Here’s Why Happiness is the Best Revenge

Happiness is the Best Revenge // From Ashlee Craft / Assemblage, Issue 10(image from Ashlee Craft / Assemblage, Issue 10)

Happiness is the best revenge. Or, as I also love stating frequently : haters gonna hate. The people who don’t like you don’t like you because they feel like you’re above them, or because they’re afraid of you being better than they are, because they are jealous of you. Because they are made uncomfortable by your vastness, your talent, your personality, your brilliance. If they really were above you, they wouldn’t see a point in bringing you down. Down is the key word in that. People who are vast, successful, happy, wealthy (in things more than just money), etc, have what they need, & don’t need to hinder or hold back or quell or block out or squash or shadow or disrespect anyone in any way, ever. They don’t have to do that in order to feel better about themselves. Because they are BIG. Because they are bright + brilliant. Without having to take light away from others in order to feel powerful.

The people who don’t like you aren’t really above you at all. For a minute, they might seem like they do – they might make more money, or have a better car, or more “friends”, or have an attractive & charming significant other, or an important sounding job. But trust me – if they’re that hell-bent on causing pain & sadness to you, they probably lead bitter, sad lives, or at the very least, have doubts about their confidence or their choices. People who are comfortable with themselves build people up & are excited when they do well.

So, if you’re dealing with someone who makes you feel bad about who you are or the choices that you make, or anything else, let your happiness, & your success, be your revenge to them. It will annoy them to see you doing well in the ways they thought you never could. No matter what you do, they still won’t like you, so you might as well do what makes you happy & pursue happiness like the wealth that it is. Be so damn happy that they shake their heads in absolute & utter confusion about how someone they think is as fill-in-the-blank as you can be so happy. Be so successful in your endeavors, so dedicated in your hard work + pursuit of a really really good life, that the people who don’t like you may find themselves desperately wishing that their lives resembled yours, and that they were as happy as you.

But in the end, it never really was about them anyways. This whole process was never about how your actions affect them, because there are so many more worthwhile things to do than caring what someone who doesn’t respect you thinks. It’s all about proving yourself & your beliefs about what’s possible wrong by providing the best life possible for yourself & reaching a higher level of self-love. It’s about asserting your own belief in yourself & confidence in your opinions. Your happiness being “revenge” is the one type of revenge which is about building someone up rather than tearing someone down. All their efforts to tear you down & make you feel bad about yourself are exceeded by you pushing back against them, rising up higher again & again, overcoming their darkness by you shouting you from rooftops “I AM GOOD ENOUGH. I DESERVE BETTER.” It is the one thing you can do in response to all their darkness which reasserts that you are free from them, they never owned you at all, that you are your very-own person which their choices and words do not influence, that you will not be broken by them. That you will keep marching right on forward & becoming positively radiant in the face of all that lies ahead for you. And in succeeding where others would love to see you fall, by continuing to try even when they try to tell you that you’ll never make it, I think this is when you start to know what it means to be your own hero.

Remember that you’re rad, & you’re so deserving of love + respect, & so deserving of an absolutely magical, epic, badass, beautiful, & awesome life filled with great experiences, dreams coming true, & complete happiness so brilliant it makes your haters need sunglasses. You deserve it.

Shipwrecked – Second Edition Released!

I am proud to announce the release of the second edition of my 2013 book Shipwrecked under my publishing company Freedom Meadow Media! Out of all the books I’ve written so far, it is definitely my best-selling one, which is why it is one of the first ones I have republished with my new company.

A little history on the book itself : in 2012, I was very very bored, so I was looking for some sort of writing challenge to keep myself busy with. I heard about the 3 Day Novel contest. It wasn’t around the time that the competition actually happens, but all the same, I was psyched by the idea of it. Writing 50,000 words in three days? Could I do that? With a very vague story idea in mind – a teenage girl goes on a boat, the boat sinks, & she has to survive on some random island – was all the plot I had when I began writing it.

Over the next three days, things were pretty crazy, to say the least. The first day, I think I only ended up writing about 11,000 words. I can’t remember exactly how many I did on the second day, but on the third day, I believe I wrote about 20,000+ words. By midnight on the third day, I’d written about 47,000 words and decided just to consider my novel done. It’s crazy even now, looking back on it, & thinking “Damn, I really did write a WHOLE NOVEL of about 50,000 words in THREE DAYS.” But I did, & Shipwrecked was the result of it.

It wasn’t until 2013 when I actually got around to publishing it. This was due to several factors. (1) Some parts of the story were poorly written or incomplete scenes. (2) The ending of the book involved, for some reason, criminals who wanted to kill the main character (why did there need to be criminals???). (3) The book was absolutely CHOCK FULL of spelling & grammatical errors. This took forever to straighten out. (4) This was back in the good-old days where I had to make my dad read & edit my books before I published them. Because he had a full-time job, he didn’t always have much time to edit my books. He would write the edits down on an index card & hand them to me. Now, I use much more efficient methods so there’s less delay between when I finish writing a book & when I get to publish it.

