Sally's Christmas List: A Charlie Brown Christmas

Sally: I've been looking for you, big brother. Will you please write a letter to Santa Claus for me?

Charlie Brown: Well, I don't have much time. I'm supposed to get down to the school auditorium to direct a Christmas play.

Sally: [hands a clipboard and pen to Charlie Brown] You write it and I'll tell you what I want to say.

Charlie Brown: [sticks pen in his mouth] Okay, shoot.

Sally: [dictating her letter to Santa Claus as Charlie Brown writes it for her] Dear Santa Claus, How have you been? Did you have a nice summer?

Sally: How is your wife? I have been extra good this year, so I have a long list of presents that I want.

Charlie Brown: Oh brother.

Sally: Please note the size and color of each item, and send as many as possible. If it seems too complicated, make it easy on yourself: just send money. How about tens and twenties?

Charlie Brown: TENS AND TWENTIES? Oh, even my baby sister!

Sally: All I want is what I... I have coming to me. All I want is my fair share.

(Image from here.)

Go ahead and visit my squidoo lens "The Peanuts Gang: A Charlie Brown Christmas".

For more holiday cheer visit these articles on my blog:

• Getting Over the Holiday Blues | Five Ways to Keep Your Spirits Up During the Holidays
• 28 Glorious Christmas Traditions
• Fun, Whimsical Gift Ideas for Creative People

Ten Inspiring Journal Prompts

There are many benefits to keeping a journal, such as recording your memories, setting down your goals and resolutions, keeping track of events in your life, and so on. However, a lot of people aren't sure how to get started in keeping a journal. My suggestion would be to scour the internet for fun journal prompts to help get you started.

Here are ten journal prompts to jumpstart your journaling efforts:

1. What's your favorite season and why?
2. Have you ever been betrayed by a friend?
3. What's the biggest lie you've ever told?
4. Describe your perfect career.
5. What is your fondest memory?
6. What traits do you look for in a friend?
7. What would you like to be remembered for?
8. Who has had the biggest influence in your life?
9. What advice would you give to your younger self?
10. What would you do if you won the lottery?

For more ideas on journal prompts you can use, visit "119 Journal Prompts". In addition, you can create a journal jar and fill it with slips of paper, each containing a different prompt. For instructions on how to create a journal jar, visit my Squidoo lens "Unique Handmade Gift: A Journal Jar".

A Poem of Thankfulness

Be Thankful

Be thankful that you don't already have everything you desire,
If you did, what would there be to look forward to?

Be thankful when you don't know something
For it gives you the opportunity to learn.

Be thankful for the difficult times.
During those times you grow.

Be thankful for your limitations
Because they give you opportunities for improvement.

Be thankful for each new challenge
Because it will build your strength and character.

Be thankful for your mistakes
They will teach you valuable lessons.

Be thankful when you're tired and weary
Because it means you've made a difference.

It is easy to be thankful for the good things.
A life of rich fulfillment comes to those who are
also thankful for the setbacks.

GRATITUDE can turn a negative into a positive.
Find a way to be thankful for your troubles
and they can become your blessings.

Author Unknown

For more gratitude quotes visit my blog post "49 Gratitude Quotes and a Poem Of Thankfulness". You can also donwload a free ebook on "114 Ways to Celebrate Life".

Five Happiness Quotes to Make Your Day

1. “The happiest people are those who think the most interesting thoughts. Those who decide to use leisure as a means of mental development, who love good music, good books, good pictures, good company, good conversation, are the happiest people in the world. And they are not only happy in themselves, they are the cause of happiness in others. — William Lyon Phelps

2. “Most people ask for happiness on condition. Happiness can only be felt if you don’t set any condition.” — Arthur Rubinstein

3. “If you observe a really happy man you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing Double Dahlias in his garden.” — W Wolfe

4. “I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge.” — Willa Cather, My Antonia

5. “To get up each morning with the resolve to be happy . . . is to set our own conditions to the events of each day. To do this is to condition circumstances instead of being conditioned by them.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

For more happiness quotes visit my post "65 Happiness Quotes".

Increase Productivity at Work: Have Some Fun

In "The Levity Effect: Why It Pays to Lighten Up", bestselling author Adrian Gostick and humorist Scott Christopher use science to reveal the remarkable power of humor and fun in business. They argue that there's a correlation between having fun and making money: happy people are more productive; more productivity leads to greater profits.

