The Happiness Blog Tour, Giveaway and Review

Bryan Cohen here, guest poster and author, promoting my new book The Post-College Guide to Happiness for The Happiness Blog Tour. I'm giving away free digital review copies of the book and doing a giveaway for paperback copies, audio copies and even a Kindle Fire! Read on and check out the info below the post.

"Ever since happiness heard your name, it has been running through the streets trying to find you."
Hafiz of Persia How to Be Found Some people spent their entire lives looking for happiness without success. That's the path I felt like I was taking after I graduated from college. I loved the people I met working at the popular coffee shop. I loved doing improv comedy and performing in front of crowds. I even loved the grind of trying to produce shows on a tiny budget. Despite these wonderful things in my life, I wasn't happy and I felt like I would never find happiness. That's when I decided to let happiness find me. I love this quote from Hafiz of Persia, because most of us think that the "pursuit of happiness" is one-way. We are the ones looking for happiness and it is our responsibility to find this ill-defined state of being. What if, however, at the same time we're looking for happiness, happiness is actually looking for us as well? Have you ever gotten separated from a group of friends at a mall or a festival of some kind? It seems like no matter what happens, you keep missing each other until half an hour later you talk about all the places you hunted to find each other. If you had stayed where you were instead of moving consistently, it's likely that your friends would have found you sitting on that bench. Perhaps it's the same thing with happiness. We are drawn to the new exciting thing or the get-rich quick scheme or the person who we think will change our lives. These ideas and people tend to pull us away from who we are and what we are used to doing. Obviously, we need to change and grow in life, but if we don't check back with where we have been and who we are deep down, happiness may miss us. I realize that this is a bit of a metaphysical way of looking at things, but I think it's important to keep in mind the two-way nature of happiness. It's not running away from us and it's not hiding in some deep cave that we haven't discovered yet. If we think about happiness as something trying to find us, it will be much easier to track down than if we assume it's some mythical, unobtainable relic. Give yourself a better chance to find happiness by looking inside yourself to see where this joy might be looking for you. You may be surprised with what you discover.
 -- Bryan Cohen is giving away 61 paperback and audio copies of The Post-College Guide to Happiness and a Kindle Fire between now and May 7th, 2012 on The Happiness Blog Tour. All entrants receive a free digital review copy of The Post-College Guide to Happiness. Bryan hopes to give away at least 1,000 copies during the blog tour. To enter, post a comment with your e-mail address or send an e-mail to postcollegehappiness (at) gmail.com. Bryan will draw the names at the end of the tour. Entries will be counted through Sunday, May 6th.

Bryan Cohen is a writer, actor and comedian from Dresher, Pennsylvania. He graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2005 with degrees in English and Dramatic Art and a minor in Creative Writing.

He has written nine books including 1,000 Creative Writing Prompts: Ideas for Blogs, Scripts, Stories and More, 500 Writing Prompts for Kids: First Grade through Fifth Grade, Writer on the Side: How to Write Your Book Around Your 9 to 5 Job and his new book, 1,000 Character Writing Prompts: Villains, Heroes and Hams for Scripts, Stories and More. His website Build Creative Writing Ideas helps over 25,000 visitors a month to push past writer's block and stay motivated. Feel free to follow along with the tour at The Happiness Blog Tour Hub Page or on the book's Facebook  Page.

My Thoughts:  
Wow, I feel happier already after reading Bryan Cohen's The Post-College Guide to Happiness. No really, I do. A few years ago I picked up the book The Secret. I don't know what possessed me to pick it up I just did. I brought that little book home and started reading, and I was completely transformed. I really was. I had been an extreme worry wart and was pretty negative on top of the constant worrying. I haven't read that book in a while and Bryan's book came to me at the perfect time. I had begun slipping back into those old habits of worrying irrationally, and the negativity was starting to creep back in.
I really love Bryan's style of writing. He is informative and inspirational while maintaining a light entertaining  tone that is easy to read. He not only talks about being happy but includes ways to practice becoming happy. In chapter 7: God and High Spirits Bryan mentions that some people might have problems with bringing religion into being happier. I have to say that was actually my favorite chapter. Obviously that is an area that I have been needing to think about at this time in my life.
I have already started recommending this book to my daughter, and I know I will be recommending it to many more people in the future.
Thank you Bryan for the pleasure of joining your blog tour, and for writing such a wonderful guide to happiness.

