"There's no f-ing muse. Just Write!" - Nora Roberts
Now...as much as I hate to argue with her....after all, she IS NORA ROBERTS. I'm going to disagree with her and here's why....
There's times when I am surprisingly not thinking about writing. Writing is in fact, the very last thing on my mind. I'm thinking about the cost of cable....
Shopping.
Will I ever admit to my real age?
Do I even know it?
Doing laundry.
Will Wise start selling those BBQ cheez doodles again?
Those things that matter the most to me at the moment.
It's during those times that I'm not necessarily aching to write when I will get the craziest dreams. Dreams so insane that I wake up not terrified and checking under the bed for the big bad boogey man. But so crazy that I instead sit up in bed and think to myself, "What. The. BLEEP was THAT about????"
The first time it happened, I dreamt that I was being chased through a summer camp by zombie pigs from outer space. I remember waking up and wondering what I could've eaten to cause such crazy dreams. The fact that I picked up a pencil and actually wrote something that day when I couldn't figure out what to do with all that was going on in my head was, as far as I knew, coincidental.
Another week or two went by and I didn't write. I was swiftly visited by the same zombie pigs chasing me through a camp ground.
By the third time it happened, you didn't have to tell me what to do or why I was doing it.
Now, if I wrote horror, I'd think, "YAY!!!! New story inspiration!" But I don't. So, I sat back and started thinking about what could cause such crazy dreams and more importantly, how to stop them.
Why did I do this and not just attribute it to whatever I'd consumed that day?
Because for some reason, I'm big on watching patterns. I'm oblivious to about just about everything else going on around me. But once I start to see a pattern, I'm good about locking on to it. The one thing that those dreams had in common was that they followed long periods, (at least for me) of living in a creative wasteland where nothing creative is willingly planted and cultivated. Each time, I sat down the same day and wrote something...anything...to just empty my head of whatever was there in regards to whatever story I was working on a the time. And each time I was immediately relieved of the burden of a story untold in my head.
Now some might just say, "I felt the need to write." But I can't say that. Any cues I may have had to sit my butt in a chair and make it happen were lost in the day to day management of my daily life living with an Alzheimer's patient. It took my subconscious, aka "My Muse" giving me a mental kick in the pants when I most needed it...which back then was every couple weeks, but have recently shortened itself to mere days...to make it happen.
I applaud each and every writer that doesn't need the occasional kick in the pants to sit down and "just write." But for some of us, those of us with the attention span of a gnat and half the patience, we need a "muse" a subconscious alarm system to kick into gear and punk us into writing or suffering dire consequences. And quite honestly? I'm happy to have the cantankerous heifer in my life. She's kept me sane, motivated to write and entertained.
Her most recent offering: A Southern Murder Mystery involving Shaun Cassidy, Susan Dey, Marie Osmond and a couple of chocolate loving, amorous ghosts.
Yeah, like I said...she's entertaining, because there's no way I could ever come up with this one on my own. *big grin*
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