Hello Protagonists!
Welcome to this month’s edition of Happiness Sprinkles—a soft, joyful roundup of small things worth smiling about and a few wonderful things you in this community have been creating.
In this post, you’ll find:
🌸 Happiness Sprinkles
🔦 Protagonist Spotlight
📖 Book Club Details + Zoom Link
Reminder! Our “Reading with Wonder” Book Club meeting this month is a Virtual Launch Party for Evelyn’s novel IDEAL LIFE! Join us this Sunday, August 23rd at 8pm ET / 5pm PT. Free for everyone!
Zoom Link at the bottom of this post
💕, Joanna
🌸 Happiness Sprinkles
A few delights we’ve loved this month—and hope you will, too.
A 1980s grocery store in felt! British artist Lucy Sparrow is internationally renowned for her hand-crafted and immersive installations. Her first museum exhibition in the US, The Beginning of Convenience, features 20,000 individually detailed felt replicas of supermarket products, ranging from food and beverage items to beauty products and household goods typical of a not-so-distant past. The exquisite detail and the vast number of items make her work uncanny.
Finding Art Everywhere. Mollie and Bek from Short Supply walk around London with a cardboard frame to find art in unexpected places. What an amazing way to practice seeing beauty everywhere and making art an adventure. Imagine the compositions you might find in your neighborhood.
A most beautiful book wrapping. I love the gorgeous work of professional book promoters. Unifindit is one of the best with aesthetic gifts, bookish bundles, and cozy stationery. This wrapping technique felt like something I could do to delight the book lovers in my life.
Gentle persistence. One of my new favorite accounts on Instagram is Slow Going. After moving into her first home in New Zealand, Gina shares how she makes her space 1% better each day. I love her calm voice, her gentle persistence, her acceptance of the beginner mind, and the beauty she creates in her home. Her account reminds me that slow and steady are real and wonderful.
Indie Artist Inspiration. I recently learned about the musical artist, RAYE, and her story of endurance, self-investment, and courage. After being locked away and refused support by her record label, she left the traditional industry structure and became an independent artist. She invested heavily to make the music she dreamed of, and it’s winning awards. Her newest album, This Music May Contain Hope, is “a maximalist, cinematic concept record that blends grand orchestral arrangements with retro soul, jazz, and theatrical showtunes.” How cool does that sound?!
🔦 Protagonist Spotlight
Every month, we love highlighting what you are creating. Here are a few wonderful projects from our community:
🧑💻 David Jace developed a website and app to help writers build good habits, track their progress, analyze their process, and finish their projects. It's in Beta, but if it will help anyone, he invites us to join. Thanks for the invite, Jace!
🧨 Canon Robertson is starting a new thriller called THE QUARTET—”Nathan runs a four-person crew, a planner, a driver, a hacker, an analyst, hired to steal one thing: a seven-figure manuscript, locked in a private vault, during a Boston gala.”
🖤 Richard wrote a short story called “The Long Good-bye.” He feels like it just might be his best work ever. (Reading that statement full of self-love moved me.) Thanks for celebrating it with us!
🎨 Hallie M. Bertling is refreshing her portfolio and finishing up a revised picture book dummy to take to her regional SCBWI conference next month. She has 1:1 portfolio reviews with art directors at two dream publishers and is practicing pitches for editors. Way to do the work Hallie, and good luck at SCBWI!
Want to be featured in a future post?
Just reply to this email or leave a comment with a 1–2 sentence description of what you’ve been working on. Or, hang out in our community chat, where we share our recent smiles and successes.
📖 Ideal Life Virtual Book Launch Party— This Sunday!
We are so excited to invite everyone to the Virtual Launch Party for IDEAL LIFE!
Usually, our “Reading with Wonder” Book Club is for paid subscribers, but we’re flinging open the doors on Sunday for everyone, for free.
Join us if you’ve ever wondered what our Book Club is like or you just want to celebrate with Evelyn!
🗓️ Sunday, August 23rd at 8pm ET / 5pm PT - ZOOM link below
📚 Book: Ideal Life by Evelyn Skye
💬 During the book discussion, we’ll chat about:
Ideal Life opens with a watch that can turn back 24 hours, allowing Talia to redo anything as many times as she wants.
If you could redo something in the past 24 hours, what would it be?
How does a literary device like the rewindable watch shape a story’s plot and deepen the characters?
Where do authors get ideas? Evelyn first thought of Ideal Life when she looked at all her friends and saw how they were stuck in never-ending cycles of self-improvement and life optimization.
But how do you know when an idea is big enough to support an entire book (vs a Substack essay, for example)?
Also: the inspiration behind Sam’s lighthouse that he converts into a bookstore
Traditionally published books usually take 2 years from book deal to publication. That means authors must finish the final draft long before it’s released into the world.
How can authors stay ahead of pop culture—or in the case of Ideal Life, rapidly evolving technology—when they don’t know what will be relevant two years in the future?
If you could have an Ideal Life “friend” like Queen Elizabeth, what would yours
look like and why?
In Ideal Life, Talia invents an AI-related technology to help people. But she’s faced with a dilemma on how to bring it into a world where profits sometimes override other human priorities.
Why did Evelyn choose to write about startups and Silicon Valley?
How can authors ask big questions and investigate different perspectives while also letting readers come to their own conclusions? Does this conflict with market demands for closure in stories?
Character cameos
Evelyn loves to drop in character cameos from her past novels into her latest book as Easter eggs to delight her most loyal readers. Which past character has a cameo in Ideal Life? Why does this work as a gift for fans of a writer’s work?
Audience Q&A
Since this book club meeting is also a virtual launch party, we will have time for questions from you!
💬 During the Mini Creativity Coaching portion, we will talk about:
Optimization is the act of adjusting a system or decision to make it as effective, functional, and efficient as possible. What areas of life do we optimize?
Ironically, over-optimization makes things less functional and efficient. How do we notice this tendency to over-optimize in our lives? How can we increase our awareness and acceptance of good enough in these situations?
How do effective and efficient fit in with the rest of our values?
✨ Note for fellow introverts: You are welcome to come as you are—cameras on or off. No pressure, just presence.
📹 This session will be recorded for those who can’t attend live.