Living With Gratitude

I saw the coolest DVD recently. It's called The Secret. Maybe you've heard of it; not only has the book been on the bestseller lists, but Oprah talked about it on her show. I'm always a little leery of anything that's getting a lot of hype, but someone I know recommended it highly, and when Netflix had it available, I put it in my queue.

Overall, I thought it was excellent. I didn't agree with everything that was said and a couple of the presenters seemed a little, well, smarmy to me, but it was definitely worth the time to watch it.

So why am I blogging about it today? The subject seemed to fit Thankful Thursdays perfectly. One of the things that was talked about in The Secret was how we as humans tend to focus on what we don't want to happen or on what we don't have rather than on what we'd like to see or on what we do have. I know I'm as guilty of this as anyone and there were several helpful suggestions to help change this.

My favorite idea was called a gratitude rock. One of the men said that he started to carry a rock in his pocket, and whenever he touched it, he'd think of something he was grateful for. Just touching it was a reminder to give thanks.

It's a simple idea, but what a wonderful way to remember what's positive in our lives!

If you have a moment right now, why not think of some things you're grateful for in your life? I'll even start. I'm thankful that my mom is out of the hospital after suffering congestive heart failure and is doing better every day. I'm thankful that I have a full-time job that pays my bills and keeps a roof over my head. I'm thankful that I finished my latest book and that I can take a break and spend more time with my parents. I'm thankful that my fifth book will be out in August and that I've been able to write another book of my heart.

Even as I wrote those things, it was so tempting to qualify them. I'm thankful, but-- I resisted, though.

Another suggestion from The Secret that I really liked was called the Vision Board. What you do is cut out pictures of what you want and paste it to a piece of cardboard or whatever, then you spend time every day focusing on them. I think of it as visual goal setting. I heard somewhere that goals are more likely to be achieved if they're written down and this is the same type of thing, just done with pictures rather than words.

I always used to tell people who scoffed at my big ideas that if I was going to dream, I was going to dream big. From the time was in eighth grade, my greatest desire was to write stories and have other people read them. When my first book was published in 2002, I walked around with a copy of it in my hand everywhere I went (yes, even at work!) because I couldn't believe my dream had come true. Sometimes I still look at the books I've written and it seems surreal that something I've wanted since I was fourteen has come true.

I'm a big proponent in pursuing dreams. When I sign books, I'll often write "Always pursue your dreams" instead of Best Wishes or Happy Reading because I want other people to find the joy that comes from chasing their rainbows. Mark Twain has a wonderful quote and I have it pasted on my cube wall. He said:

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Dream. Discover."

What are you grateful for? What are your dreams? What are you doing to achieve them?

Patti O'Shea
In the Midnight Hour - Aug 2007
www.pattioshea.com

Up In The Air

I was recently asked by my agent to give an estimate of when I might be able to get her a revised final copy of the complete manuscript she's currently shopping around for me. I really wish I could tell her.

Not because I don't have a clue how long it takes me to type in (I'm one of those freakish throwbacks who writes first drafts in longhand) and revise half a manuscript, but because my "life" is currently up in the air. The fella is waiting to hear on a job offer that will potentially have us moving halfway--no, about 3/4 of the way across Texas. We currently live in the Panhandle (that's the square, not-very-panhandle-looking part that sticks up at the top, for those of you who aren't familiar with the nomenclature), one of the more westerly parts of the state. The new job, if it happens, will take us to the Texas Gulf Coast. (Yeah, I know, they have hurricanes. We have tornados. Not a lot of difference, IMO.) But until I know whether I will be packing up my household goods and moving them over the summer, I don't really know how long it will take me to get this ms. revised and sent off to the agent, because I don't know how much time I'll have.

Summer is already filled with three conferences (an all-genre one in June, RWA's conference in July, and a science fiction/fantasy con in August), plus the mandatory visits from the grandboys, so I'm already working around those as is. If we add a move (and the insanity-making elements of selling and buying a house) to that--well... But I do keep thinking how much fun it will be to introduce my landlocked grandsons to the beach. I don't want them, like my nephews once did--mistaking a golf course sand-and-water hazard for the beach...