Bryan Cohen Blog Tour and Giveaway

Food and Writing

By Bryan Cohen

I’ve always had an interesting relationship with food. When I was a kid, it was one of my best friends, inducing comfort and always being around when I needed it. While I never indulged too much, a slow metabolism turned that love of food into chubbiness. Later in high school, when I dieted for wrestling to get into a lower weight class, it became an enemy. It was the temptation of food that tried to keep me from my varsity spot at 119 lbs. In college, it became a buddy again with all-you-can-eat dining halls and its use in my poetry (I once won over a girl with a poem comparing myself and another guy to an unknown chocolate cake and a delectable but familiar crème


Through a few more dieting periods and feasting periods, I’ve come to a sort of peace with food. Starting this year I’ve taken up cooking, which is most fun for me when I’m entertaining a large group of people. At a recent dinner, I cooked up a batch of gruyere, prosciutto and arugula stuffed chicken breasts with a caramelized shallot sauce (thank you Cooking Light) and it went over spectacularly. Chicago is one of those cities with a ridiculous amount of dining choices wherever you turn. To save money and your creative energy, however, it’s best to do your own cooking and use as many fresh ingredients as possible.

When I was younger, it was much easier to find stores of creativity no matter what I ate. Nowadays, the best way to get myself going is with high energy meals, not too high in calories that keep my brain working. When you eat a large meal or you down a huge amount of booze, your body goes into major digestion mode. It starts diverting blood, oxygen, and energy from all over your body to the stomach area. If you have a hard time being creative when you’re in a normal state, imagine how tough it would be when your body is concentrating all its efforts away from your brain.

In addition, if you are eating foods that are high in sugar or caffeine, after a little burst of alertness, your body and brain will drop like a ton of bricks. Training yourself off of sugar or caffeine sucks (it’s strangely like getting over a drug addiction, hmm) it’s the best way to keep your mind clear and focused. Foods that naturally improve your alertness like apples and whole grains are much healthier in the long term.

Now I know it seems a little silly for a writer to be talking about food in connection with creativity, but since I’ve reformed my diet to include more fruits and veggies and fewer heavy meals or sources of caffeine, I’ve felt like a creative machine. I believe that creativity is tough enough that there’s no reason to put anything in your own way. Setting up the best diet possible for yourself is obviously great for your health and weight but it also gets your mind ready to churn out that novel you’ve been putting off.

Saving money, thinking more effectively, having a healthier body and weight, and showing off to all of your friends sound like good enough benefits to me to invest in a cook book and an apron that says: kiss the published writer. Maybe I should copyright that...

"Author Bryan Cohen gets excited about a legitimate Mediterranean meal in a Bedouin tent."

Bryan Cohen is giving away 100 personalized writing prompts to one giveaway entrant chosen at random during the blog tour. Personalized prompts are story starters that cater specifically to a writer’s subject matter, strengths/weaknesses, etc. Cohen will create the prompts to cater exclusively to the winner. He is giving away free digital copies of his book The Writing Sampler to everybody who enters, which includes excerpts from each of his four books on writing. The book contains essays, writing prompts and tips and tricks to enhance your writing skills. In addition, for each of Cohen’s books that reach the Top 500 on Amazon during his blog tour, he will add a $50 Amazon gift card to the drawing (up to six $50 cards in total)!

To enter, simply post a comment to this blog post with your e-mail address. Entries will be counted through June 2^nd, 2011.

Bryan Cohen is a writer, actor and comedian from Dresher, Pennsylvania. Since graduating from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill he has written four books (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0044DEL7C">1,000 Creative Writing Prompts: Ideas for Blogs, Scripts, Stories and More, http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004SOYV4K">500 Writing Prompts for Kids: First Grade through Fifth Grade, http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004LDLD8A">Sharpening the Pencil: Essays on Writing, Motivation, and Enjoying your Life, and http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004VWPONQ">Writer on the Side: How to Write Your Book Around Your 9 to 5 Job), several plays (Something from Nothing and http://www.amazon.com/Chekhov-Kegstand-ebook/dp/B004X2IHP6">Chekhov Kegstand: A Dorm Room Dramedy in Two Acts) and he was the head writer for an un-produced Web series (http://www.amazon.com/Covenant-Coffee-Unproduced-Pilot-ebook/dp/B004XMWKYU">Covenant Coffee). His writing and motivation website http://www.build-creative-writing-ideas.com">Build Creative Writing Ideas has had over 100,000 visitors since it was founded in December 2008. He lives in Chicago, Illinois.

Follow Bryan on Twitter http://twitter.com/#!/buildcwideas">@buildcwideasa>.