My Muse Needs a Kick in the Pants

I love to write. I've also always been described as a chatterbox, having a mouth like a runaway horse or as Grammy Jeanne used to say, hinged in the middle and flapping at both ends. (I loved my grandmother dearly, but reading that sentence I realize there's no way to construct the phrase "as Grammy Jeanne used to say" without sounding like an episode of the Beverly Hillbillies. Just trust that I'm being sincere, okay?)

Hearing words and reading them are two sides of the same coin…they have a similar rhythm whether written or spoken. I've noticed that there's a correlation between liking to see your words on a page and liking to hear your words in the air – if you're verbose in one arena that's probably going to carry over to the other. Someone with diarrhea of the mouth probably isn't going to spend a lot of time writing, say, haiku. Since I am heinously afflicted with this condition (I pity you all if I ever decide to jump on the next technological bandwagon and start a podcast – which I won't. My desire to conform only goes so far.) it makes sense that my blogposts are roughly the length of War & Peace, only unencumbered by that effervescent Russian optimism. (All you non-literary types are going, what's the joke?)

Anyway, back to my main point. Writing. Love to do it. I write a lot, and I get a million and one ideas a minute – only…well…see there's a slight problem. My muse, usually so helpful in Fed-Exing ideas straight into my brain, abandons me about halfway through the creative process to go sit in a corner and drool on herself. Oh well.

Practically what this means is I have a whole folder on my computer of aborted story attempts. There's one about a girl witnessing the end of the world, which I love but which isn't quite ready to stand on its own; one about a boy who does a favor for the God of a dead planet; one about a guy who meets Death and falls in love (this one is too derivative of Neil Gaiman and so will never get finished); one about a thief who steals unbroken hearts and sells them on the black market to people desperate for a second chance at love…then there's the romance novel I'm working on. That one has stalled less because I don't know where it's supposed to go, and more because every time I have to write an intimate scene, I feel like a voyeur or become jealous of my characters. Why should they be getting play when I'm stuck out here under the oppressive thumb of General Order Number 1? This is completely irrational, obviously, but as several of you card-carrying members of Tribe Penis have told me, irrationality is a woman's natural state. Tell you what – I'll give you that we're irrational if you will admit that your external genitalia make you a danger to yourself and others.

Just kidding.

I'll never admit that women are irrational.