share

FOWC with Fandango — Share

Fandango15 Comments
FOWC

Welcome to Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (aka, FOWC). I will be posting each day’s word just after midnight Pacific Time (U.S.).

Today’s word is “share.”

Write a post using that word. It can be prose, poetry, fiction, non-fiction. It can be any length. It can be just a picture or a drawing if you want. No holds barred, so to speak.

Once you are done, tag your post with #FOWC and create a pingback to this post if you are on WordPress. Please check to confirm that your pingback is there. If not, ÿplease manually add your link in the comments.

And be sure to read the posts of other bloggers who respond to this prompt. Show them some love.

FFfPP — Hey, Bitch!

Fandango8 Comments

“Hey, bitch, get your hands off of my pizza,” Jason yelled.

“But you said we could share,” Anita said, letting go of the slice she picked up.

“No I didn’t,” Jason corrected Anita. “I said if you ordered a pizza we could share each other’s pizzas. But you chose to order rabbit food instead. You know I don’t eat salads. So you go ahead and enjoy your salad and keep your grubby paws off my pizza.”

“Just give my salad a try, Jason,” Anita said. “It’s really quite tasty and, best of all, it’s healthy. It’s actually good for you.”

“I’ll tell you what, Anita,” Jason said. “If you want to have some of my pizza, go ahead and pull off those green, leaf-like things. I don’t know what they are. Maybe spinach or arugula or some other type of rabbit food. I don’t like that shit. But as to the rest of my pizza, that’s off limits to you.”

“You are one selfish bastard, Jason,” Anita said.

“Yeah, well you knew that when you opted for a salad instead of a pizza. You made your bed, now you gotta sleep in it.”

“I’m not sure that particular metaphor applies here,” Anita said, “but fine, you can eat the whole damn pizza by yourself. But you’re getting to the age that you should consider adding more greens to your diet.”

“Maybe in my next life,” Jason said, picking up a slice of his pizza and taking a big bite.

Written for the Flash Fiction for the Purposeful Practitioner prompt from Roger Shipp. Photo credit: Christian Mackie on Unsplash.

Blogging Insights — Just Do It

Fandango18 Comments

For her weekly Blogging Insights prompts, Dr. Tanya provides us with a quote about blogging or writing and asks us to express our opinion about said quote.

This week’s quote is from Ron Dawson, a Special Educational Needs educator, psychologist, researcher, and author.

“The first thing you need to decide when you build your blog is what you want to accomplish with it, and what it can do if successful.”

I started my first blog in 2005 and I had no idea of what I wanted to accomplish with it or what it could do if successful. I just jumped right in and started writing and posting what I wrote. When I started This, That, and the Other, my fifth blog, in 2017, I still had no specific accomplishment goal or goals in mind. I just wanted a platform — or maybe a soapbox — on which to express myself.

I’m very happy with my blog and I feel that, based upon the number of visitors, views, likes, and comments my posts generate each day, it is relatively successful. What that “success” has enabled me to do is to be a part of a wonderful community of other bloggers, where we can share our stories, our poems, our photographs, our beliefs, our perspectives, our opinions, our passions, our experiences, our frustrations, and our lives with one another. And that truly brings me joy.

What Ron Dawson said about needing to decide what you want to accomplish with your blog before you start it may be good advice for some, especially if there’s a definitive niche you’re focusing on or a specific audience you wish to reach.

I don’t think, however, it’s essential for those of us who are “casual” bloggers. I say that, if you love to write and you wish to share what you write with a community of others who also love to write, you should just do it.

Blogging Insights — The Equation

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For her weekly Blogging Insights prompts, Dr. Tanya provides us with a quote about blogging or writing and asks us to express our opinion about said quote.

This week’s quote seems to be a meme.

I agree with Tanya when she wrote, “If you were to turn the definition of blogging into a mathematical expression, it would probably look like the above quote.” Blogging is all of those things: sharing, connecting, creating, and inspiring.

That said, I’d change the order of the items listed in the quote. The first component of blogging is to create content. Next is to share what you’ve created with other bloggers in order to connect with them, which may inspire them to like the content you’ve created, to potentially comment on what you’ve posted, and perhaps even for them to create their own content in response.

So my equation would be:

To blog = To create + To share + To connect + To inspire

Search History

Fandango34 Comments

I was watching Thursday night’s Jimmy Kimmel Live this morning on my DVR and he had a brief segment where his staff showed what some of their recent Google searches were. I thought to myself, “Hey, wouldn’t it be kinda fun if we all got to glimpse each other’s Google search history?”

So I’m challenging everyone to take a screenshot from your computer or smartphone (in my case, my iPhone) and share with us your most recent Google searches.

I’ll go first. Here is my unedited recent search history.62D39097-61F5-44EA-ABA6-311B5F6D4FC8Now show us yours! Post your search history and link back to this post.

Hell, what else have you got to do?

Can You Believe…?

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4BF474E4-5259-46AC-8B26-240B31F13E6A“A teenage gunman opened fire at a Southern California high school Thursday morning, killing two students and wounding three others, before shooting himself in the head, officials said.”

Yet another horrific, senseless, and likely preventable school shooting occurred yesterday. It barely made the national news, as such shootings are becoming all too common. And all of our elected representatives, or at least all of the Republican representatives, anyway, seem able to do is to send their thoughts and prayers.

Last night I was catching up on the comments on my FOWC with Fandango word prompt yesterday, where the word was “can.” One of the commenters, Christine Bialczak at Stine Writing, wrote a post in response to that prompt and it really moved me. She expressed the frustration that I, and so many of us in America, am feeling about all of these mass shootings, particularly at schools.

I want more people to read and to share Christine’s words, but my reblog button on my WordPress iPhone app still doesn’t seem to be working. So I’ve taken a screenshot of her post and am re-posting it here.1ED57E2E-EAB9-49B2-8B7D-475E63B4A600Please follow this link over to Christine’s post and share your thoughts with her. I also encourage you to reblog her post (if your reblog button works) so that as many people as possible will start asking these same questions and perhaps ask them of their elected representatives.