I have gotten three new grandsons in as many months. Another grandbaby is on the way this year! How super-uber-ultra blessed I am!
A funny thing happened over Memorial Day weekend. It was like this. My grandchildren are all brilliant and darling and beautiful and sweet. The two that live closest are very imaginative and love to play “games” where we all take roles from some story or movie and then run around chasing each other or jumping on the bed whilst pretending it’s a ship or a rocket or an island surrounded by sharks.
The trick, as a 54 year-old woman, is to manage to convince my sweet little grandsons that I AM playing with them. . .and get something done at the same time. If I didn’t multi-task, I’d spend every visit in Never-never land and the house/family and other guests would go to pot.
So I was being Captain Hook’s girlfriend and picking strawberries in our front yard to provide “chow” for the crew of the Jolly Roger. (Since those same grandsons are direct descendants of Black Beard the Pirate, it seemed a fitting game. . .(through my huband’s line. . .not mine.))
Necessarily, I was squatting on my haunches to avoid kneeling on the gravelly walk or in the muddy grass on either side of the strawberry bed. My little 4-year-old grandson (Captain Hook) came and jumped on my back. I’m not sure how this fit into the game, but I think he wanted to keep me in character as a pirate. But he tipped me over backward and I twisted as I landed on my flexed hand to avoid smashing the poor little blackguard flat with my oversized(pirate) booty.
A little later, I noticed that my wrist was swollen and sore.
It got worse overnight. I went to the Immediate Care Center near my home and got it X-rayed. The doc thought it was probably broken, but not displaced. They splinted it. They promised to have a “stat” call to a radiologist for confirmation. A little later they called back and said there were breaks in both bones in my forearm, just above the wrist.
I was delighted. It didn’t hurt that much and obviously, I’d be off the hook for dishes, weeding, chopping, haircutting, and so on. A home vacation stretched before me. I hoped that there weren’t any water-related activities planned for our upcoming out of town vacation, but hey, even so, it was worth it!
Since my daughter-in-law Kimberly has an Orthopedic surgeon for a papa, she called him and asked him about the best sort of splint for such an injury. He gave very specific recommendations that it should have a metal brace on both the front and back of the wrist and go most of the way up the forearm. We drove to 5 stores to find one that best matched his specifications.
The day after Memorial Day, I went to see the orthopedic doctor here in town that the clinic referred me to. By then, there was no pain, no swelling, not a bit of anything, except the belief that I was heroine for sparing my grandson and sacrificing my body. I was a martyr, too, since I “suffered” so cheerfully.
But it was not to be. The doc checked and double checked and just couldn’t find a thing wrong. It was really hard to argue when I had NO symptoms to show for myself.
Luckily, I DIDN’T post about my woeful arm on facebook. I DIDN’T cancel the chocolate-making class I’m teaching next week.
I quietly pulled off my $25 wrist brace, drove home and weeded my gardens. Alas, there’s a sink full of dishes waiting for me, too.
Writing news. I’m waiting to hear back from an ideal crackerjack agent I met and discussed my current project, The Pig Wife, with. If she decides to represent me, which I dearly hope she will, I’ll explain all about the surprising chain of events that allowed me two or three times the usual amount of time with her at the OWFI conference.
I especially want this agent, (Susan Brower with the Natasha Kern Agency) for all the other things she represents. She is primarily a Christian writers’ agent, but represents the other genre’s that I write, too. I have other manuscripts ready, but I want “The Pig Wife” (which is historical fiction/romance without being either Christian or sexy) to help establish a broader audience than just the Christian fiction or historical romance readers. She seems to be an ideal agent to work with.
She wasn’t taken with the title, “The Pig Wife” and expressed a preference for “Houses Built of Sticks”, (a three little pigs fairytale reference). But I pointed out that I had never told anyone the title without them saying “The PIG WIFE? What’s THAT about?” I think it would spark curiosity on a book cover and after they read the back, they’d buy the book. A title is a sales tool and if it effectively gets the book into a book buyer’s hand, it works, (to my way of thinking.)
I also learned a lot from the series of marketing classes I took at the OWFI conference. In response to one technique I learned, I ran a special for “The Angel’s Song” (free on Kindle for Mother’s day Weekend and .99 for the rest of the month) to develop audience. I have 612 downloads so far, both paid and free. Rasmus, Tales of a Utah Cowboy wasn’t free on my heaviest day, (the Friday before Mother’s day) and it got an additional 297 downloads. I don’t know how many purchases it has since then. I’m not the publisher so I don’t have access to records until he gives me the quarterly readout.
I have no way of knowing how many of those are new readers, but I was satisfied that it was a successful promotion. 900+ between the two. The Angel’s Song gets a new cover, and the price goes up to 2.99 on Kindle on June 1st.
I also had a full page story in the Oklahoman. . . The printed version included two huge Mormon Helping hands pictures from last year’s Oklahoma tornadoes cleanup in addition to the one of Mick Batt and a story. Here’s a link!
http://newsok.com/article/4850384 It’s an exciting project we’re working on!
1 Comment
yeah PTSD can lead to suicide, The person often get quite depressed and with drawn. makes suicide plans and ties up any loose ends (a Will, note ect) but it really depends on the individual because everybody acts diftreenfly and there is not set way to act