Today is my first day back writing after five days away.
A good thing, too. So many amazing stories have been knocking around in my brain after the difficulties last year, that I’m just dying to get them all told.
It wasn’t exactly a voluntary absence–I had finally just clawed my way back up to my normal cruising speed and was getting very excited about the coming months. Then, last week, on my way to bed, there was an…incident.
I won’t go into details, since I frankly don’t think any of you really want to be subjected to the details of my personal bedtime habits, let’s just say it involved a glass of tea, an electrical switch, and the porcelain rim of something very unclean, and leave it at that.
You wouldn’t think that could add up to a potentially life-threatening situation, would you?
Well, then, you have significantly underestimated the power of smart people to behave in breathtakingly stupid ways (I’m speaking of myself here).
Mere seconds after The Incident I found myself looking at my hands and thinking “Wow, I never knew that muscles looked like that when you flexed them,” which is not the kind of thing you want to be thinking at four in the morning when you don’t have a suture kit…well…handy.
I wound up with a quarter-inch deep, one-and-a-half-inch slice in my right hand, cutting all the way through to (and into) the muscle layer. The skin gaped at just the right angle that I could actually see how my thumb worked up to the first knuckle.
It occurred to me, about then, that a couple inches further up my arm and I might well have bled out before I could call for help, which shifted the cool/terrifying balance of the sight of my own muscles decidedly toward the terror end of the spectrum.
For the record, muscles under gaping skin look like maroon eels having an orgy in a pale yellow cave. Kinda like something from a David Attenborough documentary.
So, one hospital visit, two hours, and three bouts of shock later, I was officially benched. The wound was severe enough that my hand was immobilized so the stitches could heal–which meant, basically, that I couldn’t use my right thumb.
Have you ever tried typing without your space-bar thumb? It gives “carpel tunnel syndrome” a whole new meaning. So I did a LOT of recording, and almost no writing, for nearly a whole week.
The immobilizer came off today, and I’m gonna have a sweet looking scar, which in future years I will probably pretend came from an epic struggle with writer’s block (“Hey, you think this is bad, you should see what the keyboard looked like.”). Now I can type again…
Except that I don’t have enough strength in the thumb to hit the space bar without it hurting like someone is stabbing me in the hand (this is not an exaggeration). I’m writing this post primarily to prove to myself that I can hold a train of thought together in the face of the pain.
It’s times like these when you learn why you’re a writer. I’m going for my full 3,000+ word count today because it hurts more to not write than it does hurt to type.
And trust me…
That’s a lot.
jdsawyer
After a childhood in academia, J. Daniel Sawyer declared his independence by dropping out of high school and setting off on a series of adventures in the bowels of the film industry, the venture capital culture of silicon valley, surfing safaris, bohemians, burners, historians, theologians, adventurers, climbers, drug dealers, gangbangers, and inventors before his past finally caught up to him.
Trapped in a world bookended by one wall falling in Berlin and other walls going up around suburbia and along national borders throughout the world, he rediscovered his deep love of history and, with it, and obsession with predicting the future as it grew aggressively out of the past.
To date, this obsession has yielded over thirty books and innumerable short stories, the occasional short film, nearly a dozen podcasts stretching over a decade and a half, and a career creating novels and audiobooks exploring the world through the lens of his own peculiar madness, in the depths of his own private forest in a rural exile, where he uses the quiet to write, walk on the beach, and manage a production company that brings innovative stories to the ears of audiences across the world.
For news and free stories, sign up for his occasional newsletter. Or find his contact info, podcasts, and more on his home page at http://www.jdsawyer.net
Fear not. The stitches are coming out in a couple days. Mostly it just itches now.
jdsawyer
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Indeed, for someone not going into details; you really were rather explicit in such wonderfully illustrative ways!
Welcome back and may your writing lead you to many years of painfully illustrative words 😉
Just getting in fighting form for Antithesis in all its grisly glory 😉
Dan Dan Dan. Please stop the self abuse ritual before bedtime. I told you this would happen.
But seriously, heal fast, my friend.
Fear not. The stitches are coming out in a couple days. Mostly it just itches now.