She Comes and Goes

Where does the desire to write go when it's gone? Why does it leave? Sometimes it's here for months at a time. Sometimes it only sticks around for a few hours. It's been gone since my last post and it still is right now. I suppose that maybe I shouldn't call it a desire, but more of an inspiration. My muse has fled me if ever I had one. Maybe she just has a short attention span. Maybe she likes to travel. I wish she'd visit home a little more often than she has been recently.

I've tried to write a number of posts since my most recent colorful adventure but after a few sentences I just get disgusted with what I've written. What had meaning to me five minutes earlier becomes transparent, empty, plain. I read what I've written and wonder why I started on that topic to begin with. It feels like digging in the mud looking for gold and only finding a different type of mud. It's a little upsetting after a few sentences, but after a few chapters it's hard to want to try again for months.

This is not, however, a pity party. This is an invitation for inspiration, for my muse, to bring herself back from vacation and get back to work. Paid time off is almost over. It's time to write things that rock worlds, shatter minds to their core, scare evil itself back into the dark recesses of reality and encourage good to gather up its courage and take on new fights.

It's time to write the words that make women believe men are better than they are and that encourage men to actually be better. It's time to create new worlds, new universes, and new ways of thinking. It's time to show people the window out of reality and into a different one so that when they decide to step back they'll be better prepared to deal with whatever reality they live in. This will be the bridge to the greener grass. It will be the window to the promise of spring and the door that lets us in from the cold.

Come back my muse. I need you.

I need the courage to write the things I'm afraid of. I need to write fearlessly. I need the persistence to write even when the words lose meaning, the plot comes unravelled and falls away, the characters revolt and become mindless automatons, and the story itself that had so much promise reveals itself to have nowhere to go. I need to believe not only that I can do this, but that someday I will. I need to believe that I'm a writer.

My muse. I know you're close. I can shut my eyes, just for a moment, and catch glimpses of her in the madness of my mind. I can fly faster than thought through time and space, earth, air, water, and nothingness to see the remnants of the places she's been and the beginnings of places she'll go. There's her name stenciled across the nose of a starship. It flies past whole worlds that have her fingerprints all over them. There are whole races of beings, familiar and unfamiliar, that all know her intimately. Constellations appeared at a whisper from her lips. Cowboys on the parie sing songs as they fall asleep inspired by the vast landscapes she inspired. The rustle of the leaves in a vast ancient forest insinuates that she passed here, or that she soon will.

Eyes open. She'll come soon. She knows as well as I do what needs to be done. We'll just put this on the timecard as a bit of field research. Above all we must have faith that she knows what she's doing.

All stories start here.

Soon this one will too.

Soon...