The Muse is on the Loose

Being a writer is both a blessing and a curse.

Having a way with words has allowed me to carve out a comfortable living as a communication consultant after spending 15 years as a university professor. Neither profession is what I wanted to do with my life,  but they pay the bills and all me to enjoy my creature comforts (like having a roof over my head and being able to afford the occasional vacation).

The curse is twofold. For the last two years work has chaotic (and thanks to the current government budget situation, will likely remain so for the foreseeable future). I regularly work 60-70 hour weeks which leaves little time for my 'fun' writing, and when I do manage to find a spare hour to devote to it, my brain is the consistency of warm tapioca. No real surprise here, but 'Tapioca-Brain' is not particularly conducive to writing anything coherent and frequently is accompanied by the ailment universally dreaded by writers for centuries -- writer's block.

Still, at other times, life is chaotic and work is a madhouse, but the novel ideas flow thick and fast. Sadly, this is usually just my muse teasing me. Apparently, my muse is a sadistic witch who likes torturing me with a bunch of ideas all at once, especially when I have no time to do more than scribble down the bare bones of a plot before I get pulled back into other 'responsibilities' that (unfortunately) take priority over writing.

Stupidly enough I spent two hours in an MRI machine this week, staring at the ugly ceiling (they took my glasses so I couldn't even count dots in the institutional grey ceiling tiles). While fighting to stay still, I laid there getting increasingly frustrated as my muse flung idea after idea into my head, when I was powerless to write them down or record them. Sure enough, the minute I got out of there and back to my phone so I could start recording the ideas they rushed out of my brain, like water pouring through a colander -- until only the tiniest detail remained.

If only the lottery commission would do the nice thing and pull our numbers for the next big pot so I could quit being a slave to the 'Capitalist Bitch' and devote all of my time to writing for a living.

It's a lovely dream.