Last night, before I went to bed, I mentally planned my writing week. I’d start by rewriting a piece I wrote about Raymond Chandler’s quote: “ The faster I write the better my output. If I’m going slow, I’m in trouble. It means I’m pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.” I’d post it on today’s blog and then add the new chapter that’s been percolating in my head for the last week to my novel. I knew it was ambitious, but I felt up to the challenge.

And then Monday happened.

I got out of bed at 6:30 and thought I’d have plenty of time to write before my 9:00 yoga class. A phone call from a friend at 7:30 and a detailed conversation with my daughter on Zoopharmacognosy (a behavior in which non-human animals apparently self-medicate by selecting and ingesting or topically applying plants, soils, insects, and psychoactive drugs to treat or prevent disease), left me less than 20 minutes to get dressed and drive to class. On the way into yoga I dropped my key fob on the sidewalk and it broke. I picked up the pieces and snapped them back together. It was only fleeting thought that it might actually be broken. I left yoga with a new sense of purpose and determination. But when I pulled my keys out of my purse, I sensed that something wasn’t quite right. Not only didn’t my keys work, my phone was locked in the car.

I went back in the building to call my husband. I wasn’t surprised when I got his voice mail. My yoga calm quickly turned to panic when I realized the only other two numbers I knew by heart were my mothers, who lived 20 miles away, and my daughter, who had just started her new job as a camp counselor. I’d love to say that I handle it well, but the truth is I started to cry. I stood by my car for a next 10 minutes trying to figure out what to do. Then a couple in a convertible pulled up next to me and let me use their phone. While I tried my husband again, the gentleman looked at my key fob and noticed that something was missing from inside. I explained that I didn’t see anything else on the ground when I picked the pieces up. He suggested that we take another look. As I walked back over to the spot where I dropped my keys, my husband answered his cell phone and I told him about my predicament. Just as I ended the call with my husband on his way, the gentleman found the missing piece. And as if nothing had happened, the doors unlocked and I was good to go.

On the way home, I decided to call my mother. We chatted for few minutes and then she invited me over for lunch. I foolishly thought I’d be able to stop at Starbucks and write, so I took my iPad and notes along with me. As I was getting dressed, I noticed the bug bite on my leg had gotten bigger. I made a mental note to keep an eye on it. Once I got to my mother’s house, I showed it to her. She insisted that I go to urgent care.I told her it was fine. But she wouldn’t let it go. So I promised her I would stop on my way home.

“I’m going with you,” she said.

Not seeing a way out, the two of us headed to the closest urgent clinic. After sitting there for a half hour, I decided I wasn’t waiting anymore. But my mother said we weren’t going anywhere until the doctor looked at my leg. I felt as if I was ten years old again. I pretty much expected that the doctor to confirm that it wasn’t a big deal, so I waited smugly to be called.

The doctor wasn’t with me five minutes before she announced I had a staph infection. I sat on the table stunned as she wrote a prescription for two different antibiotics, one for the not so serious staph infection and another for very serious one.

“We can’t tell which one it is, so we’ll treat both.”

I walked out of the office sheepishly with prescriptions in hand and instructions to go to the emergency room if it starts to streak red or bleed.

By this time it was 5:00 and I hadn’t written a damn thing. But on the way back to mother’s, I thought of the title of this blog post, How not to write in 5 easy steps. So here are my 5 steps to getting out of your writing for the day.

1. Start the day early so that you think you’ve got things under control.
2. Have your teenager son or daughter wake up happy at 8:00 am and want to talk to you.
3. Head to exercise class and either lock your keys in the car or break the key fob
4. Accept any and all lunch invitations.
5. End the day in the urgent care with what might be a serious infection.

Of course, the only true way to ruin your writing time is to not roll with the punches. Even with everything I went through today, I still put my butt in the chair and hands on the keyboard. And I learned that mom always knows best.