This post is part of Just Jot it January, and the prompt word, “antipodean,” comes to us from Kim. Check out her blog here!
When I was a kid, I was told the antipode (the opposite side of the planet) of where I lived was China. It’s not, and it never has been.
In fact, the antipode of Toronto (in and around where I’ve spent most of my life) is somewhere in the middle of the Indian Ocean, but closest to Australia.
Not that I would have known what an “antipode” was. In fact, I only learned the word two days ago from Kim!
This post is part of Just Jot it January, and the prompt word, “why,” comes to us from Willow. Check out her blog here!
Ninety percent of the phone calls I get are from people trying to sell something, convince me of something, or machines that just hang up.
And it’s frustrating.
Most of the time, if I don’t recognize the number on the screen, I pick up and say nothing. If a human says “Hello?” I’ll speak, but otherwise I listen until the caller (or machine) hangs up. Apparently (though to be honest I haven’t fact checked this), if there’s no response, they won’t call you back. And if I just let it ring, the answering service will pick up.
But then there are the ones who actually get through.
Like the machines that start talking immediately, telling you your bank account has been compromised without actually telling you which bank you deal with. I just hang up on those.
But the humans that get through? Especially the ones who know my name? Ugh.
“Is this Linda Hill?”
“Why are you asking?”
“I’m with so-and-so company and I’m calling to blah blah blah…”
“I’m not interested, thank you.”
“But this thing you can’t live without—”
“I’m not interested.”
“But—”
*click*
I’m sure they’re paid to not take no for an answer. But it’s not up to me to reward them for putting themselves in the position of being abused by their employers, knowing they’ll be abused by the people they’re calling.
I figure I’m at least saving them some time by hanging up on them.
How do you handle sales calls?
This ranty post is part of Just Jot it January! Want to join in? Just click here to get to the prompt and drop your link. It’s fun!
This post is part of Just Jot it January, and there’s no prompt word! Today is a free-for-all, whatever-you-want-to-write day. Find the post to link your post to here!
First, my most pressing news.
My laptop is fixed! For the time being.
I took it to Best Buy and found out the noise coming from it can’t be the hard drive because its an SSD and there are no moving parts inside.
Then I got the bad news—the fan, which is making the noise—can’t be replaced.
So the nice Geek (of Geek Squad fame) took my dear laptop to the back, took it apart, and blew air on the fan to clean the dust out.
And voila! No more horrible noise! For now at least.
I did some research on SSD hard drives though, and it seems when they die, it’s really hard to get data off of them. So I’m going to back up my stuff religiously from now on!
In announcements:
First off, I want to give everyone a heads-up that the second “Prompt Me” post is coming tomorrow, Saturday January 18th, at 10am EST. So make sure you get here early if you want to provide a prompt for one of the remaining ten (yes! only ten!) slots.
I’ll give first dibs to people who didn’t get in with their prompt word in the first half of the month, so if I’ve already used your word this year, please wait until it’s been at least 24 hours before you come back with a second one.
And finally, in book news, Rocked: A Romantic Comedy is free!
I’ll leave it that way through my birthday next week, then the price will go back up to $4.99. So if you don’t already have it, get it now!
This post is part of Just Jot it January, and the prompt word, “personality,” comes to us from Astrid. Check out her blog here!
In a way, I’m jealous of authors who can plot and plan a novel or an entire series before they start writing. I haven’t published a full-length novel in a year because I’ve been busy writing three of them in a continuing series, and I’m afraid to release the first one in case the details in the third one require a change at the beginning of the overall story.
All this because I’m a discovery writer, or a “pantser,” as we often call writers who write by the seat of their pants. I love being a pantser—finding out what’s going to happen in my story and to my characters as I write is both fun and fascinating.
Many times for me, an entire book will start with a single personality. And often, that personality will come to me from listening to a character’s voice and seeing them in my head.
Because my stories are character-driven, personality is essential to pin down. Personality can often help me to decide what situations to put them in.
In Creamed, my latest release for instance, Tom comes to town and inadvertently steals Mary’s business at the Christmas market where they both have booths. If not for Tom’s strong feelings on the subject of fairness (he hates unfairness), the story might have gone a completely different way.
In other words, the personalities of characters have a lot to do with conflict and its resolution, and therefore, plot.
And that’s my lecture story structure for the day. Not sure how I came to this point, but here we are.
(Seriously, I didn’t plot this post ahead of time. 😏)
This wandering post is part of Just Jot it January! Want to join in? Just click here to get to the prompt and drop your link. It’s fun!
Photo: The multi-coloured Christmas lights wrapped around the top rail of my deck in my back yard that I’m seriously considering leaving there because they’re pretty.
If you would like to participate in this prompt, 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.
Here are the simple 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.
2 a) The rules that I’ve made for myself (but don’t always follow) for “One-Liner Wednesday” are:
1. Make it one sentence.
2. Try to make it either funny or inspirational.
3. Use our unique tag #1linerWeds.
4. Add our lovely badge to your post for extra exposure!
5. Have fun!
Badge by Laura @ riddlefromthemiddle.com
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 JusJoJan25 and/or #JusJoJan25.
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.
This post is part of Just Jot it January, and the prompt word, “embrace,” comes to us from Laura. Check out her blog here!
I’m trying. But it’s hard, I tell ya.
I mean, there’s always going to be chaos. Life is unpredictable, right? And no matter how determined we are to make our plans come to light, something is bound to throw its own brand of poopstorm into the mix.
So what is a girl to do?
Embrace the chaos.
Make friends with it, tell it to come on in and do its worst, because its going to come in whether it’s invited or not.
All the things that can go wrong, from the little stuff I’ve learned to deal with like WordPress absolutely refusing to change the title of a copied post unless I go out of it and come back in again (am I the only one?), or putting stress-related heartburn in my life almost every day for the last five years … I’ve got to try to go with the flow.
Because fighting it just isn’t helping.
This surrender-y post is part of Just Jot it January! Want to join in? Just click here to get to the prompt and drop your link. It’s fun!
This post is part of Just Jot it January, and the prompt word, “notifications,” comes to us courtesy of Sadje. Check out her blog here!
Sometime in the last week or so, I wrote about my poor old laptop and that I was going to take her into the shop to either get her fixed or replace her.
Well, I think she heard me. Or maybe she got upset that I wrote my JusJoJan post on another computer, because lo and behold, when I turned her on to get a file off her that day, she stopped making the horrible noise that made me determined to take her in.
In other words, she knew she was on notice to behave.
Well, today the noise came back.
So I’m here posting on my other computer again.
I’m tempted to try starting the old gal up again to see if she’ll behave for another week—after all, if I hadn’t done it last time, I’d have been at the Geek Squad counter swearing up and down that really, the hard drive was making a noise. Honest! Just like that rattle the car was making before you took it to the mechanic. Machines, I tell you!
So I’m not sure what I’ll do.
Either way, the saga will surely continue.
Stay tuned.
This rather frustrated post is part of Just Jot it January. Want to join in? Just click here to get to the prompt and drop your link. It’s fun!
lindaghill.com 