Day 66: Happiness

How has this writing challenge contributed to my overall level of happiness?

This is an important question to ask for several reasons. First of all, as someone who has written a book about happiness, I should make sure that what I'm doing at any given time is contributing positively to my levels of joy. Secondly, since the first book I wrote on the challenge was that happiness book, how well it represents the subject is worth looking at to see if I'm keeping my quality up as well as my quantity. Thirdly, I think that other people on writing challenges such as NaNoWriMo should know if they can maintain their general happiness while working on something as difficult as a novel.

I'm proud to say that this challenge has contributed very well to my happiness during the last two months. While it has caused some issues socially and there have been days in which I've felt like collapsing on the couch for a few days, overall, I am feeling happier compared to a few months ago. I knew at that time that I needed something to keep me focused and to keep me excited about writing. Even though I know that writing is a major part of my life purpose, I still needed to set a goal for myself that would be challenging and this idea of writing 2,500 words a day for 365 days straight has fit the bill.

Today, I continued to work on the young-adultish fantasy novel, and I'm very glad to be giving it a second go in a full-length version. I'm able to flesh out some characters more and I've had a great time seeing how they get from point A to point B in a much more complex tale. I also wrote a blog post today focusing on quotes about happiness, which provides some context to several amazing quotes on the subject of joy.