Fast forward to now, when I started my company & wanted to republish Shipwrecked. When I set out to republish it, I assumed that editing it would be relatively straight-forward. My current editing method involves making my computer read my book out loud to be, which makes it easier to hear where the errors are. Things had gone smoothly editing & republishing A Thousand Cranes, Volume 1 this way.

With Shipwrecked, it was an entirely different story. The book was sadly filled with many, many errors – grammatical errors, spelling errors, missing punctuation, continuity errors, as well as sentences & things which, upon reading them three years later, just sound lame. I probably changed or fixed an estimated two to three hundred such things throughout the course of the book (some of these were adding a sentence here or there to improve things, but still). I honestly wasn’t aware that there were so many things wrong with it, so I’m sorry if any of you read it & these errors took away from the story. Let me tell you this now : all the errors I could find in the book have been fixed, and this is an entirely new edition. I’ve never released a second edition of any of my books before, but I felt like the changes I made to this book warranted a clean slate & a new edition.

Here is the brand-new edition, with a brand-new (& much improved) description. I hope that if you read the book, you let me know what you think of it, preferably on either Amazon or Twitter.

Shipwrecked by Ashlee Craft - CoverThe imaginative 16-year-old Tami Franks is thrilled to finally be going on her dream adventure of a three-day boat trip. She read Treasure Island several years ago, and ever since then, she’s spent her time reading survival guides, climbing trees, and swimming in the neighborhood pool in preparation for the adventures she might go on one day. When her parents finally agree to let her go on a trip with their charter captain friend, she is expecting the adventure of a lifetime. Tami gets much more than she bargains for when the boat sinks in the middle of the night, killing the captain and leaving her stranded in the middle of the ocean. She manages to swim to a nearby but uncharted island, where she must put her survival skills to use in order to have a chance at seeing her family again and saving her own life. Unsure of when, or if, she will be rescued, she must use her imagination, courage, and belief in herself in order to triumph.

Second Edition
Publish Date //
March 11, 2016
Paperback 246 pages
Genre // YA Survival – Adventure

Kindle Edition
Paperback
View Sample Chapter

Issue 10 (Ashlee Craft / Assemblage) – New Zine Available!

Ashlee Craft / Assemblage - Issue 10 - Cover Issue 10 of Ashlee Craft’s life-is-a-playground art & poetry zine, Ashlee Craft / Assemblage.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

the door 4 / work smarter not harder, my friend 5 / things I love when people say to me 6 / belong + be awesome 7 / souvenirs 8 / you held me down & hindered me 9 / fledglings 10 / angry stars 11 / let him go if he causes you so much pain (& makes you feel so sad) 12 / to hell with you 13 / more than you know 14 / conduct yourself like you are the queen 15 / he still didn’t text me back 16 / do better 17 / let it go 18 / what I’m made of 19 / not force & not fear 20 / cantaloupe 21 / you deserve better than this 22 / no reply 23 / the dark knight rises 24 / I was chasing you 25 / therapeutic music 26 / better things to do 27 / garland 28 / the strangely beautiful feeling of afternoon 29 / do my very best 30 / define mini-bitch 31 / you thought you could eradicate everything weaker 32 / what matters 33 / they don’t deserve my anger 34 / happiness is the best revenge 35 / not worth the tears 36 / wow bro 37 / damn you for making me think this was real 38 / surprise party 39 / all a loan 40 / another to-do list 41 / poems to write 42 / fight (fight) 43 / icelandic water 44 /

Kindle Edition
Paperback

Publish Date // March 1, 2016
Paperback 44 Pages
Genre // Zines

Ashlee Craft / Assemblage Issue 10 Now Available!

Ashlee Craft / Assemblage, Issue 10 - CoverIssue 10 of Ashlee Craft’s life-is-a-playground art & poetry zine, Ashlee Craft / Assemblage.TABLE OF CONTENTS

the door 4 / work smarter not harder, my friend 5 / things I love when people say to me 6 / belong + be awesome 7 / souvenirs 8 / you held me down & hindered me 9 / fledglings 10 / angry stars 11 / let him go if he causes you so much pain (& makes you feel so sad) 12 / to hell with you 13 / more than you know 14 / conduct yourself like you are the queen 15 / he still didn’t text me back 16 / do better 17 / let it go 18 / what I’m made of 19 / not force & not fear 20 / cantaloupe 21 / you deserve better than this 22 / no reply 23 / the dark knight rises 24 / I was chasing you 25 / therapeutic music 26 / better things to do 27 / garland 28 / the strangely beautiful feeling of afternoon 29 / do my very best 30 / define mini-bitch 31 / you thought you could eradicate everything weaker 32 / what matters 33 / they don’t deserve my anger 34 / happiness is the best revenge 35 / not worth the tears 36 / wow bro 37 / damn you for making me think this was real 38 / surprise party 39 / all a loan 40 / another to-do list 41 / poems to write 42 / fight (fight) 43 / icelandic water 44 /

Publish Date // March 1, 2016
Paperback 44 pages
Genre // Magazines

Kindle Edition
Paperback