Welcome to the Daily 2021 Just Jot it January Prompt and the Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt for SATURDAY, JANUARY 9th! Sorry I’m a bit late. I meant to schedule this last night, but I didn’t get around to it. Oops!
For those of you joining SoCS for the first time, it’s a little different than the other prompts in that it’s not always a whole word. Much may be left up to your discretion: this week is no exception. Having said that, if you’re joining in from JusJoJan, don’t want to write stream of consciousness style, no worries. It’s up to you! If you do want to try it, please check out the rules below. It’s fun! Here’s your Saturday prompt:
Your prompt for #JusJoJan and Stream of Consciousness Saturday is: “sky’s the limit.” Write about something that has or seems to have no end. Enjoy!
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 post. Anyone can join in!
To make your post more visible, use our 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!!
You can also use the Just Jot it January badge! To find the rules for Just Jot it January, click here.
Here are the rules for SoCS:
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. NOTE: Pingbacks only work from WordPress sites. If you’re self-hosted or are participating from another host, such as Blogger, please leave a link to your post in the comments below.
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.
PART 4 – (FIND PART 1 HERE, PART 2 HERE, AND PART 3 HERE, IF YOU HAVEN’T READ THEM YET.)
Petra gasped. “You can’t fire me!” she said to the old broomstick of a butler. “Who will serve the guests?
“What guests?” Geeves asked with a smirk.
She listened. The house was silent. It felt empty, for that matter. Just to be sure, she stepped over to the door and opened it. They’d all left.
“Well, then, who’s going to help you clean up?” But that was a stupid question. She’d been one of a dozen servants working tonight. As though to punctuate the point, three of them pushed past her with loaded trays for the dishwasher.
Geeves continued to smirk.
“Where am I going to live?” Petra asked, for she had a room in the upstairs back of the house with everything she owned in it.
“We’ll have your room cleared out in the morning.” He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out an envelope. “Here’s your severance pay. I suggest you find a hotel to stay in tonight. Goodnight, Petra.”
With that he turned up his nose and left the kitchen.
Defeated, Petra hung up her apron, changed her shoes for boots, and stepped out into the snowy back yard with no idea what she was going to do or where she’d go.
“Fired you, eh?” The deep voice of the guy from the cellar came from the corner of the house.
“You! This is all your fault!” she said, stalking toward the shadowy stranger.
“It didn’t matter. Watch.”
Sure enough, a few minutes later the servants began leaving the same way Petra had. They all had envelopes in their hands.
“What … What happened?”
“They do this every five years on January first. When did they hire you?”
Petra thought about it for only a second. “January second, five years ago.” She turned to the stranger. “But how did you work here for twenty years then?”
“I was the head butler. Before Geeves. Little does he know, his time is up tomorrow, after he cleans out all the rooms.”
Petra giggled. “Serves him right.”
“Would you like a ride into town to get a room?” the man asked. Petra looked at him sharply. “A room for you. I have my own place. And I’ve got a snow mobile. All these poor suckers have to walk.”
It was true—no one had cars.
“Thank you,” Petra said. “I’ll take you up on that offer.”
When they got to town, the stranger let Petra off and reached into the bag strapped on the back of the snow mobile. He pulled out a bottle of “Mother’s” wine and handed it to her.
“What’s this for?”
“It’s a key,” the stranger said. “There’s a secret door in the back of the cellar, and the indent on the bottom of the bottle”—he turned it over to show her—“fits into a device on the wall outside. Every year at New Year’s Eve I go in and stock up on wine. You’re the first to notice.”
Petra blinked at the stranger, who was starting to grow on her more by the minute. “Why are you giving this to me?”
“Because I hope you’ll be back next year for a drink with me, to celebrate the New Year.”
“Thank you,” Petra said. “I just might.” She got off the snow mobile and he drove away into the night.
“But … what’s your name?” she called out to him, but he didn’t hear her. Petra turned around and trudged through the deepening snow, happy to have shelter in her sights.
The next day, Petra called a taxi and made her way back to the mansion to collect her things.
Geeves was there, his nose turned toward the heavens as he handed her a suitcase which, she assumed, had all her clothes in it, as well as a box with her pictures and all her other worldly belongings.
She was about to leave when a thought came to her. She turned back and asked Geeves, “Who was the butler that worked here before you did?”
“Henry,” he said simply. “He died the night before I was hired. Twenty years ago almost to the day.”
A shiver ran through Petra’s body. She thought about the bottle of wine that she’d left back at the hotel. But no, that couldn’t be. He couldn’t have been a ghost.
“Weird,” she mumbled as she walked away. She turned the corner to go back to the taxi that she’d asked to wait for her, but instead she found a fire truck with half a dozen firemen standing around it.
As she approached, she heard one of them say, “Butler got out, but they don’t know if he’ll make it.”
The fireman beside him shrugged. “They’ll rebuild, then we’ll be back again in five years.”
She started to ask what the man was on about, but instead she followed their gaze back to the house.
It was smouldering, collapsed, burnt to a crisp. In the flowerbed sat a bottle of “Mother’s” wine.
THE END
(Di’s prompt was “Petra as a name, wine cellar as a setting, and ‘getting caught’ as your what if. “)
(This story came off the top of my head. I had no idea how it was going to end. Don’t judge my storytelling skills by it. Haha!)
Here are the JusJoJan Rules:
1. Just Jot It January starts January 1st, but it’s never too late to join in! Here, we run on the honour system; the “jot it” part of JusJoJan means that anything you jot down, anywhere (it doesn’t have to be a post, it can even be a grocery list), counts as a “jot.” If it makes it to your blog that day, great! If it waits a week to get from a sticky note to your screen, no problem!
2. I’ll post prompts at 2am my time (GMT -5). The prompt will be the word in quotation marks in the title of my 2am post. You don’t have to follow the prompt every day, but that will be where you leave your link for others to see. You’ll get a prompt for every day except Wednesday, when the prompt is simply my One-Liner Wednesday and on Saturday, when your prompt will be the Friday Reminder and Prompt for #SoCS, which will appear at about 9:30am Friday. Each prompt post will include the rules.
3. Please ping back or link to the daily prompt. To ping back, just copy the URL from the daily prompt post, and paste it anywhere in your post. Check to make sure your link shows up where you want it to, and go back occasionally to see other bloggers’ entries – the more you visit others, the more they’ll visit you! Note: A) The newest pingbacks will be at the top of the comments section. B) Ping backs only work if you’re blogging on WordPress. Everyone else must paste a link manually.
4. Tag your post JusJoJan and/or #JusJoJan.
5. Write anything! Any length will do! It can even be a photo or a drawing – you’re going to title it, right? There’s your jot!
6. If your post is NSFW, do not ping back. Please leave your link in the comments with a warning.
7. If you’d like to, use the JusJoJan badge so that others can find your post more easily.
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