So how do you introduce more fun into the workplace and thereby increase your bottom line? Here are five things you can try:

1. Turn the coffee room into a "Fun Sanctuary" filled with comic books, stand-up comedy routines on audio tapes, toys, and other fun props. Toys can include silly putty, Legos, crayons, wooden blocks, and even nerf ball guns.

2. Every Monday send out a riddle by email and give a small prize to the first person to solve it.

3. Create a bulletin board and have everyone hang up a picture of when they were babies. Better yet, have everyone bring in a picture of their pet and have a contest to see who can match the pets with their owners.

4. Bring in a cake once a month and sing "Happy Birthday" to all those in the office who had a birthday that month.

5. Do something together outside of the office once a month, such as trying out a new restaurant, going to a pub, or having a barbeque.

For more ideas on ways to have fun at work, visit my blog post "Have Fun at Work and Increase the Bottom Line".

Six Creativity Quotes to Inspire you

1. “The world is but a canvas to the imagination.” — Henry David Thoreau

2. “Creativity is… seeing something that doesn’t exist already. You need to find out how you can bring it into being and that way be a playmate with God.” — Michele Shea

3. “The most potent muse of all is our own inner child.”– Stephen Nachmanovitch

4. “We have come to think of art and work as incompatible, or at least independent categories and have for the first time in history created an industry without art.” — Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

5. “As competition intensifies, the need for creative thinking increases. It is no longer enough to do the same thing better . . . no longer enough to be efficient and solve problems” — Edward de Bono

6. “So you see, imagination needs moodling – long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.” — Brenda Ueland

For more creativity quotes visit my blog post "75 Creativity Quotes".

Marelisa Fábrega blogs over at Abundance Blog at Marelisa Online.  She blogs about creativity, productivity, and simplifying your life. Marelisa is the author of the ebook: "How to Be More Creative: A Handbook for Alchemists".

Subscribe to Abundance Blog at Marelisa Online for free by RSS or e-mail and you'll always know when something new is published. (What's RSS?).  Follow Marelisa on Twitter.

Making Your Characters Real

One of the most important elements of any novel is creating characters that come to life in the pages of your book. We’ve all experienced the sorrow of finishing a book and realizing we have to bid farewell to a character in the novel whom we practically felt we had befriended. Then we wait anxiously for the novel’s sequel so that we can resume that friendship.

How does a writer create characters who appear to be made of flesh and blood?

Although some authors prefer to come up with the basics of their characters and then simply allow them to reveal themselves as the story moves along, a lot of experienced writers recommend that would-be authors create character profiles, at least of their main characters. How detailed you make your character profiles depends on what works best for you.

What You Need to Know About Your Character

Some of the things you'll probably want to jot down about your characters are the following:

• Age
• Appearance
• Occupation
• Income
• Education
• Marital status
• Recent relationships
• Children / siblings
• Likes and dislikes
• Favorite music
• Hobbies
• Strengths and weaknesses
• Special characteristics (movement, speech, laugh, and so on)
• Favorite sayings
• Idiosyncrasies
• Birth date/ Sign of the Zodiac
• Knick name

Six More Things You Can Do

Six more things you can do when it comes to creating your characters are the following:

1. Write what a typical day looks like for your character.
2. Create your character's backstory; even if you never include a word of the backstory in your novel, if you know your character's past you'll be able to make him or her more convincing to the reader.
3. Create a profile for each of your characters similar to those of popular socializing networks such as Myspace, Twitter, or Facebook.
4. Draw a family tree for the character.
5. Make a sketch of your character so that you can get a better idea of what they look like.
6. Research your character's job or career if it's different from your own.

Character Profile Worksheets

Here are some links where you'll find worksheets to help you create character profiles:

• How to Create a Character Profile
• Character Creation Form
• Developing Fictional Character Profiles
• Creating Character Profiles
• Character Development Worksheet
• 100 Character Development Questions for Writers

For more tools, tips, and resources for writing your novel, visit my Squidoo lens "NaNoWriMo - Write a Novel in 30 Days".

