2025 Theme Reveal #AtoZChallenge Bloghop

Please check out the April Blogging from A to Z Challenge
#AtoZChallenge
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My theme this year is going to be memories. A sort of alphabet of an autobiography, if you will. 

It's what we are, and one never knows when they could be gone. So I'll put some here. Hopefully they'll be interesting. 

Political Rant

Political rant. (Warning.)

IWSG

 https://www.insecurewriterssupportgroup.com/p/iwsg-sign-up.html

Happy birthday to my husband John.

(Eating birthday potato soup from our friends Katie and Bob.)

Alternative to the orange felon's speech last night. Approximately 150k were watching when I last looked. 

This is an annoyance. I got a pineapple 🍍 coconut 🥥 slushie from my favorite food truck. And, while carrying it home, I slipped on the icey steps, the cup fell, and it completely exploded. Absolutely none left in the busted cup.

For a day, I'd like to be an annoyance to the traitorous felon who is destroying my country. Every freaking day, I'm stressed by yet another proclamation that targets my friends, family, environment, wallet, or a combination of those. 

So I'd like to be at least an annoyance for a day, to him. Wet socks, broken shoe 👞 heel, hair won't sit right, every pen is out, leaks, or explodes ink everywhere. Stuff like that. Annoying and humiliating. Some extra chaos. 

Obviously, I cannot become this thing. Just a fictional fantasy. Probably wouldn't make a real difference. Almost nothing I do feels like it makes much of a difference anymore. But I try. I reach out to Congress almost daily, sometimes more than once a day. I'm sure it isn't helping my blood pressure or respiratory issues, but I'm trying. 

I'd want to be an annoyance to him for a day. He plans to cut off my medical care and income, which will result in my life ending. So, there's that. 

Where Is My Money 💰

For followers of this blog, you know I lost a social media 🐦 account for a time. 

Well... so did someone else. And he's getting $10 million dollars. Hell... where is MY money?? 

https://www.facebook.com/share/1A2krCaFXH/

🤦‍♀️ Wow. What a huge weight off of my mind. Between this and renaming a body of water, all our problems are solved. 😑 Smooth sailing from here on out. Yup. Perfect health, wealth, and love for the whole country now. Heck, the whole world. Utopian paradise ✨️ coming up! 🤨 Yup. Any second now. 🫣🤔 Yup...

Mmmhhhmmm 

IWSG cha cha changes

InsecureWritersSupportGroup.com

February 5 question - Is there a story or book you've written you want to/wish you could go back and change?

I started a story a few years ago, mostly to process and deal with the unbearable emotions I was facing. I never published it. I shared some of it with two people. There's almost nothing stopping me from making changes to it. 

• I don't care enough
• I can't figure out how to get Scrivener on a Chromebook ( *NOT a complaint or ingradititude -- an observation of my own ineptitude) 
• FAIL FAIL FAIL
• My Samsung laptop won't work soon because of Windows update and such
• I'm fucking poor
• Probably gonna be more poor as food prices soar
• I hate Trump
• What I want to change depresses the shit out of me

So, I don't see this happening any time soon. 

There's another story I was working on. (Yup, also in Scrivener.) It's a YA. 

(There is no Caps Lock on Chromebook. Stop hitting Caps Lock, Jamie. Dammit.)
Anyhow, the tech doesn't fit. I don't know. I've been working on it for over a decade. 

And now, my main character would have much larger problems. Impossible ones. 

I don't know. I'm not okay. My friends aren't okay. Every day is a new, horrible, psychotic... 

A plane crashed in my old neighborhood the other day. 

Planes are falling from the sky. And the dipshit running the country is all, "we need to reduce the safety procedures and get rid of people!" 

Didn't see planes falling from the sky when Biden was president. Or birds. They found dead geese in a nearby lake, with the bird flu. No one is doing anything about that. 

I have zero chill. No focus. I just... 

I keep writing my useless Congress people.

And that story I was talking about? Yeah, my main character is a big supporter of someone who is currently a Congress person. And that person has taken a political nosedive. Abandoned a large chunk of what my main character admired. I already kill off her parents, have her betrayed by her family, lose a friend... now someone she looks up to fails? They were supposed to be the thing that propels her forward, that moves that final part so she is inspired to become the character at the ending. Now there's no decent reason for her choice. It's not a small rewrite, it's a plot overhaul. And I just don't feel like I have that in me. Not right now. 

