Series Reading and Unexpected Pleasures by Suz deMello

I don't often like to get involved in series (serieses?). I've noticed, in film, TV  and books, that when a series becomes popular, often the writer or producer will try to extend the series beyond its originally conceived length to make more money. For obvious reasons, these additional works will most often suck, and suck bigtime.

Take, for example, Karen Marie Moning's Fever series, which I believe was originally conceived as five books, but has, unfortunately, extended to eight. The last three, to put it mildly, range from not very good to really awful.

But it's an unexpected pleasure to find a series that's longer (and better!) than one thought. So it is with Dexter, the book series that the Showtime TV series was based on. I thought there were only three books. One day, while wandering through Amazon, I discovered that there are eight. 

EIGHT!!!!!

Number Five just became available through my local library's ebook lending program. 

What's really cool is that the TV show didn't follow the books in many particulars. I don't want to give spoilers, but at least one major character in the TV series got killed off in the first book. Another lost significant body parts in the second. And so on.

If you're familiar with the characters of Astor and Cody, they reveal some major personality quirks, which Dexter finds quite...intriguing, even attractive. You have to read the books to find out (tee-hee-hee).

*****

I occasionally bestir my mind to read non-fiction, instead of the pop fiction I prefer. But I do like to stretch my mental muscles, and so read Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness.

Gilbert's main thesis is that we fail to act in ways that make us happy because we misremember the past and misperceive the present, which makes it almost impossible to correctly figure out what will make us happy in the future.

The author does advise checking out others' reactions to the same stimuli, and discarding the notion that each of us in unique.

I would also imagine that journaling daily, and then rereading would be helpful.

I can't recommend this book enough. Gilbert writes in a witty, conversational style that sort-of disguises the pithy nature of the information he's transmitting--he describes and discusses the results of many, many experiments and tests. I highlighted so much in the digital copy I borrowed that I decided while transcribing all of Gilbert's fascinating conclusions, that it would be easier if I just bought the book. So I did.

And the information is precious. After all, we all want to be happy, right?

Writing For Happiness

I’ve never been good at happiness.

Maybe it’s the way I’m wired: serotonin seems to kick in more slowly with me.

Maybe it’s the way I was raised: to be suspicious, not to hope for too much, not to be surprised if I get less, never to let others know what I want in case they try to take it from me.

Whatever the cause, the effect is that happiness is not something that I have a lot of experience of.

This is not as dire as it sounds.

For me, happiness is like a favourite holiday: I’m always glad when it comes around, I look forward to it, I cherish the memory of it, but I don’t expect it to happen every day. Mostly, I’ll settle for not being depressed, afraid, lonely or miserable.

Over the years I’ve developed the habit of distancing myself from immediate emotional reactions. Partly that’s a natural pre-disposition; partly it’s a professional hazard. These days, the emotion most likely to penetrate my defenses is anger.

I’m really good at anger. I do the full range from the slow smolder, through vicious wrath, on to all-consuming rage. Anger, like luxury, comes as a guest to take a slave. Anger is the enemy of happiness: mine, the people around me and particularly the person that I’m angry at.

I started to write out of loneliness more than anything else.

I was traveling too much, alone too much, disliking myself and my surroundings too much. I needed an escape. Alcohol doesn’t work for me, I need way too much of it before it has an effect and the effect often leads to a clarity of thought and vulnerability to emotion that turns an escape route into a cage. Drugs have never appealed; there seems to be too much loss of control involved. I’m not a people person. I hate small talk and abhor rooms crowded with people that I don’t know.

So I turned inwards, not pursuing happiness, just inuring myself from life. To my surprise, I discovered happiness.

It turned out that, for me, writing is what the psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi describes as a “flow experience.” Csíkszentmihályi was one of the few psychologists who treated happiness as problematic. He felt that happiness needed to be explained. His research revealed that many people experienced joy, sometimes even rapture, when they could immerse themselves in a task that took their full attention, that was challenging but at which they could succeed and which required them to harness their emotions.

Some people get into the flow in sports or playing video games or dropping their bike into a perfect line through a curve. I get there through writing.

When I write, time slows, the world fades and there is nothing but me and my imagination. It is, in its way, a little bubble of happiness.

At first I thought that I had found a way to daily happiness, but the more time I spent in the bubble the more I realized that the activity was similar to masturbation: a pleasurable relief but not a sustainable source of joy. I began to understand that real joy, real happiness, required something more: love.

As the words produced by my time in the bubble spread out behind me like a snail-trail, I saw that, subconsciously, I was using my writing to tackle all those things that impeded me from living a loving life. My characters, like me, were largely not happy people. Unlike me, they all tried to do something about that: to reach out to others, to make a change, to seek a form of redemption, maybe even to achieve happiness.

Looking back, I realized that I was telling myself a story, sending myself a message. My emotions had found a way to send me an email.

Surprisingly, some of the emails they sent me where funny. I discovered that I could write about people who were witty and kind and offered each other love. It took me longer than it should have to realize that these were actually the most important emails of all.

The message was a trite truism: those who love themselves and open themselves to others spread happiness like a contagion. Love is the mechanism through which happiness is passed on.

