Life in progress

Monthly Archives: June 2014


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The Friday Reminder and Prompt for SoCS June 14/14

It’s SoCS prompt time again! A great deal of time in a blogger’s life is spent reading, whether it’s books outside the blogosphere, other blogs, or even our own articles that we pore over time and time again to get them perfect before hitting the publish button. So with that in mind, what better to do with Stream of Consciousness Saturday than write something we’re not going to fix?

This week’s prompt will be slightly more of a challenge, should you choose to accept. Your prompt is to include the word read (present tense), read (past tense) or red. The extra challenge? Publish without reading. Just do your best while you write, then make a really squinty face and pluck up the courage to hit that button. If you’re brave enough to do it, make sure you tell us you’re going to at the end of your post.

After you’ve written your Saturday post tomorrow, please link it here at the prompt page in the comments so others can find it and see your awesome Stream of Consciousness post. Don’t hesitate to join in – it’s fun and this week it tastes good too!

Here are the rules:

1. Your post must be stream of consciousness writing, meaning no editing, (typos can be fixed) and minimal planning on what you’re going to write.

2. Your post can be as long or as short as you want it to be. One sentence – one thousand words. Fact, fiction, poetry – it doesn’t matter. Just let the words carry you along until you’re ready to stop.

3. There will be a prompt every week. I will post the prompt here on my blog on Friday, along with a reminder for you to join in. The prompt will be one random thing, but it will not be a subject. For instance, I will not say “Write about dogs”; the prompt will be more like, “Make your first sentence a question,” or “Begin with the word ‘The’.”

4. Ping back! It’s important, so that I and other people will come and read your post! The way to ping back, is to just copy and paste the URL of my post somewhere on your post. Then your URL will show up in my comments, for everyone to see. For example, in your post you can copy and paste the following: This post is part of SoCS: https://lindaghill.wordpress.com/2014/06/13/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-june-1414/  The most recent pingbacks will be found at the top.

5. Read at least one other person’s blog who has linked back their post. Even better, read everyone’s! If you’re the first person to link back, you can check back later, or go to the previous week, by following my category, “Stream of Consciousness Saturday,” which you’ll find right below the “Like” button on my post.

6. Copy and paste the rules (if you’d like to) in your post. The more people who join in, the more new bloggers you’ll meet and the bigger your community will get!

7. Have fun!


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The Darkest Corner of Writing

This post brings up an interesting question – does writing a horror scene scare you? Thanks to Payton for letting me re-blog. Please comment on the original post.


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Forcing Myself

I’ve been having a hard time for the past few days getting into editing my novel. I’m able to force myself to work, but then I come up with any number of excuses to do something else, every other sentence I fix.
Candy Crush Saga is only the tip of the ice cream cone. (Make that a mint chocolate chip Klondike Bar.) How about those dishes in the sink? Or is that another email? And let’s not even mention WordPress stats. And if all else fails and I’ve done everything else I can do, or eaten everything in the house (damn, I just ate tomorrow night’s pork chops… and why do my teeth hurt? Must be the fact that they were still frozen…) I start to notice that my butt’s starting to hurt because I’ve been sitting on it too long.

It has to be time for a glass of wine.

You can see how it goes. I sit down to edit at times like this and I get SO MUCH ACCOMPLISHED! just not any editing. Is it really worth spending three hours just to slice the hell out of two paragraphs that I end up not happy with anyway because I wasn’t really concentrating?

How does anyone get this job done for goodness sakes?!?


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Watch Me Die by Erica Spindler – A Review

Watch Me DieWatch Me Die by Erica Spindler
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Despite the fact that I was suprised to discover after beginning it that this book was not the first part of a series–the dust jacket says nothing about the previous books–I was able to enjoy it as a stand-alone novel. There were details about the main characters that I’m sure I missed because I haven’t read the other books, but it didn’t impact my reading enjoyment.
The story is fast-paced and the suspense builds with each turn of the page. Ms. Spindler kept me guessing right to the very end.
I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys a good thriller and I look forward to reading the other parts of the series.

View all my reviews


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One-Liner Wednesday – Can any of us?

