Project Happy

I am taking inspiration from The Daily Post and setting myself a schedule of sorts for the upcoming months by starting a project designed to promote a sense of happiness and well being.

Project Happy – I know, its a terrible name but it gives me a lot of scope. The premise  is based on the fact that I feel more secure and content if I am organised and have specific goals to work towards. Despite peoples preconceptions when they discover my job as a drama teacher I don’t do “airy fairy” and thrive with structure. So the plan is to look at how planning simple daily tasks can make me feel happier and give me a sense of accomplishment.

I will pick a topic each month e.g. my first month will be based on my home,  and I will set myself one 10 min task to complete per day and consider the feel good factor I achieve. I hope that my little and often approach will result in big changes to how I feel overall.

This isn’t a new concept in fact people often take this approach with healthy living, diets and weight loss. My hope is that other people will join in the challenge with me and consider how little improvements make them feel happier. If you decide to give it a go with me please leave comments and feel free to add photos etc. I will not be contacting people, sending email updates or Facebook requests – it would just be nice to know if anyone else is feeling happier by the end of the month. I am also happy to take suggestions for topics as long as they can be broken down into 10 mins a day.

My first topic will be about improving the environment in which I live – details to follow in a few days and the challenge itself will start on 1st November. Hopefully some of you will come along for the ride.

Royal Mail

I am a massive fan of Royal Mail! It is one of the organisations from which I have received the best customer service over the years.

However I have one or two issues with the current system. Unfortunately these are not only making me a little more disgruntled but I am sending less and less mail with every passing year.

In the age of text messaging and emails it is sad that the humble letter is fast becoming a thing of the past. I miss paper and pen – slower than using ICT but in many ways more reliable, the decline of these simple items is in my mind one of the reasons that literacy in children is on the decline with increasing dependence on electronic devices rather than a more personal medium.

I posted most of my Christmas cards over the weekend. I say most because I had to hold back 5 slightly larger letters. Despite having a book of stamps in my wallet I could not risk using them to post letters a fraction bigger than the majority of my mail in case they counted as large letters and as such needed a higher postage amount. Gone are the days when a first class stamp would be sufficient for the task and a trip to the post office was not required to mail a simple card or letter. Why not have set prices somewhere in the middle that cover any size of letter? I have actually used internet sites such as Funky Pigeon and Moon Pig rather than buy my own cards as that way I know I don’t need to worry about postage. While the personalised element of these sites does appeal to me, it does once again rob me of the joy of putting pen to paper myself.

The second thing that irks me is the opening hours of the depots particularly at this time of year.

With the increased number of parcels and packages – although in truth I am not sure what the difference is between the two – and the reason for non delivery being peoples need to be at work to pay for said items, it seems a tad unreasonable that the allocated slots in which you can pick up a parcel are during the traditional working day. For my husband and I, any delivery not made on a Saturday does not reach us, we get the irritating red card through the door and need to organise to pick it up at our local collection point. On a good day we can just squeeze in a trip en route to work but as the office closes at 1ish there is no hope of doing it in the late afternoon or early evening on our return journey.

Royal mail you are sooooooo good! Don’t ruin it with these irritating flaws which are surely beneath you.

 

 

What if the bad guy won?

My husband has long harboured a desire to write a book. He has brilliant ideas but lacks focus and cannot structure his work to form a coherant story with a clear beginning, middle and end. He is writing in the fantasy genre and the idea is to create a stand alone story & his concept invlves the bad guy winning.

I have set him a challenge to write an epilogue so he has an ending point to work towards.

So I asked the following questions:

1. What does the bad guy want?
2. What happens when the bad guy wins?

I have suggested that he put together a series of bullet points answering these questions before he can set about writing his ending. Any ideas fellow bloggers?

 

Postaday

I have been part of the postaday challenge since back in mid-January. For the most part I have been successful in writing something (however uninspiring) each day and maintaining a bit of discipline with my writing. But lately I have been finding it tough.

I am suffering with fatigue and finding it harder and harder to motivate myself to post every day. When I do miss a day, I try to post twice the subsequent day to make up for it and I am currently still adding the postaday banner each time I blog.

I have been questioning at what point I need to accept failure and stop adding the banner but I am reluctant to do this as that may mark the point when I accept that this challenge is too difficult and give up entirely. I have known other people to attempt the challenge only to give up a few weeks in when writers block first rears its ugly head when I managed to work through that stage several times.

For now I will struggle on and hope my fatigue passes, but I hope this does not mark the beginning of the end for me and my beloved blog.

Karroté

This evening I wanted to gve a shout out to a friend who has just published his first book Karroté.

My copy is making its way to me coutesy of royal mail and I cannot wait to read it.

Karroté is described as “a comedy fantasy for adults. This novel strips away all of the conventional romance and fluffy niceties associated with the talking animal genre. It laughs in the face of cute, and flips the vees at cuddly. Welcome to life at the bottom of the Food Chain”.

It appeals to people who are also fans of Terry Prachett and similiar writers and given author Duncan Watkinson’s natural wit and charm I am confident it will prove an entertaining and popular read.

Please show your support by buying a copy – it is available on amazon (see below).

For more information check out:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0992635101

https://www.facebook.com/KarroteBook

http://www.karrote.co.uk/

follow : @DunxWatkinson

 

Book Concept

Well who would have thought that inspiration would strike at random on an otherwise typical Friday evening.

It came during an episode of The Apprentice while I was “kind of” writing a totally unrelated blog post (but in truth I was mainly ordering a take away meal for FFOMC and I from a local Indian Restaurant). But I digress; in short, this evening, the concept for my own work of fiction conveniently popped into existence out of nowhere.

I did post about the idea of writing a novel a while ago and have been wracking my brains since then for an original idea to get me started. I have no idea where my idea actually came from, but it has taken shape this evening and I can see a way to at the very least develop my thoughts.

To get the ball rolling I have decided that  tomorrow I will utilise the Evernote download suggested by FFOMC to map out a very sketchy storyline over the next week or so. Then I can start to build some character profiles to inhabit the world of the story that I have in mind.

By this time next week I will hopefully have committed some of my meandering thoughts onto my laptop hard drive.

I am excited about the idea of starting a more concrete project. This is a terrific project, especially at a time when I am feeling a little deflated and unmotivated after my very own “DRAGON” took a bit of a battering this week but I am full of confidence that she will be available to edit and make changes as I start to commit my thoughts to B&W.

So watch this space!