Anyone who would like to try it out, feel free to use the “One-Liner Wednesday” title in your post, and if you do, you can ping back here to help your blog get more exposure. To execute a ping back, just copy the URL in the address bar on this post and paste it somewhere in the body of your post. Your link will show up in the comments below. Please ensure that the One-Liner Wednesday you’re pinging back to is this week’s! Otherwise, no one will likely see it but me.
As with Stream of Consciousness Saturday (SoCS), if you see a ping back from someone else in my comment section, click and have a read. It’s bound to be short and sweet.
Unlike SoCS, this is not a prompt so there’s no need to stick to the same “theme.” However, if you’d like to combine One-Liner Wednesday with Just Jot It January, go right ahead!
The rules that I’ve made for myself (but don’t always follow) for “One-Liner Wednesday” are:
They say that with great responsibility comes great power. But what about sacrifice?
When I was a teenager and into my young adulthood I thought of sacrifice as something romantic. I dreamed of the ultimate sacrifice, as in, “I’d die for you my love!” As much as I might have jumped in front of a bus for my boyfriend, I (thank goodness) never found out whether I’d have the guts when it came down to it.
Then when I started thinking about having kids I wondered at all I’d have to sacrifice of my relatively carefree life. And when it came down to it, I suppose I did. I miss the days of laying in on a weekend morning, of being able to go in and out of the house at will, of doing all the things one truly takes for granted before they have kids. But it doesn’t feel like a sacrifice.
So I was quite wrong, in my own case at least, when I thought that with great responsibility comes great sacrifice. It’s definitely power… the power the kids have over me.
The “Sacrifice” prompt is brought to you by Me – Who Am I?. If you don’t already know her, check out her blog!
To find the rules for Just Jot It January, click here and join in today. It’s never too late! And don’t forget to ping back your January 13th post here! If you’d like to combine this with One-Liner Wednesday (which will be posted several hours after this), have at it! Just be sure to link back to both prompts.
I’m back again this week with the same request I had last week. I don’t have a prompt word for tomorrow’s Just Jot It January and I need your help. Yes, you!
This is your opportunity to create a prompt for tomorrow. The rules for getting your prompt in are as before: one word in the comments below. If your comment includes more than one word, your suggestion will be eliminated. Also, if you’ve already contributed to the existing prompts for the rest of the month, you are disqualified. The existing prompt words can be found here: https://lindaghill.com/2015/12/31/just-jot-it-january-2016-rules/ Please make sure you don’t enter a duplicate. The first one to write their word below, wins. Hurry up!
P.S. If your word is the first and is chosen, you’ll also have your blog linked to my daily post tomorrow. It’s well worth the effort!
After he died and everyone around her was keening in grief, she was keen to keen, but she wasn’t really feeling it.
This post is part of the Tuesday Use It In A Sentence prompt. It’s being hosted by My Loving Wife over at A Word Adventure this week. Click on the link to read the rules and join in. It’s fun!
Skulls, for me of late, have been all about inspiration. It began a few months ago with the release of a solo project, a band called The Mortal, by my favourite singer Sakurai Atsushi. The music of The Mortal with Sakurai’s Shakespearean inspired lyrics, and the Gothic look they created with their tophats and props spoke to me from the start.
But today, with the news of the death of David Bowie the co-incidences and the very meaning of how deeply music can inspire us was driven home and has been revolving in my head faster than I can process it.
I fell in love with “A Space Oddity” the first time I heard it. I was in my parent’s best friends’ basement with their niece, Beverly. She was a teenager – a mythical creature to me at my tender age of about six years. On this particular afternoon she was listening to the song over and over. I’ve never tired of it.
At my first glimpse of the man himself I was totally fascinated. His slightly feminine features which seemed to blur but not hide his masculinity, his style (which was his Ziggy persona at the time), and his lyrics made my mind whirl at the possibilities of what even my life could be like: wild, bohemian, and perhaps out-of-this-world exciting. Bowie made me dream. Ultimately he sparked my imagination and guided me to the worlds my characters live in.
As a young man this “cat from Japan” was also inspired by David Bowie.