…I can’t really help who I am and what I create. ~Sakurai Atsushi, April, 2010

(nopperabou.net – interview translation by Lola)


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There’s Pain and then There’s Pain (and then there’s pain in the rain)

This morning while waiting outside for Alex’s school bus with Alex and my best friend John, I lifted my right hand to point at something and felt a shooting pain through my shoulder. I moaned. Not normally being one to complain about aches and pains, I thought about what made me so miserable where this shoulder thing is concerned.

Being that I was diagnosed with arthritis in it, I explained to John that pain has never really bothered me that much. I just live with it. But I realise it’s different this time, because I’m not sure it’ll ever go away: I may very well have to suffer with this one for the rest of my life.

I suppose just saying that made me deserve what was to come. At the house of the second customer on my paper route, I missed a step on the way down and landed on my knee on their brick pathway.

It could have been worse though – I could be out in the torrential downpour I’m watching through the window as I type this.


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Can You Believe It?

Don’t waste time. There is money to be made and advancement is within reach. A space at home to develop your ideas will help you increase your income and stabilize your financial situation. Invest in yourself and your talent.

As tired as I am, I can’t help but feel the motivation from my horoscope today, especially considering the thought I had last week about taking some university courses. And heck, what writer doesn’t need a space in his or her home to work? It’s like this was written for me.

I don’t usually put too much stock in horoscopes, but there are times like these when they really hit the target. My biggest problem now is choosing where to really focus my efforts. If I’m to take the courses, I still have all summer to myself to work on my novel. I’m still trying to decide if I should just self-publish without trying to find an agent/publisher or if I should brush up another project and give the whole self-publishing thing a go to see what is involved. Maybe some good, honest critique of my novel is what I really need before I make my final decision.

In the meantime, I’m psyched. I have a dream. I have a work-in-progress that I truly believe in. And now I have a cheap newspaper horoscope telling me I’m on the right track.

Can you believe it?


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Thank you!

equalIn just over half a year I have as many views as I had for all of 2013!

As you can see, the A-Z Challenge in April was the best thing to happen to my blog to date. I’m not sure where I was in September. There’s certainly something to be said for posting every day as I did have, with a few exceptions here and there, since half-way through October. I took one day off in June and my views suffered for it.

All this to say thank you so much for all the views! I feel loved. 🙂


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HarsH ReaLiTy – Flash Fiction Challenge Part 1 of 2 – Create a City

Only a day left to get your entries in!


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Tongue Talk – Stream of Consciousness Saturday

When I thought of the tongue prompt yesterday I had no idea what I wanted to write. It just seemed like something people could have fun with. That hasn’t changed – I still don’t have any idea what I want to write.

There are so many things we can do with our tongues:

The first of course is taste – it’s one of the first things we do when we enter the world. Our tastes grow as we get older. Sure, there are things we can’t stand to eat, even as kids. Much to the annoyance of parents everywhere, often these foods end up in places they shouldn’t. I still remember picking sticky pieces of spaghetti off the walls when my kids were toddlers.

Shortly after taste comes our mother tongue. Or, in some cases, not. My son Alex will never know his mother tongue because he’s Deaf. Is Sign Language even a tongue? Maybe not, but Alex is certainly vocal enough. That’s something that comes with having hearing parents though. In completely Deaf families, they don’t use their voices.

Shortly after we learn to speak we learn to do other things with our tongues. Stick them out at people, for instance. (Thanks  Lee-Anne for reminding me of that one.) Some of us do tricks like twist them or curl them – which as I understand is something that is inherited. If your parents can’t do it, neither can you. I can lick my nose though…

As we grow up we learn to use them for kissing. I remember my first kiss – however I’d rather not. There was a lot of drool involved and I don’t think most of it was mine. Ick.

From that first kiss we graduate… My mother used to call it “sucking face” though I’m not sure that that was an expression she grew up with. Then there were the hickeys that we tried and usually failed to hide from our parents.  As I write this, I realize how much hell parents go through!

And of course there’s the next step.. but I won’t get into that here. Best left for the bedroom, eh?

That would be everything I can come up with, and I still don’t know that I’ve said anything of importance or worth reading.

Except the next time I go to the doctor and I see the tongue depressors, I’ll probably think of this post.

This post is part of SoCS! https://lindaghill.wordpress.com/2014/06/06/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-june-714/ Click the link to find out more, and to join in!