ome of you might have noticed that the site has gone largely dark over the last few weeks. No updates. No opinions. No grousing about the sorry state of entertainment, media and literature lately.

Most of you haven’t, of course.

I’m keeping track of names, just like Santa.

Anyway, the reason for this wasn’t a failure of courage or and onset of writers block. Nope. Carpel Tunnel. I have it in my left hand, not because of typing or anything, just hard use. So the bone and cartilage in my left wrist tightened up around the nerves and suddenly I couldn’t feel my left index finger tip – just the end and the nail. Strange sensation, especially when playing Go left handed (I don’t remember why I was doing that – the board placement, I think). I’d pick up a stone and feel most of it, not all of it. Crazy weird.

Saw the hand doctor and he told me, yeah, he could fix it right up. The implication was that I’d be inconvenienced by all this for a day or so. Scheduled the surgery, went in, conked out, and the next thing I knew I was smooth-talking the recovery nurse in finest continental style (my wife said I was a babbling idiot). But besides that, I found my wrist in a splint from mid-forearm down to the wrist. Worse, on my palm there was a convex piece of hard plastic. This mean when I put my wrist on a table, you’d hear a clunk.

The worst part of all this was using a keyboard. The first two days (with my fingers swollen like ball-park franks) I had to type right-handed (friends on Facebook might remember that low-cap phase I went through). But even after the swelling was down and the sling off, I still had problems. When I typed, my left palm-splint would bump against the lower-left keys – shift, caps lock, alt, control and the windows launcher. So I’d be trying to type in two or three simultaneous IM sessions and update excel and a dozen other things all while windows were popping up, the text was centering, the font was changing. In the evenings, I’d catch the bus to the train station and stand reflecting about things on the platform. And I’d look at my left hand and think, Fuck you.

Writing was no fun. That short story I was working on, shelved. That game my friend and I were developing, stalled.

But now the splint is off. Now I can type (though my thumb is tired from long disuse). But I’m writing again and I can feel all the tension and stress drain out as I do.

So yes, I’m back.

With caps and everything.

>>>IF YOU WANT TO SEE TWO-HANDED STORYTELLING, CHECK OUT MY BOOKS DOWN THIS LINK. YEAH, THAT WAS ME, BACK IN THE DAY.<<<