(My middle sister lives in Idaho, and when our kids were little and her family came to visit the Texas branch of the family, we got a golf course condo in Rockport, on the Aransas Pass (No "k" in Aransas, and it's pronounced ah-RAN-sahs), because we thought it would be safer with a horde of pre-schoolers. There was a pond behind the condo, surrounded with sand, and when we all arrived, the nephews spotted that pond, and went running out to it screaming "The beach! The beach!" They were duly impressed when they saw the "real" beach.)

I do know in general how long it takes me to write a book of a given length. And I know how long it takes me to get it revised and ready to ship out. Of course, given the fact that my books tend to grow when I'm writing them, it can sometimes take a little longer than I expect to reach the end. The writing business is insane as it is. When you add life to it... the insanity compounds.

Has life tripped you up lately? We'll listen, if you want to share.

How We Met

Fridays at the 2BRead blog are for First Alert, but I thought I'd go back and talk about an old first. Like the first date I had with the fella. We spent the night together.

On a band bus with 43 other people in the college marching band. We'd met early on in our freshman year, at the band picnic. He was dating another girl (who became my roommate the next two years) at the time and we all got into the same game of spades. Then we discovered that we were in the same chemistry class. (And I never thought about all the cheesy puns that could be made about "chemistry" until now. Really.) He still exclaims about all the times I walked barefoot to class in the rain. It made sense to me...feet dry better than shoes, and once my feet were dry, I could put on dry shoes and warm my feet up. So we would talk in chemistry class, and walk together to our next class--same building, different rooms.

As the time came for the annual overnight band trip, to the University of Arkansas this particular year, he started talking about band trips and "what happens on the band trip stays on the band trip" but I just couldn't believe he was flirting, because we're exactly the same height (I look taller these days, because he's gone to the Captain Picard hairstyle) and in my experience, guys just didn't flirt with girls who might be taller. Turned out I was wrong. And so we spent the night together on the bus coming back from Fayetteville.

Our romance was entirely too dull for any romance novel, which means it was much more pleasant to live through. Reading this, I'm sure people are asking "But where's the conflict?" Well, there was a little, but very little, and it came later. If we did fit a romance-novel story, it would be the "good friends who discover something more" sort of story.

So what did you and your honey do on your first date? And what kind of romance novel would it be?

Stopping to smell the flowers

For some reason, I thought I'd signed up to blog here on Tuesday of this week. Tuesday was my 31st wedding anniversary. It was also the day of the combined community- junior college choir concert, and I joined the community choir this spring. The community choir has six to eight members (depending on the weather and whether our tenor who works for the highway department has to be out on the highway to deal with flooding or tornados). The college choir has around 15 members. So every one of us had to be there, both for dress rehearsal on Monday and the concert on Tuesday.

Tuesday, I also had to drive the 60 miles into Amarillo to put money in the bank for our son at college. (There are banks in our little town--two of them--but none of them are also in Waco.) Baby has to pay his rent, you know. And then I had to drive home again in time for warm-up. I didn't even think about computers or the Internet, much less blogging, until Wednesday. Fortunately, I hadn't signed up, so I was safe. (whew!)

And I'm trying to revise a book I just finished writing. For some reason, just after I've finished something, my life is much less organized than it is when I'm driving for the finish line, heading frantically for the point where I can write: The End. Now that it's done, I have to go back and look at the beginning again and figure out if the beginning matches the end, and if it gets lost anywhere in the middle and--well, lots of stuff.

But when I walked home from picking up the last couple of days' worth of mail at the post office this afternoon (it's only 3 blocks away--if you don't count the swing around the park and baseball fields), I noticed the iris blooming in my front yard. I inspected each one of them and picked off the faded wads of old blossom. I pulled up the nasty thistly dandelion thing that isn't a dandelion, but tries to fool you into thinking it is. (Should have pulled up a lot more of them, but the ground's a little hard.) I stopped to smell the flowers. And I wanted to share them with you. I hope flowers are blooming where you are. Go take a whiff, okay?