It is First Line Friday! Welcome and let’s get writing.

Below, I give you the first line, and you all get to write the rest. This prompt alternates with Jim’s Music Prompts, so make sure to check back next Friday for some musical inspiration.

I’ll provide the first line, you get to write whatever comes afterward. Length, genre, and structure are completely up to you. Feel free to modify the line as you see fit, adding punctuation, quotes, or other bits if so desired. No need to tie it to the picture, unless you want to.

Or for more of a challenge, change nothing. You have a week to write it, enjoy!

Include the first line of course! Tag it Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie, First Line Fridays, and short fiction. Create a link (ping-back) to this post and add your link to Mister Linky below.

Your line for this week is:

Gigi assembled her planners, her calendars, her pens, pouches, and post-its before her on the desk and stood over them like a general surveying maps. She told herself that 2024 would be a year of organization and change. All the supplies have been ……

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Gigi assembled her planners, her calendars, her pens, pouches, and post-its before her on the desk and stood over them like a general surveying maps. She told herself that 2024 would be a year of organization and change. All the supplies had been meticulously purchased—probably during one of her late-night Amazon blackouts—and she was ready. Like, this time for real.

She picked up a glitter gel pen (because obviously, if the ink sparkles, the tasks magically get done, right?) and stared down at the blank January page of her planner. It was so clean, so fresh. The possibilities were endless. This was gonna be the year she actually meal prepped, worked out regularly, and didn’t spend three hours a day scrolling through TikTok like a zombie.

“OK, let’s do this,” she muttered to herself, flipping the cap off the pen like it was a secret weapon. She started with the basics: New Year’s goals. You know the drill—drink more water, wake up at 6 a.m. (which, LOL, but let’s pretend), maybe read more books instead of listening to crime podcasts that make her suspicious of her own mailman.

But the longer she stared at that pristine page, the more her brain went rogue. Should she color-code? Maybe get stickers involved? What if she accidentally ruined the whole vibe by writing something in the wrong spot? What if her handwriting didn’t match the aesthetic she was going for?

Suddenly, the glitter pen felt heavy. Like, existentially heavy. Was this really her life now? She had become the kind of person who bought productivity planners in bulk and followed five different bullet journaling influencers, yet somehow still ended up eating leftover pizza while binge-watching reality TV at 1 a.m. What kind of cruel cosmic joke was this?

Gigi took a deep breath, realizing she might be spiraling. This was supposed to be her year of change, not the year she became a stationary-obsessed gremlin. She glanced at her perfectly aligned, rainbow-colored highlighters. Then, at her phone—where Instagram was no doubt already showing her ads for even more planners she didn’t need.

And that’s when it hit her: maybe organization wasn’t about buying the perfect tools or having an influencer-worthy desk setup. Maybe it was about, you know, actually doing stuff. The real villain wasn’t the lack of post-its or gel pens. It was her constant procrastination—disguised as “planning.”

She dropped the glitter pen like it was radioactive and stood up, stretching her arms dramatically. “Alright, Gigi, let’s not pretend you’re becoming a new person overnight,” she said aloud to herself. “But maybe—just maybe—you can get off your butt and make some moves.” She glanced down at her planners. “After lunch. And maybe one more episode.”

Baby steps, right?