As a Man Thinketh

This YouTube video has some great quotes by James Allen, author of "As a Man Thinketh":



For more information on "As a Man Thinketh", visit my squidoo lens here.

Finish 2009 Strong - The 100 Day Challenge

My squidoo lens "Creating a Bucket List - 100 Things to do Before You Die" has been in the top one hundred squidoo lenses for months. I think that the success of this lens is in large part due to the fact that people want to set and achieve goals that they consider to be meaningful.

Therefore, when I came across The 100 Day Finish Strong Challenge--which shows people how to finish the year off strong and accomplish their goals--I decided to promote this program on my squidoo lens. Read more about the program below.

There are less than four months left of 2009. As it relates to your goals, you're now in one of three positions. You have either:

1. Exceeded your expectations of what you thought you could achieve this year.

2. Met expectations of what you set out to accomplish.

3. Fallen below your desired expectations of what you wanted to accomplish.

Regardless of your current position, you can really make the last months of 2009 count. Take The 100 Day Finish Strong Challenge created by Gary Ryan Blair, better known as "The Goals Guy". His revolutionary program --which begins in just a few days--will allow you to end 2009 with a bang.

Gary is offering a special report for free titled: "How to Create Your Own Big Bang!" which you can access right away simply by clicking here.

Creativity Constraints - Lack of Resources

In my article The Key to Success: Resourcefulness (Creativity + Determination), I refer to Anthony Robbin's Ted.com Talk and how he explains that the problem when people is fail is not lack of resources, but lack of resourcefulness.

In fact, a lack of resources--such as time, money, and technology--can actually be a creativity booster. Here are three examples of creativity constraints:

Shoot Out Boulder

The Shoot Out Boulder is a filmmaking festival that asks filmmakers to make a 7-minute film in just 24 hours. In addition, there's a list of required technical, material, and timing 'rules' for creating the films.

National Novel Writing Month

If you've been dreaming for years of writing a novel, sign up for National Novel Writing Month (nanowrimo) which takes place each November. Nanowrimo gives participants the challenge of writing a novel in a month's time. This is what they have to say about their deadline:

"Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that's a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down."

The Houdini Solution

Ernie Schenck, author of "The Houdini Solution", is a big proponent of creativity constraints and limits as fuel for the fires of creativity. In his book he refers to the Apollo 13 mission in which an explosion on board caused the spacecraft to lose oxygen, electricity, light, and water approximately 200,000 miles from Earth.

The engineers at Houston had to find a solution which the astronauts could implement using the few materials they had on board. If they failed, the crew would die of asphyxiation before they made it back home.

Here's a quote from the book:

". . . talk about thinking inside the box. You’ve got to design a new product. You’ve got to build that product. Your raw materials consist of cardboard, plastic bags, duct tape, and other low-tech materials. And, hey, just for good measure, you’ve got less than 48 hours to do it all or people are going to die."

Conclusion

So the next time you're staring at a blank page, see if you can come up with some constraints to help get your creative juices flowing. For more tips and resources on how to be more creative, visit my squidoo lens: "How to Be More Creative". Another great resource is my ebook, "How to Be More Creative - A Handbook for Alchemists".

(The "Houdini" image is from here).

Inspiration for Writers

“If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.” -- Joyce Carol Oates

"I don't wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work." -- Pearl S. Buck

"Caress the detail, the divine detail." Vladimir Nabokov

"A writer lives, at least, in a state of astonishment. Beneath any feeling he has of the good or evil of the world lies a deeper one of wonder at it all. To transmit that feeling, he writes." -- William Sansom

"Nothing you write, if you hope to be any good, will ever come out as you first hoped." -- Lillian Helman

"Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go." -- E.L. Doctorow

"Use the right word and not its second cousin." -- Mark Twain

"To be clear is the first duty of a writer; to charm and to please are graces to be acquired later." -- Brander Matthews

"I write the first sentence and trust in God for the next." -- Laurence Sterne

"In composing, as a general rule, run your pen through every other word you have written; you have no idea what vigor it will give to your style." -- Sydney Smith

"Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write." -- Robert Penn Warren

"Words have weight, sound and appearance; it is only by considering these that you can write a sentence that is good to look at and good to listen to." -- Somerset Maugham

"Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time…The wait is simply too long." -- Leonard S. Bernstein

For writings tips and advice for writers, from writers, visit my Squidoo lens: “Tips for Writers, From Writers”.

