Not the Party I Was Planning

People talking and laughing and eating cheese

celebrating the successful fundraising campaign ($600K, almost entirely from our town of under 30,000 people) and the imminent construction of the PlayLab this summer. It was a party I’d been anticipating for a long time, almost since I first became involved. This is what we call putting the cart before the horse. Guilty, sorry. There’s precedent for this in my life. I’ve done the same thing with my novel.

You see, at random moments while writing, I would sometimes imagine the epic bash I would throw when it gets published. I even started a guest list (Are you on it? There’s still time.). It was an incredibly pointless way to waste writing minutes, but it was fun. I may just dig out the list today and add a few names, because I’ve met an awful lot of new people during my volunteer work on this project.

Me listening carefully to our speaker and also wondering if there’s any Havarti left.

Writing is lonely, folks, especially when you live where I do with few other writers around. When my youngest started school, I planned to throw myself into my work full-time. I found this was not possible. I quickly learned I didn’t want to live inside my own head for seven or eight hours a day.

This project gave me something to be passionate about, entirely outside my writing work. It gave me a community of like-minded people focused around a goal. And there was intrigue, mayhem, double-crossing (sometimes it was a damn Parks and Rec episode). I know, you may be thinking, it’s a playground, but then you may not know small-town politics like I do, or like I do, now. And I also know about fall zones and pea gravel and site drainage and all sorts of things I may never need to know again once this project is done, but who can say? Maybe I’ll write about it. Odds are good.

This blog is about creativity, and thus far, most of my posts have been about writing, and sometimes painting random bits of cast-off furniture, but there are so many ways we’re all creative in our everyday lives, figuring out how to work together, coming up with solutions, even when the solution involves something as seemingly unimportant as the width of a slide. It’s important to someone. It’s important to many someones in the case of our playground.< I’ve been mentally planning a book launch party for a lot of years, way before “Happy, Indiana,” way before the book I wrote previously (which was cast into the proverbial drawer). But this PlayLab party was everything I could have hoped for and reminded me there are so many more ways to be successful, way beyond my narrow, writerly focused ideas of success. And you know what else? Helping other people makes you happy. I’ve read stacks of research on happiness for my novel, and I can tell you the findings there are quite clear. So, more helping people! More parties! More wine and cheese!