“Fancy seeing YOU here.” Gads. It was my Muse and some of her cronies who had skipped out on the session about avoiding being assigned to a journalist.

“Uh, I ah….er….”

“Don’t get up,” she said. (I hadn’t moved.) “Barkeep! We’ll take a bottle of tequila over here. Put it on his tab.”

“But….”

“Don’t interrupt, Elwood,” she said. “It’s unbecoming for a world-class author.”

I was stunned. The Muse and her cohorts repaired to a table in the corner while I contemplated what she had said. World-class?

“Don’t get a big head now,” she said out of the corner of her mouth. “HEY! BARKEEP! How about an ashtray and some matches?”

“This is a smoke-free hotel, m’am,” the man said.

The Muse gave him one of her laser-beam stink eyes. He wisely relented and recommended a “back room” I didn’t know existed.

“Listen, bub,” she said. “I had to say that because I need to keep my street cred among my colleagues. I can’t let them know who I am really working for. They think you are a real writer.”

“But…”

“Now quit interrupting. I don’t have the time, and you don’t have the talent. You need to get to work. Don’t you have ANY ideas?”

“That’s your job, I thought,” I protested.

“My job is to make sure you write, not tell you what to write about,” she said while lighting an unfiltered Camel. The bartender started to correct her, but she gave him another stink eye. He skulked back to his post at the far end of the bar.

“Now why don’t you just whip out that lil ol’ laptop and started tickling those keys like a real writer. I’ve got some partying to do.”

She left me open-mouthed at the bar as I watched her walk back to her laughing harpy friends. I swear there were at least eight of them. Watching her butt while she walked was like watching two bear cubs wrestling under a blanket. She had gained weight.

I got out my laptop and put it on the bar. I ordered another gin and tonic. I sat and waited for an idea to arrive, like an e-mail, from the ether.
(more to come)

Tagging along also meant maybe I could find a better Muse. This one is just a temp, as are, it turns out, my inspired ideas. They don’t last long enough for me to write them down. Then when it comes time to write, the Muse is snoring on the couch, and I’m sitting chin in hand at the keyboard.

I wasn’t sure whether to be offended because she was at the session in the first place or
thankful because she obviously wasn’t paying attention.

With all that giggling going on in the back corner, it was hard to follow the speaker, but I
gathered from the PowerPoint slides that being assigned to a journalist was the Muse
equivalent of being assigned the overweight kid as your partner in elementary school
ballroom dancing class.

The bulleted list explaining all this went something like:

• newspapers are dying
• journalists are hacks anyway
• you can wave your Muse wand ferociously and little more than “It was a dark and stormy night” is achieved
• they are notoriously tight with their liquor closet
• they THINK they are actual writers

The last one drew a storm of howls and laughter and many nods of agreement. I glanced over at my Muse, and she was high-fiving her buddies and and laughing so hard that the flask contents were dripping from her nose.

I couldn’t take any more and left for the lobby bar. I needed a drink, and I didn’t want to
have to buy one for my so-called Muse. How the hell did she keep her license? What kind of an operation is this?

I gratefully tipped the glass back and the nectar of forgetfulness (Ah, Lethe!) was about to hit my lips,
when….

“Hey, Elwood! Fancy seeing YOU here!”

The Muse!

(To be continued)

For most writers, knowing your Muse is at your side as you type is a wonderful and rare thing. If it weren’t for her onion breath and the fact that her presence at my side probably wasn’t to inspire, I would have been thrilled. I was fairly certain it meant we were out of beer.

“Those publishers are in the middle of an Egyptian river,” she cackled, while running her fingers through her greasy hair and chewing on sunflower seeds. She was reading over my shoulder again, though she knows I hate that. Inspire me and then get the hell out of my way was what I wanted, but I didn’t get either one.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“It’s obvious,” she said. “They’re in deNile….” Then she exploded with laughter.  She loves her own jokes.  She spit out a few sunflower seeds on my keyboard during a particularly boisterous paroxysm.