Writing Advice From Stephen King

Stephen King is the author of over fifty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His book "On Writing - A Memoir of the Craft" is both a textbook for writers and a memoir of Stephen's life. "If you want to be a writer," Stephen King says, "you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot."

King emphasizes that writers have to be well-read. He adds that he has no patience for people who tell him that they want to be writers but they can't find the time to read. The answer is simple: if you don't read, you can't be a writer. You have to read just about everything. In addition, you also have to write in order to develop your own style.

When it comes to the reading part of it, King explained during a lecture at Yale that if you read enough, there's this magic moment which will always come to you if you want to be a writer. It's the moment when you put down some book and say: "This really sucks . . . I can do better than this . . . And this guy got published." So go ahead, read all you can, and wait for that magical moment.

Here's an excerpt from "On Writing":

"Mostly when I think of pacing, I go back to Elmore Leonard, who explained it so perfectly by saying he just left out the boring parts. This suggests cutting to speed the pace, and that's what most of us end up having to do (kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler's heart, kill your darlings)...I got a scribbled comment that changed the way I rewrote my fiction once and forever. Jotted below the machine-generated signature of the editor was this mot: "Not bad, but PUFFY. You need to revise for length. Formula: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft - 10%. Good luck."

For more writing tips, visit my Squidoo lens: "Writing Tips for Writers, From Writers".

Quotes on Simple Pleasures

"We will have to give up taking things for granted, even the apparently simple things." - J.D. Bernal

"The man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest." -- Thoreau

"What can your eye desire to see, your ears to hear, your mouth to take, or your nose to smell that is not to be had in a garden?" -- William Lawson

"When we lack proper time for the simple pleasures of life, for the enjoyment of eating, drinking, playing, creating, visiting friends and watching children at play, then we have missed the purpose of life. Not on bread alone do we live but on all these human and heart-hungry luxuries. " -- Ed Hayes

"The more you praise and celebrate your life, the more there is in life to celebrate." -- Oprah Winfrey

"There is nothing like staying at home for real comfort." -- Jane Austen

If you liked these quotes, you'll love my Squidoo lens: "100s of Ways to Celebrate Life".

Learn Effective Ways to Communicate Why You're Angry

Although there are many anger management styles, the best one is assertive problem solving. People with this style of anger management pay attention to their anger signals and respond in an assertive manner. They deal directly with the person related to the issue at hand, and they talk to them in a direct, honest, and polite way. Choose to adopt this style of anger management; you can begin by communicating assertively with others when you get angry.

An effective way in which to tell others what you need or want is to speak in "I" statements, stating clearly the behavior that you're referring to, how it makes you feel, and what you would like to happen. Here's the basic formula:

"When you (specific behavior)".
"I feel (specific feeling)."
"I want (specific goal)."

For example: "When you're out late and you don't call to say where you are, I feel that you don't care that I'm at home worrying about you. I want for you to call me when you're going to be late."

For more information on how to control anger, visit my Squidoo lens: "Controlling Anger: Tips, Techniques, and Resources"

Healthy Anger

In "Letting Go of Anger - The Eleven Most Common Anger Styles & What to Do About Them", Ron Potter-Efron and Patricia Potter-Efron explain that people who use anger well have a healthy or "normal" relationship with anger. These people tend to think of anger in the following ways:

• Anger is a normal part of life.
• Anger is an accurate signal of problems that need to be addressed.
  
• Angry actions are carefully screened; you needn't get automatically angry just because you could.
  
• Anger is expressed in moderation so that there is no loss of control.
• The goal is to solve problems, not just to express anger. In addition, the goal is not to hurt others.
  
• Anger is clearly stated in ways that others can understand.
• Anger is temporary; it can be relinquished once a problem is solved.
  

Anger is a signal that something is wrong in your life that needs to be addressed. You need to re-examine the way in which you've dealt with anger in the past and ask yourself if it's the most effective way there is to deal with anger. If not, you need to pick a new strategy to deal with your anger that will help you to obtain the results you desire. For information on how to control anger, visit my Squidoo lens: "Controlling Anger: Tips, Techniques, and Resources".