During this past week of thankfulness and as we’re fully engaged in the holiday season, I’ve been thinking about my happy quotient. Happiness is, of course, a relative term. Days that aren’t unhappy would be called happy by an optimist’s standard.
But there is one thing that can multiply that sort of ho-hum happiness, and that’s working at what we’re wired up to do. As you know, I’ve recently turned in edits on my work-in-progress. That means—sigh—I’m between projects.
I have a number of things I can and should be doing. Business related. Marketing related. I need to visit some local bookstores; I need to put together a newsletter; I still have two articles to finish and polish and several blog interviews to complete. Writing related, yes. But writing? The articles are past the stage of creation, so even that I wouldn’t call writing but rather re-writing.
And that brings in the happy quotient. Reading can make a ho-hum day suddenly sparkle, if the book is engaging enough. Which highlights that one of the ingredients in successful storytelling, either being the audience or the story teller, is that wonderful feeling of leaving reality and becoming thoroughly enmeshed in the world of a book.
So while I’m stuck between projects I’ll visit worlds created by my fellow authors. I have plenty of other work to do, too. With the holiday bustle the days are already flying by. Since there is little to report on my work-in-progress which this blog is all about, I will be taking off the month of December except perhaps for an occasional book review and resume my blog in the New Year. 2009!
I hope you’ll join me in escaping some of the holiday stress for a moment to lose yourself in a good book! And may you have the merriest of Christmases, remembering our Savior without whom a true happiness quotient would be impossible.
Join Me!