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Day 1

Talk about your Happy Place—the things that give you joy, calms you or keeps you sane.

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City skyline glowing across the water.
The distant sound of a train’s horn during the middle of the night.
A lazy afternoon reading while sipping coffee in a cafe.
The downpour of rain on the roof and the wet lush green world beyond the window.
A leisurely dinner out with my longtime partner in crime.
Working on a painting that takes countless hours to finish.
RPG video games and visual novels that suck me in because of the characters’ stories.
Cities that are or that could be city-states, both real or imagined.
Writing on my laptop while sitting in bed in my pajamas and drinking tea.
Modern or unexpected takes on botanical art and scientific illustration.
The seductive flow of ink onto creamy smooth paper.
A sleepy cat stretching and spreading its fat round toes.
Descriptive prose that is terribly, painfully human yet nonetheless beautiful.
Online fandom interactions that are fun, a bit “thinky,” and all around good natured.
Finding happy fanworks of my current fave OTP.

Regarding fandom specific happy places, Persona 5 is downright magical for me. I can wander around virtual Tokyo doing absolutely mundane things and feel completely engulfed in the goodness of being exactly where I want to be. The characters’ personalities and stories are A+ (note: not yet finished with the game — still avoiding hardcore spoilers). When I am away from my gaming console, the P5 Anime, Manga, and soundtrack are guaranteed good feels and I find it so relaxing to hunt for P5 fan art that I can add to my Pinterest collection.

The Final Fantasy series has provided decades of happy place goodness. The music instantly transports me to a happy place. Same for the official art, the environments, and many fanworks. There are easily two dozen FFVII fanartists whose work I return to repeatedly whenever I need that moment of “aaaaahhhhhhhhh. yes. this.” I need to organize a fanfic reco/happyplace collection one of these days. Writing my current fic WIP (FFVII-based) is instant happy place even when everything is going to shit for the characters.

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Given other thinking that am doing at this point in the year, being challenged to name my happy place is very relevant.

Thinking about two challenges I need to give to myself:

1. Regularly creating moodboards/image collections of my happy place things.

2. Organizing / reorganizing my collections of fannish Happy Place fan works (made by other people) such that they are easy to find rather than somewhere out there in one of my messy Pinterest boards or 20 pages back under a half-forgotten Tumblr tag. Or, somewhere deep inside AO3 or Fanfic.net or pixiv.

If anyone has good suggestions for organizing #2, please feel free to share.