The Jeopardy Clues to Crappy No Good Writer's Luck

I love the television show Jeopardy. I record it to DVR every night, and my husband and I watch it later before the news comes on. In the arena of our family room, I always win! One of our cousins was a contestant once, a poet I know competed once, and tonight a former writing workshop participant will appear.

But this post isn't really about Jeopardy. Jeopardy was just a convenient hook. This post is about something else, but let's play a little Jeopardy shall we?

Here's our clue:

Two physical injuries, which in combination spell disaster for a writer and editor who was so recently happy that the academic semester was over, and was ready to deep dive into her own creative work.

And the correct answer would be:

A broken wrist on the dominant hand and falling so hard on one's posterior, that sitting for more than 15 minutes, even after 10 days, is all but impossible.

Yep.

Well at least I got a nifty bright red cast on my right arm (yes, I asked the orthopedist for a colored cast, just like a little kid). As for the other end and the other injury, the less said the better. (Except to say: pillows, a jerry-rigged standing desk, and Mineral Ice.)

Writers, do not go out in the backyard to plant flowers alone when all the outside steps are still wet from days of rain, your entire family is 100 miles away, no neighbors are outside to hear you scream, and your phone is in the house.

I'm writing this using voice dictation, which works great for emails, texts, and posts, but I can't seem to get the hang of it for any real writing. For that, I'm tapping away with the left (spastic!) hand, and two fingers on my right hand, making a zillion errors. But I am writing still, though s..l..o..w...l..y. I'm lucky that my editing clients and adult students have been understanding. And I'm lucky to have a husband and two sons who are all helping out. But enough about that.

On the good-news front -- and frankly, I needed it, as this latest accident was the latest in a series of incidents that are adding up to a not-so-lucky year thus far -- a few short essays have been published recently.

One piece, "Break a Leg," appears in Cleaver Magazine. It recounts a small mistake I made while working with horses as a teenager, and how that reverberated through the rest of my riding life -- and beyond.

The second short nonfiction narrative is running over at Purple Clover, and (depending on what you click/enter from) carries both my original title, "A Father, a Road Trip, and the Polyester Mafia," and the clever one editors gave it to improve clicks (to be fair, it uses a line I wrote within the piece): "Goodfella: I liked being the rich kid whose father may or may not have been in the Mafia."

I'm the smallest person in this pic
(probably  the last time that was true!)

I'll say this about it. I was born, raised, and still live in a part of New Jersey where The Sopranos took place. In fact, part of the pilot was filmed across the street from my son's preschool (all the moms thought it was going to be about opera singers!) and once when they were filming a half mile from my house, I nearly rear-ended a Hummer because I was so distracted by the sight of Tony walking out of the funeral home on our main drag.  This story pivots on a road trip to California when I was a child and overheard my father acting like he was a mafioso. (wink wink)

And that's the story from here for now. 

Image: Flickr/CreativeCommons - horse, Blake Hall; Jeopardy, ShawnMSmith;  others, mine