O.K. You all knew that. I knew that. I just couldn’t bring that knowledge to be an active part of my life.

My writing, the content of it, the need for it, the inspiration behind it, slowly convinced me that I needed to love myself a little more and I needed to give that love to others.

Oddly, this resulted in me stopping writing for a while. I decided to get to know my wife again; to see if I could show her the love that I felt, rather than assuming that she knew it was there beneath my angry, difficult exterior. I wanted to centre myself on that love.

Of course, life is never so simple. We went through two years in the shadow of other people’s pain and death. But we went through it together.

When I started to write again, I let my subconscious play its established role and waited to see what message I would receive.

I smiled when I saw that I had started to write stories that were about love and perhaps even romance; about people who were pursuing happiness even though they knew that they might not find it.

I’m still deciding what to do about that. Maybe if I write some more, I’ll find out.

Abe's Advice

By Lisabet Sarai



"Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be" ~ Abraham Lincoln

I first encountered this quote when I was a member of the Twelve Step program Overeaters Anonymous. Twelve-steppers love brief maxims like this, sayings that are easy to digest and remember. They're something to hold on to when you're feeling lost and desperate, ready to jettison everything (your sobriety, your job, even your life) if it will just make the pain go away. At the time I was still struggling with anorexia, waking to anxiety attacks and palpitations, playing dangerous games with my food in the struggle to retain a balance between physical health and psychological comfort. It was not, by any stretch of the imagination, the happiest period in my life.

Nevertheless, the saying made some sense to me, even then. It helped me to stop focusing on the demons clamoring in my head and look around at my world. I was indeed fortunate. To start with, I hadn't died as a result of my obsession with losing weight. I had made it through college, despite the odds. I'd been accepted to a top grad school with a full scholarship, had left my parents behind and gone off to live on my own in a strange, fascinating city. New people had entered my life. New ideas and opportunities beckoned. If I could just let go of the fear, I might actually be able to enjoy myself. At some level, it was up to me.

Now, thirty plus years later, I am completely convinced of the truth of Lincoln's statement. Happiness does not depend on external circumstances. It's a habit of mind, a mode of perception. My mother, as I've shared before on this blog, was never comfortable or content. For some reason, probably rooted in her childhood, she expected to be unhappy. Her many accomplishments she dismissed as trivial. Her few disappointments loomed large in her mind as proof that the universe had cheated her. She had decided that she was going to be miserable and so of course she was.

I had an annoying experience the other day. There's a used bookstore not far from my apartment that I would visit once or twice a month. They'd buy back books you brought in and give you a credit that could be applied to new purchases. In December I carried in quite a pile and received a credit for $12. I didn't have time to book-shop that day, so I stuffed the voucher in my wallet. Last week I dropped by, intending to use the credit to beef up our bookshelves, which were looking a bit sparse. I discovered that the shop was under new management and congratulated the young women who'd bought it. Then I spent almost an hour browsing and picking out new books to buy. When I brought them to the register, however, the new proprietors informed me that they would not honor the credit from the previous owner. After arguing and pleading, to no avail, I finally stormed out of the store, vowing to never return and to spread the word of their customer-unfriendly policy all over the Internet.

I stood on the side walk, my heart pounding, so upset I was practically in tears. It wasn't just the money that bothered me, or their unfairness. I was most unhappy about the time I'd spent book shopping, time that I could have devoted to writing or marketing, time that was forever lost. I tried taking deep breaths to calm myself, but angry thoughts kept intruding. Just wait till I get home, I grumbled to myself. I'll get on Facebook and my other forums and trash the bitches!

Then it hit me. I was making myself unhappy. I could choose to let the whole issue drop, if I really wanted to. Just forget it, put it behind me. The time was gone in any case. Nothing I did would change that. Instead of wasting more time on vindictiveness, I should simply go home and put the time I did have to good use.

I'm not trying to set myself up as some kind of saint or anything. I have my unhappy periods like everyone else, though they tend to pass fairly quickly. I do sometimes wonder whether I'd manage to hold on to my conviction if I were less lucky. What if I contracted terminal cancer? What if our apartment was gutted by fire and we lost everything we owned? What if my extreme myopia actually resulted in blindness, as my doctors have warned is possible? In the face of misfortune, would I still be able to choose happiness and make it real?

Of course I don't know. Still, I have numerous concrete examples in my life the demonstrate how thought creates reality. I'd like to think that I'd remember those cases if misfortune struck. Only time will tell.

One of the questions Mike asked when he proposed this topic was "Does happy make good fiction?" Sometimes I think that my personal happiness leads me to write fiction that is superficial or ephemeral. I don't have a deep well of angst to draw upon in my work. Garce tells me that I'm "too nice to my characters". Darkness doesn't come easily to me in my writing because, quite honestly, I haven't experienced all that much.

There's a common notion that you have to suffer to create, that great art is the product of personal pain. I'm not sure that I buy that, but I can sort of see the logic. How can you write of heart-rending conflicts if you have not experienced them?

Well, maybe I can't write truly tortured characters. Perhaps, though, I can capture true joy. That might not qualify as great fiction - but if it helps my readers toward happiness, I can't complain.

"If you are not happy here and now, you never will be." ~Taisen Deshimaru