Opus No. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

All right, call me a blatant copycat, but Nate (http://tidus-blitz-rex.livejournal.com), Supergirlfriend (http://theoralreport.blogspot.com/) and Highlander (http://miserableannalsoftheearth.blogspot.com) (sorry for the URL jungle, but my browser won't let me make links) already ran with this idea on their blogs and it sounded like fun.

If I’d made different choices in my life…in an alternate universe...

1. From the stress of living with an emotionally abusive, philandering boyfriend, I gain a hundred pounds and an addiction to raw cookie dough ice cream and a twitch in my left eye. In the dead of night, I escape to a battered women's shelter, but have to be moved several times because my ex seems to be able to charm my current address out of the agency in charge. Despite the many orders of protection taken out against him, he manages to appear in my window every other night. Finally I have a breakdown and while recovering at a hospital guarded by very large men and un-charmable women, I lose the weight and write the screenplay to "Sleeping with the Enemy." Except my version wins an Oscar. After it's nominated, my ex tracks me down and stalks me, demanding a cut of the profits because the character was based on him. I ignore him, and then while I'm coming up the red carpet to accept my award, he charges me. My husband, Harrison Ford, wrestles him to the ground. In my next screenplay, I give his character erectile dysfunction and a nasty case of the crabs.

2. I am a single mother, divorced from the alcoholic cokehead father who managed to stay awake and focused long enough to knock me up. He’s home crashed on the day of the hearing and his mother begrudgingly pays me child support. I start my own version of Alanon, called Women Who Should Have Known What They Were Getting Into But Were So Deep In Denial They Couldn't See Daylight Until Planting Season (“WWSHKTWGIBWSDIPCSDUPS”, or "We wish to God that we hadn't been so pathetically stupid"). Oprah finds out about me and begs me to write a memoir. It wins the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and the Booker Prize, (the British Empire makes their first exception and gives the honor to someone outside Britannica because they laughed so hard they wet themselves). While I'm doing my reading at the 92nd Street Y, my ex's mother charges me and demands an apology and a share of my profits because I made her out to be a Jewish battleaxe with a permanent claw in her son's shoulder and a bad case of body odor, which had been vetted by my lawyers and found to be the truth . She's taken out by my current husband, Colin Firth, who will be playing my ex in the movie. I ask the screenwriter to make his character gay. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

3. I become a world-class marathon runner and I'm so focused and competitive that my poor, beleaguered significant other has to go to great lengths to get my attention and approval. So I plot to poison her rival by spiking a cup of water and holding it out to her from the sidelines. Unfortunately I grab it, and...no, wait a minute, that was a TC Boyle story. Never mind. But it's a really good story. You should read it.

4. Getting in my head that I could write a novel, I hunker down at my very first computer and write not just one, but two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.... I write continually for two, three decades. I'm so focused that I don't notice the meals someone slips under my door, or when the phone stops ringing. Or the red alert level siren blaring from the firehouse. I don't notice the explosions, the screaming, even that the electricity has gone out. Eventually I wander out into the light of day, blinking through the fallout haze, and find that I'm the only person still alive except for Dick Cheney, who finally pops his head out of his secret undisclosed location. I tell him I’m a novelist and he says, great, I could use the distraction. He offers me his printer so I can run them out from my backups. "Backups?" I say. "What's a backup?"

5. Wendy Pini from Elfquest catches wind that I can write comic book script. She offers me a job, which I accept, and spend years hunkered down in a tiny room bent over a keyboard writing dialog for elves and fairies. Eventually I go mad, and become a bag lady, wandering around pushing a shopping cart, sipping on a Diet Pepsi and murmuring, “Nastybad high thing…nastybad high thing…”