The Muse, She Calls

God, what a pretentious and cliched title for a blog. But it happened that way. Seriously.

I'm in the middle of a requested revise and rewrite for WINTER'S DISCORD that put my 90s ski epic on hold for a bit. I'm not saying more so not to jinx it. Perfect timing as Mid-Winter break was on the horizon. As is often the case, however, when I'm given something to do, especially related to my writing, I find the polar opposite of said task and do that instead. So naturally in the three weeks since the request, I've done things around my house, caught up on school work and made countless (and equally useless) playlists on Spotify that I'm realizing now I'm going to have to use on later drafts. But I'm now elbows deep into the rewrite and making progress. The suggestions weren't heavy lifting changes, but heavy enough.

I'm grooving away, fixing what needs to be fixed. I can see the hourglass though, knowing that how long I work on it might be a test too. Then, last night, as I'm driving my daughter to ice skating lessons, something hits me right in the face. Not literally but figuratively. I came up with a new opening for the 90s ski epic. I fumbled with it in my mind as I watched my daughter learn to skate then last night I tried to commit it to the computer, but as with everything in my life, I couldn't quite wrangle it down. Maybe it was the 4 year old trying to get comfortable sitting next to me on the couch and fighting sleep at the same time. Maybe it was watching Cleopatra on TCM last night (and not Tweeting about it since I've given that up for Lent!). Maybe it was that the muse wasn't fully ready to give me what I needed. But I was getting nagged about it. It wanted to be worked on, even though WINTER is the priority. I tried to ignore it, but stared at the open file on my desk top (students are working on research projects). Now my muse decides to kick in and I couldn't ignore it anymore. And I wrote and wrote, in my notebook. And I'm very happy with it. It'll still be there when I get back to the ski epic and I think the story will be better for it.

Back to WINTER for now.

(Because of my Lenten promise, mostly to my daughter, I can't link this from any of my social networks, but I needed to say something about it.)