The devil has knocked on my door a fair number of times. It's usually on Halloween and he has a flashlight and a pillow case filled with candy.

This time, however, the devil has shown up unannounced with a fistful of opportunities. All geared to lure me away from my delightful little RIP that edits so much better when I work on it every single day. I'm ashamed to admit that I fell for that evil guy's charms and have not done anything on my book since Sunday.

I even forgot all about Pancake Tuesday.

What did the devil do that was do darn devilish? It appeared like nothing really. Last week he encouraged a client to call me in for a few days of work so that I'd be in an office for five days in a row. Then he orchestrated some wild happenings with the content of the next Women Can Do Anything newsletter, which comes out March 6 -- very exciting times over here, let me tell you.

There is another reason why I was feeling the need for distraction and kind of caved into it. I was involved in an attempted robbery this past Sunday with my friend Michelle. As I was returning to her car after using a bank machine, a man approached me and came right up before I could shut the door. He looked like a man needing directions. He stood inside the door and told us he was desperate and said he didn't want to have to use "this" -- indicating the hand he had in his pocket, which could have held a gun. It was impossible to tell if there was one or not.

The man told us to hand over everything in our purses. He said it so calmly that we didn't understand what he meant at first, then he repeated himself.

Then something happened. Somehow I found the courage to push him away and shut the door. Michelle put down the door locks and the man got into his own car and drove away. Thankfully Michelle was able to drive us to my house so we could freak out over Diet Cokes.

The thing was, it was broad daylight and there were cars all around us. We were so freaking lucky that I didn't want to think about it, but it was a total wake-up call. There are so many what-ifs to this story that I can't go there.

All I know is that for that brief moment that guy made me very, very angry for not paying more attention to my surroundings. Sure, I was madder than a mad cow that this doofus wanted the $23.18 that was in my wallet at the time (plus some subway tokens) but the fact that I let him get THAT CLOSE was what scared me the most. And gave me the chutzpah to push him away.

Michelle covers the event in more detail here, if you're into that kind of thing. Her first version of the account is the way it should have happened. That is, if we were ninjas. ;)

For now, I'm just going to slow things down a little bit while I get my bearings back.