No. 23: 50 Pieces of Joy
A Handy List of Happy
One of the qualities I aspire to in my writing is that you want to re-read it, which requires this perfect mix of layered substance and sumptuous fun. Words so crisp and sensory that together they build into something you feel like you can eat, sugary hot chocolate that’s also soul food. It’s a strange kind of alchemy if you can get it right, almost like literary ASMR. A tall order to achieve, of course. But having impossible goals is my favorite part of writing.
To get that ASMR, though, you need to be able to summon little pieces of joy in the writing, spikes of dopamine that keep readers coming back to a book again and again. And one of the ways to practice that is to recognize the little pieces of joy in my own life. Things that wrap a warm band around my chest and make me feel stirrings of something deeper than myself.
By writing down these blissful little spikes, I can conjure that heart-full sensation inside myself again and again. And that becomes my True North feeling to reproduce on the page.
So here we go.
My current 50 pieces of joy.
1. Watching a kid reading a book, brows raised, tongue sticking out their mouth, concentrating hard because they’re totally in it
2. The way our dog huffs and puffs if we talk too late into the night, because she has a strict 9:30pm bedtime she’s imposed for herself and doesn’t take well to being kept awake
3. Sourdough toasted to black edges that goes crunch crunch crunch when you eat it
4. A goat named Malinky Joe that I raised from birth and fed milk bottles to and took on long walks and hugged 5x a day and was my ride-or-die friend until it became time for him to grow up, which he’s resisted so much that he still doesn’t like to eat grass and escapes open pastures to jump back into the pen where we used to cuddle
5. Working out in a no-A/C Crossfit gym at 4pm on summer afternoons because it’s so sweaty, so impossibly wet that you can’t think or resist, you just grind, grind, grind
6. Feeding a baby calf a bottle and watching them drink, wide-eyed, glug, glug, licking my hands when they finish
7. The primeval little machine at the public pool that wrings all the water out of your wet swimsuit
8. Rewatching old Madonna concert videos and realizing that yes, she was as good as my teenage self remembers
9. Drinking ice water with lemon & a pinch of salt on hot summer days out of 2-liter mason jars
10. 6:30am tennis when everyone’s still sleeping and the two of you are dead drenched, trying to bash each other off the court
11. The fact that my tennis partner is named Case, who my real-life partner calls Lower Case and his dad Upper Case
12. That moment where you hit a winning number on a scratch-off lottery ticket and you know they’re gonna screw you when you scratch off the prize amount but you just savor the hope and possibility for one last second…
13. Lemon-oregano vinaigrette
14. The kind of nap where you wake up and there’s a little puddle of drool next to you because you were so tired
15. A painting that faces me in my writing room of a rabbit telling a unicorn: “Here, you can borrow my belief in you until you can find yours again.”
16. The happy ending between Mom and Malinky, who are bonded forever and living out life in green pastures (Diary No. 19)
17. The last 5 seconds of Billie Eilish’s song “Lunch”
18. When you have a dream that has a full beginning, middle, and end, and climaxes with a big flourish, just as you wake up, like your mind knows how to make symphonies
19. The time a parade of first-graders had to cross the gym during my book presentation to the eight graders and the nervous teacher told them to wave to the author to keep them under control and they all started waving, shouting “HI ARTHUR HOW’S IT GOING ARTHUR”
20. Falling asleep with two baby goats on my chest
21. People I know for decades still brazenly calling me ‘So-mahhhn’ no matter how many times I correct them, as if they’re sure their way is right
22. Charcoal toothpaste that looks like it’s gonna turn your teeth black and then magically leaves them pearly white
23. Those first few weeks of writing BEASTS & BEAUTY, when I had no idea what it was going to be, and thought at first I was writing a new, unpublishable novel about sexy wolves
24. That time when I was finishing up a month-long tour for Book 2 of SGE and I just was emotionally wrecked and worried the book hadn’t sold well enough and just down on myself in general and as I was getting off the Amtrak from the last Philly tour stop, I saw a 12 year-old boy reading the book, laughing into his sleeve
25. Sitting in the bathtub until the water gets cold and you know it’s time to get out but instead you use your toes to turn the hot water back on
26. Timed 25-yard sprints — a primal kind of stress relief
27. Letting our dog be completely free on the farm and realizing it has its own daily routine independent of us: pond swims, chasing groundhogs, running through corn stalks to feel the sensation on its fur, stealing away to the ravine in the woods…
28. The way my body forces me to get a snack or take a bathroom break every time I’m going in the wrong creative direction — I hear the right answer the moment I’m distracted
29. A silk eye mask and wax ear plugs to sleep, so you’re basically in a sensory deprivation tank every night
30. The first time I packed all my toiletries to go to the farm, not knowing what I’d need, and I packed it in a Whole Foods bag and as soon as I arrived, it rips and everything goes spilling everywhere and my partner still calls it “the day your creams exploded”
31. Looking back at photos from the press tour for The School for Good and Evil movie, when I was glam and chic and polished clean, and realizing that was a fitting peak to a 10-year crescendo and how nice it is to be in a new era, everything covered in cow poop
32. Beezle from SGE, who no one liked or respected or remembered, and I’m still convinced is the greatest character of all time
33. Spotting competing lawn signs on neighboring houses from opposite political parties and secretly thinking… scandalllll