Admiration #IWSG

I admired a woman, let's call her Soup. She spent a lot of time with me, for which I am grateful. She also spent a fair amount of time trying to get me to want to be someone else. Probably because she wanted to be someone else or maybe someone treated her that way? She lost a lot of interest in me when I became a teenager. Literally my 13th birthday. Suddenly I wasn't invited to things and we didn't hang out or anything. I don't know if it was me or her. I turned down a job at 16 because it was during hours she might call and want to do something. That call didn't come. A year later, a major and horrible, ultimately tragic, event happened. Soup knew it was coming but didn't tell me. Then blamed me for not knowing and thus not doing anything about it. We didn't speak for several years. Another death reconnected us a little. I now see a lot of the toxic traits. I see why she has lost most of her friends- she had an extensive network of people forty years ago. She's going through a hard time. I feel sympathy. But just the other day, we talked briefly, and she managed to mock me and call me names for ten minutes. I gave absolutely no response and she suddenly had to go and hung up. 

So yes, I admired someone and my opinion changed as I grew up. This example has been on my mind lately. A very complicated relationship which is mostly toxic. 

 

Dec IWSG and Happy Holidays plus Grey's Anatomy, Ally McBeal, #BathroomGate

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1CvBag2SPD/ #BathroomGate The United States Congress doesn't want all elected members to be allowed to use the bathrooms in Government buildings. Gonna need to pause doing your job of running the country to poop at the deli down the street, I guess. We'll be back to toilet segregation in no time.

"This is your priority, that you want to bully a member of Congress, as opposed to welcoming her to join this body so all of us can work together to get things done and deliver real results for the American people?" Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said. - BBC news

Again, to clear this up, the MAGA Republicans are saying if a person is born with a 🌮 "taco" and has since undergone extensive surgery, medical treatments, psychology, basically thousands of dollars in medical costs, and now has an 🍆"eggplant," that person should use the bathroom labeled ladies. 🚺 Because that will prevent sexual assault. To have people who now have a penis in the ladies' room will PREVENT sexual assault. Additionally, a person born with an 🍆"eggplant," who has had the medical procedure to slice it open and fold it over, so now the person has a 🌮 "taco," that person should use the bathroom labeled men. 🚹 For their own protection, of course. 🤦

As usual, no mention of people born with multiple reproductive organs, or none. 

It's an American problem. Partly because our restrooms our so poorly constructed. Huge gaps between the doors and walls, neither of which go all the way to the floor or ceiling. The "locks" rarely keep the doors closed. And now, apparently, over half of the population has become obsessed with watching others use a toilet. 🚽🧻

But, back in the 1990's, the show Ally McBeal had a unisex restroom. "We all go together." Gen X survived with that. "Some say Ally McBeal was a quintessential show of the 1990s."

 

HAPPY HOLIDAYS

InsecureWritersSupportGroup.com

December 4 question - Do you write cliffhangers at the end of your stories? Are they a turn-off to you as a writer and/or a reader?

Cliffhangers... use one book to sell the next. My beloved Grey's Anatomy just did another big cliffhanger to 🤔🫣😵‍💫 drive fans crazy for the next few months. (Returns March 6. Jo!!! 🤰) 

You gotta go with what the story calls for, I guess. Traditional publishers seem to be looking more and more for novels under 90k. So, sometimes you need a cliffhanger. Of course, a lot of them also want stand-alones, so then there's no cliffhanger. 😅

A story I've been working on for a few YEARS has cliffhangers between chapters. A main plot point of the story might not exist much longer, so I don't know what to do about that. I should just indie publish it because trying to find just the right people to represent it is getting more and more difficult. 

https://bsky.app/jamiewriter.bsky.social

Some of you may recall my LONG battle with Twitter to restore my account. It had been shut down due to quoting a Jeff Dunham character joke in a blog post title and sharing a link to my post. (Oddly, a Gif with the same quote was readily available on Twitter. And Jeff's own account used the words multiple times without being banned.) 

ANYWAY. I finally got my Twitter account restored.

And now I don't even want it. 😅

Now the platform is full of hate speech, sandbags any posts with links, and is used to train AI.

TL;DR = I'm on Bluesky now! And I prefer it. Much happier place. If you've moved too, please hit me up. I'd love to make more writer pals over there. - JamieWriter