I just sat, arms crossed until she regained control.

“That’s not that funny,” I said. “Lots of really good people in the newspaper business are trying to find a way to keep newspapers alive.”

The Muse sighed.

“They been givin’ it away for years on the web, and now they want people to pay? HA! That ain’t gonna happen. Yer wastin’ yer time.”

“Well, thank you very much for your help and inspiration,” I said.

“Don’t go all sarcastic on me now Captain of the Good Ship Jejune. Get me some more beer and then you can go back and save the news biz with your mellifluous prolixity.” She headed back to the stain that represented her spot on the couch.

“Say,” I said to her receding back, “the agency never called back about stopping the contract renewal, did they?” I was so disgusted with this Muse that I couldn’t wait to send her back.

“Yeah, they called yesterday while you were on that beer run. Don’t worry, I said you wanted another three months. Now get back to writin’ that crap before you miss yer deadline and yer editor — whatsizname, Shrike — calls again.”

At least she knows her literature. I headed out for more beer. What else could I do?

(To be continued)

She still doesn’t understand why she is needed as a see-Alice for my flagging writing abilities.

“What’s the big deal?” she taunted. “So you have these 26 symbols you have to almost randomly group into sound-maps called words that stand for an idea or thing. Then you freight-train those groupings into sentences, paying attention to which cars you attach and/or sequence with other cars. Then you clump all those into paragraphs, which you stack on top of one another like cold cuts on rye, and Boom! You gotta story.”

I stared at her in disbelief.

“You really think it’s that easy to write?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said, stifling a yawn. “I sometimes wonder why I became a Muse out of college. I mean who needs the frustration? I shoulda gone into public relations.” She headed into the kitchen, no doubt to get a beer. I silently prayed there was only light beer left, which she hates. Some Muse.

I turned back to the keyboard, sans inspiration, and cut open a vein.

She ambled in, hair totally bird-nested and too unwashed even for dreads. A nearly dead cigarillo didn’t so much hang from between her puffy lips as cantilever there on her lower, stuck by dried saliva. She dropped a pull-tie Hefty bag, no doubt filled with dirty clothes, by the front door and headed for the couch, the left side of which has an indention that exactly matches her butt.

“Hey, Elwood! Got any cold beer?” Don’t know why she calls me Elwood. She dropped what was left of her cigarillo into my Starbucks grande double latte I just brought home with the Sunday New York Times.  She lit another.

“Whadjago deef or somethin? Ya got a cold beer or ya gonna make a run?” She blew a few smoke rings, a small fast one through a slowly moving big one, then fixed me eye-to-eye with a steely glare. I fetched her a beer.

“Thanks, bub.”

My karma must be bad. I asked the Universe for help, for inspiration, for something to end my creative drought, and the next day, she shows up as if from Hell’s temp agency.

“So, tell me. Didja get any work done or did you miss me?”  She flicked an ash toward the Starbucks cup and missed. I hoped the Times wouldn’t catch fire.

“Yeah,” I said with too loud of a sigh, “I did get some writing and web site work done.”

“Good boy, Elwood! Another few months, and maybe all my help will really pay off,” she said, before nearly losing a lung in another of a long line of hacking coughfests. Then she snorted up the excess mucus and drained the beer.

“Ya know what that tasted like?” she asked while actually belching the last word.

“No. I don’t.”

“That tasted just like another one!” she said with unsuppressed glee at her humor. “Just like another one! Ha-ha-ha.”

I don’t think I can make it. Can one fire one’s muse?

(To be continued…)

I am organizing the notes and documents into a set of folders that follow the current, loose outline. I have to scan some documents.

I have to set up organizational and reminder software. I want to just start writing, to get into the “fun” work (HA!) of writing. This preliminary stuff is almost enough to make me kick the Muse off the couch and take a nap.

Is writing an addiction? Why do we writers willingly spend so much time suffering? We suffer to write; we suffer when we write. We agonize over the flaws after publication.

We write again. Ad infiwritum.