Sakurai Atsushi with Buck-Tick, 1987
During Sakurai’s first solo outing in 2004, before I knew he existed, he covered “A Space Oddity.”
And so we fast-forward to my discovery of Mr. Sakurai. Eleven years after this video was recorded I had the privilege to see Sakurai perform for the second time. He described The Mortal as an opportunity to be himself; to do what he wanted on stage, with the dark, Goth-inspired atmosphere that moves him.
I suppose you could say that I’ve been influenced twice by the same man. First directly, when I was very young, and now again indirectly by the influence he had over Sakurai Atsushi.
David Bowie, the hero that blew the spark that lit the flame of our imaginations has flown. May his influence live forever.
The “Skulls” prompt is brought to you by Dean Kealy at Dean’z Doodlez. Please check out his amazing doodles, and tell him I said hi while you’re there!
To find the rules for Just Jot It January, click here and join in today. It’s never too late! And don’t forget to ping back your January 12th post here!
I think about all the things I used to do effortlessly when I was younger and I wonder that I can’t anymore. I know you young ‘uns out there are saying, “We don’t want to hear about all your aches and pains, ya old coot!” I know. I remember thinking it myself. I also thought I’d never get to this stage. But here I am.
Gone are the days when I didn’t have to struggle to get up off a hardwood floor after sitting on it for ten minutes. Gone is the ability to sleep through the night without waking up with a sore hip; the ability to read things on the tv without glasses, and the ability to do the splits…
There’s a message in some of this for you kids out there. The message is, don’t stop. If you can do the splits now, or touch your toes without bending your knees, or run half a mile, or multiply large numbers in your head, keep it up! It’s when we stop because we no longer need to do it that we lose it. Age has little to do with some of the things I find difficult.
But you know what? It’s not all that bad. There are things I CAN do now that I couldn’t do before. Like write a story or a blog post, or even a novel and put it out there for the world to see without caring what anyone thinks. Or like effortlessly sing all the low notes that used to hurt my throat to even try. Hell, I can even sing in front of people now. It used to be that I wouldn’t sing in a house when I was on my own, unless I was singing to something playing on the stereo.
It’s not all bad, getting older. Then again. I’m not THAT old.
This “Effortless” prompt is brought to you by Dan Antion at No Facilities. If you don’t already follow him, please check out his blog!
To find the rules for Just Jot It January, click here and join in today. It’s never too late! And don’t forget to ping back your January 11th post here!
What does it mean to be sane? According to Google’s dictionary it refers to a) a person who is “of sound mind; not mad or mentally ill,” or b) an undertaking or manner which is “reasonable; sensible.” That’s all fine and good, but who gets to judge?
The obvious answer is a doctor. But before that can happen, someone has to take, encourage, or direct said insane person to the doctor in the first place. Because chances are that the truly insane person doesn’t know he or she is insane at all. Not, of course, to put down anyone with mental illness. But for example, I had to be the one to decide to take my Autistic son to the doctor to get checked out. I was the judge in that case.
Moving on…
I often wonder about my own sanity. Considering some of the things that come out of me in my fiction, I think anyone in their right mind would. The thing is, I have no idea where my darker, twisted imagination stems from. I had no significant trauma (that I can remember) in my childhood. I was loved by my parents until my father passed away at the tender age of 49, when I was fourteen. So where’s the psychology in it? Okay yes, I’ve been reading Stephen King since I was fourteen, but can he have influenced me that greatly? No, in fact I don’t think he did.
I’ve had the imagination of a writer since I was very young. I’m talking four or five years old. I remember coming up with stories that, not having the skill to spell, revolved over and over in my head. Some of them even then involved a certain level of torture and sex. So how? Could I have been remembering another life? You may be thinking what I poor child I must have been to have such imaginings, but I grew up with a healthy sense of right and wrong, with empathy, without anxiety or nervousness, and with an understanding of humankind that has prevented me from hating a single soul on the planet. It’s an understanding that has enabled me to write relatable characters. It’s an understanding of everyone else but me.
But then, does anyone really understand themselves? Or does everyone but me?
This questionably “Sane” prompt is brought to you by John W. Howell at Fiction Favorites. Please click on the link to visit his blog, and follow him if you aren’t already!
