a lot of fun so congratulations that we'll look forward to your future works as well thank you very much valerie for coming on the show thank you for

having me chris it's been an honor you're my first and it's an honor to have you as your first your first podcast interview yeah really on to many more on to many more please share your message you know i remember there was a point in writing my book in 2021 where I reached the point where I was just writing 12, 18 hours a day, and then the editing became a nightmare. And it's part of the process. And I literally had reached the point where I was telling my friends that I've reached that moment of the shining where I'm I'm typing all work and no play makes Jack a dope boy like I just feel

like that's all I'm typing at this point even though the words aren't quite there and I I'm just I'm ready just to throw it all out and just give up and my friends that are authors thank God I surrounded myself with them they go they go oh if you're ready to give up and my friends that are authors thank god i surrounded myself with them they go they go oh if you're ready to give up if you're ready to throw it all out you're at the good part and i'm like what do you mean the good part they're like this you're almost there you're right there you just just hang in there you're gonna be fine but one person one or two people took me aside and they said there's somebody out there that needs to read your book and you may never meet them you may not know who it is but they are they need your book really bad and they

need to read the words in your book to save them and you have to write this book for that person and and i was like wow and that really motivated me and they said you you may not even ever know them and sometimes people come up to me and they'll be like hey you know what you said this And I was like, wow. And that really motivated me. And they said, you may not even ever know them. And sometimes people come up to me and they'll be like, hey, you know what you said? This changed my life. And I'm like, really? And some people think that's just what they needed. So go out and tell your story.

Get out to all those other podcasts and share the message out there and cash to your net far and wide. Thanks, Valerie, for being on the show. Thanks, Miles, for tuning in. Order the book wherever fine books are sold. You can get the preorder now. Ashes in the Milk by Valerie Johns. It's out August 27th, 2024. And refer the show to your family, friends, and relatives.

Go to goodreads.com, fortuneschristmas, linkedin.com, fortuneschristmas, christmas1, the TikTok, and all those crazy places on the internet. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next time. And that should have us out.