The Missing Muse

 I don't seem to have a muse. If ever I did, she up and left. Unless you count mindnumbing boredom as a type of muse. The desire to write never came to me as a flash of inspiration, or as a voice in my head or heart who had to be coaxed into giving up the goods.  Making up stories was a survival mechanism. School bored me to tears and I didn't seem capable of either staring mindlessly into space or coming up with vaguely obscene pranks in the back of the classroom the way my classmates were. So I got out the notebooks and while the teachers droned on for the fifth deadly day about diagramming sentences, I kept myself from going postal by making up violent stories about space heroines offing bad guys who bore uncanny resemblances to disliked teachers and bullying classmates. It had the added bonus of looking as if I were paying attention and taking notes. Ha.

To this day, there's no muse to court. Stories are about characters. I know a book will get written when the hero and heroine stroll into my head, grab me by the neck and say "Listen up!" Some stories rise up from beneath my feet to overwhelm me. Some drop into my head like a ray of sunlight. There's a meditation, popular in many religious traditions called Middle Pillar. My tradition's particular take on it is that you imagine white light rising up through your feet, through the center of your body and emerging from the top of your head. You also focus on a beam of white light entering your body at the top of your head, pouring through your body and out through your feet. You hold that image - light flowing through you from both directions, opening, clearing, empowering. You become a channel for the energy. That's what stories feel like for me. I don't own them. They pre-exist. I merely discover, then uncover them. It's a question of clearing space inside me to make room to hold those stories, to give home and voice to those characters. Every story is different. The voices vary from book to book. In fact, even if a book already has a title, among my critique groups, the book is referred to as the heroine's. Ari's book. Jay's book. Edie's book. And a lot more named books that may never see the light of day.

Maybe those heroines are my muses. Does that makes me a muse whore - if I finish with one, callously toss her aside and move on to the next? That can't be right. I don't ever toss them aside. Hmm. Am I assembling my own muse harem? Come, my sweet. Tell your story. I'll house you until its done, then you're free to stay or go as you wish...