Muse - M

Some (or sinew if autocorrect is to be believed) days the idea faucet flows freely and others (aka most)  it's like pulling teeth to string 100 semi-cohesive words together for this blogging challenge.

And once I've cobbled an idea together, usually within 20 minutes of clicking the publish button, I'm flooded with other, more interesting topics I could have more thoroughly articulated. Hindsight is a manipulative bitch.

So ‘M’ is for muse, because manipulative bitch felt a tad aggressive. ‘M’ could be for one of my favorite swear words, made oh so eloquent by Samuel L. Jackson, but my coffee has kicked in so I'll manage not to write an ode to swearing. At least until ‘S’. At that point, I make no guarantees.

Writing has been my guilty little aspiration until recently. Who am I kidding, I still take a lot of crap from people who view it as a self-indulgent and delusional hobby. The handful of people who offered encouragement over the years, mostly teachers or my husband (who in all honestly encourages with the hopes that I someday write a string of bestsellers and make him a kept man), are silenced by those who view the whole idea with contempt, manuscript unseen.

It has taken some time to offer my ideas to other writers in brainstorming sessions. To my surprise though, I’m usually met with, well, surprise. Probably more from the volume of ideas I suggest rather than quality. (Naughty, naughty self-esteem. Pull yourself together.) Either way, it was one of the first times it had ever occurred to me that not everyone who puts words to screen/paper/coffee cups/pizza boxes has a never ending stream of ideas. Certainly they’re not all winners, but I can keep going until I spit out something that can be worked with.

Is this muse? Is this an overactive imagination? Is this something that requires prescription medication? For the sake of argument, I’ll go with some of column A and some of column B. (We aren’t going to entertain column C at the moment. I can keep myself quietly amused, so I’m harmless.)

I have notebooks, discs and flash drives full of the random ideas that come to mind. I have been known to completely zone out in a movie theater because five seconds of a screen time is enough to get my mind racing while I piece together an outline for the duration of the picture. I have woken up with entire scenes, an overall plot outline or fully formed characters. As long as my brain is left alone to puzzle over a topic long enough, I can figure out something to do with it. I’m a marathon writer. Stories on the fly, quick writing prompts, timed writing? Those are never going to be my strengths. But I take it from the open mouthed gapes of a few writing friends when I do share an idea that there may be something to my process after all.

Come to think of it, maybe they're afraid...

My muse(s) doesn’t necessarily appreciate the blogging situation. And I’m sure there are plenty of people who will tell me (and have done so) that I’m doing it wrong. But I’m using it as a personal challenge, a sort of thrown gauntlet to stretch my muse(s) and push myself in a direction I’m not decades-long comfortable with. The muses, like myself, bitch about discomfort but ultimately are enhanced by it. And who am I trying to kid? Unless my muse has a hyperactive disorder, there’s got to be a whole Greek chorus up in there.