This post is part of Just Jot it January, and the prompt word, “jubilee,” comes to us from Liz. Check out her blog here!
I haven’t had much reason for jubilation in I can’t remember how long. We celebrate my kids’ birthdays with family dinners, and there’s the usual Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving celebrations, but something that qualifies as jubilee?
Stress is closer to the truth.
But I’m content with my quiet life.
My traveling days are likely all behind me, though it would be nice to get a weekend off. That would be reason for some jubilation after *checks calendar* five and a half years.
Seriously, I’m okay. 😊
This contented 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 my weekly prompt, Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Find the prompt and see how you can join in HERE.
You’d think that with solid goals and the steps to reach them, going after what you want and getting there would be easy. Assuming all the steps are reachable, of course.
So why is it so hard to get our desires in line with our goals? Assuming desires and goals are the same …?
Okay, let me break this down.
If I desire a cake.
My goal is getting to the store to get my cake.
The steps required are digging the car out of the driveway, clearing the snow off it, driving safely to the store and back home again with the cake.
But what if I don’t want to dig the car out?
That gets in the way of my goal, which keeps me from what I desire.
Right?
So my desires and my goal are out of line with each other.
That took a lot of brain.
And now I want cake.
Damn it.
This frustrating post is part of Just Jot it January and SoCS! 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, “hobbies,” comes to us from June. Check out her blog here!
As I contemplated what to write today, I realized that long before I made my hobby of writing a business, I earned money on two other hobbies.
The first was riding horses.
I got a job taking out hour-long trail rides. Made $20 a day, but it was one of the best jobs I ever had. I did it weekends, year-round for years.
And I had a job in a wool shop where I spent all my days knitting and selling what I knitted. I got really good at tucking a ball of wool under my arm and walking around, helping customers find what they needed with my needles still going a mile a minute.
I’m lucky in that none of the hobbies I’ve earned money from have made the hobby feel like work.
Have you ever turned a hobby into a job?
This nostalgic 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!
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, “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!
lindaghill.com 