Day 27 of the 365 Days of Blogging

The author, Dane F. Baylis

Talk About My Muse

My who? There's always that image of the diaphanous being floating out there on the edge of awareness who is just waiting to hand over the peyote button of inspiration and you sit at your typer for four or five days without realizing any time has passed, caught in the throws of a burst of automatic writing that defies the visions of the Delphic oracle, and BAM you have out Dostoevsky'd Dostoevsky. If that's your muse's modus operandi than I am jealous. Mine is more of a reclusive old fart who, if I stand outside the door in my mind where he has cloistered himself and whimper as if I am in the throws of heroin withdrawal, then he slips a piece of paper over the transom with a word on it. Might be a verb, maybe an adjective, could even be a conjunction. There it is and it's time to run with it.

 

I've never believed in muses and I don't intend to start. The muse happens when you find yourself flat-ass stuck beside a rutted dirt road in your imagination without a vehicle to get your protagonist moving. So you say, wait right there Gridley, and you wander off and do something else for a while. Work on an outline, or the seventh draft of that short fiction that has more rejection letters than pages, or some dirty limericks. Hell, go to the bar and lose a few days then wake up at the bullfights in Tijuana! Then do what everyone eventually learns to do, sit back down and get back to work.

 

Ask yourself a thousand questions. What if this, or could I do that, or maybe it would sound better this way? That's the muse, that's inspiration. As has been said a million times before, the ONLY place success comes before work is in the dictionary and it falls in between shit and syphillis. If you hang around waiting on the muse to show up you may miss the opportunity to follow the singular greatest idea you've ever had...Or not. At least you'll be doing something more than sitting on your keester like some adolescent who just got dumped. Muse...Sheesh!

 

Always looking for short fiction to 1200 words, poetry to 25 lines and carefully crafted essays for the Your Work/Your Love page. No pay, just the glory of exposure and the author retains all rights. You can follow me or subscribe to this blog by using gadgets found on the right of the page. Love the company, but that's misery for you!

 

Until tomorrow...live, love, write.

 

 

Dane F. Baylis