34. Taking a single Advil like twice a year on days I just can’t with life and feeling so decadent
35. The way my Dad and I both end phone conversations with “okay, okay” and a race to hang up
36. When someone says to me: “let me take care of that for you.”
37. The time an 8th grade boys baseball team in Dayton, Ohio showed up at my bookstore event in full uniform after a game and said it was because they heard “that girls kiss” in my book
38. A salad of chopped radish, scallion, tons of lemon, a touch of salt, lots of pepper, served chilled
39. Looking back at an abandoned novel I wrote 100 pages of back in 2017 called MeTV and loving how free and cool it was and still fantasizing what to do with it
40. The way parents sometimes try to talk for their kids at book signings and I fix eyes 100% on the kid and keep asking the kid questions until they figure out it’s them I want to hear from
41. When my partner says I’ve been working too much and forces me to have a hooky day where we go to the Science Center to watch one of those Omnimax movies about polar bears or the solar system
42. Thinking of the fact that I lost my grandmother on July 9, 2012. The greatest inspiration in my life, who used to take me to lunch at fancy Italian restaurants where she interrogated the waiter about what exactly she should order, like it was a joint collaboration. Exactly one year later, after my grandma’s death — July 9, 2013 — I started working with Toni Market, who would become my editor for 10 years at HarperCollins before she retired. Now she takes me to lunch at fancy Italian restaurants and also collaborates with the waiter on her order
43. Forgetting that I write books sometimes when I’m in a bookstore and thinking of it purely as sanctuary
44. Roller coasters at over-regulated, overly safe theme parks that I surrender to without fear of malfunction
45. The way a field looks after cows have moved off it, everywhere a cow pooped so much greener and healthier than the rest of it
46. The feeling you get when you meet a new person who has positive energy and a high frequency and just gets it, all of it, the fleetingness of life, the immediacy of the moment, the intensity of connection, and you feel like a kid again, just wanting to hold onto a new friend
47. When an acupuncturist in New York told me, “There are two types of fire in the body. The first is royal fire. Creative, hot, energetic, full of life.” I nodded: “And that’s me.” He said: “No. You are peasant fire.”
48. Looking ahead to the slow journey of getting old and weaker and courting death, but knowing it also comes with inching closer and closer to understanding
49. Stories I have left to tell
50. The thought of you reading this diary, writing your own pieces of joy in the comments for all of us to savor.
Until next week…
This was an amazing thing to find when I woke up this morning in my email. One of my pieces of joy is a schorching summer day, with the smell of the ocean or chlorine in your hair, ice cream in your hand, and the feeling of sun on your skin.
Or picking up your favorite book after a while and rereading it and loving it all over again, on a cold winter day drinking hot chocolate in a cozy reading chair.
Even when I'm reading somebody else's pieces of joy, this list feels like a warm embrace to me! How even the simplest things can bring sparks of joy to our life.
One of my little pieces of joy is re-visiting a book I haven't read for a while and discovering something that has always been there, yet somehow I forgot about! (and co-incidentally I have just re-discovered Beezle a few days ago too! I was totally one of the people who never remembered him)
And assembling pieces of a glass bottle (broken by accident, it happens sometimes) so that it looks like a bottle again - except with glue lines like the concept of kintsugi. I could never finish any because of shattered glass, but broken things mended always look more beautiful to me.
And I think MeTV sounds interesting! The concept art looks so cool. Hope we can know more about it someday!