She’s A Saucy Wench
My Muse, that is. Why is it that when I have a Valentine book and short story under deadline, the Muse all of a sudden decides that what she REALLY wants to work on is another book for a series that hasn’t even been sold yet? Why? Especially since the series in question (the Kismet books) is one of those things where the book comes out whole and bloody, in great mind-shattering chunks?
My Muse has an immortal being’s sense of humor, I guess. Maybe I should have chosen something else to be my anthropomorphisation of creative endeavour. Sometime nice and tame and tractable, who would produce work on spec instead of haring off wildly after violence and gunfire. Just a nice little fairy Muse whose head I can hold underwater.
Yeah. Right. Instead I get a chain-smokin’, hard-drinkin’, bar-fightin’ Muse with a black-leather habit and a metal ruler to pop across my mental knuckles. The Muse is often wearing a sneer, and she delights in messing with my head.
Oh, you want a love story? Sure, I’ll give you a love story. Then someone will DIE! Bwahahahahaaaa!
Yes. My Muse chuckles like Dr. Evil on a bad day, and wants to take over the world like the Brain. (I’m more like Pinky than I want to admit.) She delights in messing with my head, producing the most outre plot twists, and telegraphing her moves even though nobody will suspect them–so the reader (and this author, too, don’t forget that) looks back through the book and says, “Oh, for God’s sake, I should have seen that coming but how could I have?”
Yet I love her. She’s a harsh mistress, and I always worry about coming in on deadline, but somehow everything does turn out all right. Which makes the Muse snarl, “What did you expect? I TOLD you it was under control. Have another shot of vodka.”
I feel like the parent of a demented, hyperintelligent three-year-old. My fleshly children are thankfully not as demented, although they are sunny and very intelligent and sometimes just as frustrating.
But they don’t chain-smoke, thank God.
So the Muse has her own ideas about what I should be writing on this sunny day, when the wind reminds one of baking pine needles and the weather report says rain is right around the corner. A good bit of damp may slow the Muse down; she loves to watch raindrops on the window.
For hours.
Go figure.
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September 12th, 2006 at 1:48 pm
… your Muse sounds like mine. LOL.
September 12th, 2006 at 7:47 pm
That’s hilarious. Muses are indeed naughty creatures who would do well with some military school, methinks. Mine, alas, has gone MIA. When she gets home, she is so grounded.