To find the rules for Just Jot It January, click here and join in today. It’s never too late! And don’t forget to ping back your January 10th post here!
It’s come to my attention after a full week of eight hour days spent reading and commenting on and tweeting all (I think I got them all) of the posts that are linked back here and still being a day behind that I’m not going to be able to keep it up. For some strange reason, my kids are trying to scrape me off the laptop and my glue is getting weaker by the hour. I’ve been trying to read your posts before replying to my own comments, so if your kindly left comment has gone unanswered, that’s why.
From here on in I’m going to do my best to get to everyone at least once every two days. On the odd day I may “like” but not comment. If this happens, it doesn’t mean I didn’t read your post! Chances are I enjoyed it immensely but am just short on time.
I’d like to take this opportunity to once again say thank you to the overwhelming response to Just Jot It January and SoCS. You guys are awesome, and I really do love reading all the posts! So keep visiting each other, keep up the community spirit and keep on jotting. 😀
To cheat or not to cheat? (I’d say, “that is the question,” but I’ve already gone the Shakespeare route this week, so I won’t. But it’s stuck in your head now, isn’t it? Ah ha!)
I was going to write about how hard it would be for me not to cheat on this prompt, since I have no idea what movie title popped into my head when I decided to make that the prompt. I was doomed to fail from the start. I missed out on the element of surprise because it’s hard to surprise yourself. BOO! Nope. Didn’t work. See? Try it at home. It’s safe.
Where was I going with this? Oh yeah. An earworm. Have any of you ended up with one due to this prompt? Because an earworm doesn’t have to just be a song played over and over in your head after hearing it once. It can be a line. A line that becomes a mantra. And then you get stuck on it and it’s like there’s a broken record playing in your head. You hear the line and then the little “blp” that means the needle has jumped the grove and then there’s that line again. I really love vinyl (I know I’ve mentioned it before – I even wrote a post on it) but it can be very fragile and can become unreliable. Not that CDs can’t. I remember being told when CDs first came out that even if you broke them, they’d still play. What a load of crap. My son ran a CD over with his lion (it was a little four-wheeler toddler scooter type thing that he sat on) and it completely destroyed my disc.
Where were we? Oh yeah. The Lion King. “It’s the circle of liiiife…”
You’re welcome.
The “title” prompt is brought to you by Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Click here to join in, and leave your link for everyone to see!
To find the rules for Just Jot It January, click here. Join in today! It’s never too late! And don’t forget to ping back your January 9th post here at this post.
Note: If you combine SoCS and JusJoJan in one post, make sure you ping back to both this post and the Friday Reminder post.
It’s Friday, and time for your Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt. Today’s SoCS prompt will be tomorrow’s Just Jot It January prompt word, so if you want to use it for your JusJoJan post, go right ahead, and if you want to combine the two challenges you can do that too! Now, since we’ve had one-word prompts all month so far, I’ve decided to do something slightly different with SoCS this week. Pay close attention; here is your prompt:
Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is: “title.” Think of the title of a movie. Remember or jot down the first one that comes to mind. Now what I’d like you do for SoCS is, use that title as the inspiration for your post. It can be the story of the movie, the title of the movie, or you can simply quote the title of the movie somewhere in your post. It’s up to you! Enjoy!
P.S. If your chosen movie is largely unrecognizable, please let us know at the end of your post what you’re referring to. Thanks!
After you’ve written your Saturday post tomorrow, please link it here at this week’s prompt page and check to make sure it’s here in the comments so others can find it and see your awesome Stream of Consciousness post. Anyone can join in!
To make your post more visible, use the SoCS badge! Just paste it in your Saturday post so people browsing the reader will immediately know your post is stream of consciousness and/or pin it as a widget to your site to show you’re a participant. Wear it with pride!!
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,” “Begin with the word ‘The’,” or simply a single word to get your started.
4. Ping back! It’s important, so that I and other people can come and read your post! For example, in your post you can write “This post is part of SoCS:” and then copy and paste the URL found in your address bar at the top of this post into yours. Your link will show up in my comments for everyone to see. 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. As a suggestion, tag your post “SoCS” and/or “#SoCS” for more exposure and more views.
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