I have had a very frustrating week already, and it’s only Tuesday afternoon. People continue to thwart me as I’m trying to move. I wasn’t going out today because I’m so frustrated I’d start aiming for people with my car, and then I had to go out anyway and I didn’t hit anybody, so more frustration. So I’m putting up Working Wednesday early and going Zen for the rest of the night.

One good thing: we have a cover. I think the only change yet to come is going from “A Novel” to “A Liz Danger Novel.”
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Happiness is a SoupTruck

So some of you may have noticed that I haven’t published anything in awhile. Like ten years. It took several years of therapy to track down the reason: I have a problem with depression. In this, I am not alone; turns out writers are 121% more likely to suffer from depression than the general public. I don’t know if depression makes us turn to making up stuff to survive, or if making up stuff for a living makes us depressed, but I do know that throwing yourself headlong into building a career in publishing would make anybody nuts. And yet I did that for twenty years, and then face planted. I kept writing—you’ve suffered from reading how many unfinished manuscripts in here?—I just couldn’t finish anything. Continue reading →

We are finishing the rough draft of Rocky Start this week, Bob is doing all kinds of self-publishing stuff, I’m loading a truck to move and running a lot of Final Errands so I can hit the road in July, and we’re both looking forward to the end of summer when all of this madness will be over, we’ll be in new places dealing with new madness. It’s a goal.

What did you work on this week?

Remember when I asked you for store names for Nita? Motel Styx? Pins and Sins. Good times. Well, here we are again.

Rocky Start is a small town that straddles the border between Tennessee and North Caroline in the middle of freaking nowhere. It was mostly bought out by two spies on the run and made into a retirement community for agents who want out of the game. The majority of the town is just normal people, but a significant minority are retired spooks, many of whom opened small businesses.

We need business names.

We started with Oddities, the second hand store where our heroine, Rose, works.
Then we added Ecstasy, the bakery/coffee shop next door run by our heroine’s friend, a former German spy, Coral.
Sid Quill’s pharmacy is next door.
We mentioned a restaurant called the Wok Inn.

Okay, none of those are spy related, but now we have to figure out the names of some of the spy-owned businesses and we were thinking it would be interesting if they named them things that would signal to the others that they’d been operatives.

So right now we’re calling the bookstore Undercover Books, but that seems a little lame.
We also have an important character who’s a carpenter, making wood furniture, a little old lady assassin who runs a tea shop, and a cleaner named Melissa who has a funeral home. (The normal guy who has a funeral home is Geoffrey Nice; his motto is “Have a Nice Funeral.” That cracks me up every time.)

And since you all did such a stellar job on Nita, we thought we’d let you have at it. Very small town, full of spies, businesses can be anything that a small town might have.

Go nuts in the comments as you always do. And thanking you in advance . . .

So it turns out that even if the news is depressing or horrific, reading about the acts of kindness that the event inspires is a deterrent to depression. Observing kindness not only reaffirms our view of the human race as basically decent, it inspires more kindness. According to an article in the NYT, “When humans witness an act of kindness, “it gives us a special feeling called elevation,” said Buchanan, describing it as a “warm, fuzzy feeling in the chest,” and “an immediate rush of wanting to be a better person.”

That’s part of why we started doing Happiness Sundays on ReFab so long ago. We’re bombarded by such bad news constantly that we forget to concentrate on the good. And there is so much good in the world. Good people far outnumber the bad, it’s just the bad get all the press. (The news was full of Donald Trump this week, but this week Governor Pritzker of Illinois also signed in a banned book ban; libraries in that state can’t ban books there any more because of political disapproval.). And I’m not a fan of newsletters, but I love the Washington Post’s Optimist newsletter.. Every week I get to read about good people making good things happen in the world. Even if I don’t hit the links and read the articles, the brief descriptions of a dozen good things make me breathe easier.

Happiness is good people doing good things. Good thing there are so many of them.

How was happiness good for you this week?