A true story: I wrote my novel The Sweet Spot with only one hand. That was twenty years ago, when I was recuperating after getting hit by a car as I walked across the street.

I was in a crosswalk on my way to get coffee before I headed to the newsroom at 7 a.m. The driver claimed he didn’t see me. The impact threw me into the air and broke my collarbone when I fell onto the hood of his car. Something on the hood cut the back of my head. A person sitting outside Starbucks called for an ambulance to take me to the ER.

My injuries could have been much worse. I am grateful for that.

I missed work for a week. I was a copy editor then for a daily newspaper. When I returned, I got good at typing with one hand. The heavy-duty meds and ice helped. Plus Hank, who worked at a job site in the valley, drove me back and forth to work until I mended enough to drive.

And that’s when I started The Sweet Spot, which has been the novel’s name all along. I set it in the hilltowns of Western Massachusetts, where I lived then. It is also the favored setting for most of my books. The small town of Conwell is pure fiction, but I feel I made it believable enough that I could plunk it in the middle of Worthington, where we lived, Chesterfield and Cummington.

The year is 1978. No cell phones or email. No home computers. The Vietnam War ended officially three years earlier.

The characters are locals, except for one important newcomer.

I set the stage with softball and baseball games, a Fourth of July parade, a general store, a swimming hole, and raucous nights at a local bar.

Emotions get high. As I learned as a resident and reporter, things can get mighty personal in a small town. In this case, Edie St. Claire, one of the main characters, messes up big time. Most in Conwell won’t let her forget it.

Her father is a crusty so-and-so who runs the town dump. Her wisecracking aunt is as fiery as her dyed red hair. Both live next to Edie and her young daughter on a dead-end dirt road.

Edie is an “I gotta go” kind of woman, pretty and direct, but she holds onto an old sadness: the death of her husband in Vietnam. She tries to ease her grief with his married brother, Walker.

But when the affair comes to a tragic end, Edie does her best to survive the blame with the help of her rough-sawn family and a badly scarred man who has arrived for his fresh start.

I remember coming home and letting the words flow one after the other. I don’t know where they and this story came from, but there it was 80,000 words a few months later. To this day, I have not written a novel that fast.

I also got quite good at typing with only my right hand.

I sent the manuscript to my then-agent. His suggestion: start from the middle. After I reworked the novel that way, he pitched it to two publishing houses. Both editors took a pass. One of them died the next day in surgery. Another true story.

Slow forward ten years later. I reread The Sweet Spot. I loved it enough to rewrite it. I went back to my original beginning and added more dialogue thanks to the encouragement of my then-agent. But alas he couldn’t sell it either. My pitches to other agents and indie houses after I let him go were unsuccessful.

So I published it myself. I felt it was too good a novel to keep in my computer. Here’s the link for The Sweet Spot if you want to find out yourself. And thank you if you do.