The past few months I’ve let my writing fall by the wayside. I did finish a very rough first draft of my first novel, and I had every intention of revising it, but somehow, life got in the way. You know, kids, working two part time jobs, keeping up with the house, pregnancy #3, blah dah dee, blah dah doo. The usual excuses aspiring writers give for not actually writing. I hadn’t even touched my manuscript since I wrote that last blog post, which was well over six months ago.
But then the part time jobs ended, I got back in the swing of things around the house, and I remembered that I had a whole novel that needed to be rewritten. That was two months ago. I allowed myself to procrastinate a little further by telling myself that I needed to do more research before I picked the book up again. In my defense, I did do that research, and it’s going to make the novel much, much better. It was vital that I read those sources.
But still, even as I was thinking of improvement and details that I wanted to add, that urge to write, the voices of the characters that won’t shut up, that which we call the Muse, hadn’t returned.
Until last week. As I was taking my afternoon nap (what? I’m pregnant!), I just could not fall asleep. And I couldn’t fall asleep because I couldn’t stop writing a scene in my head. And it’s been that way ever since. I’ll be trying to sleep, and it will start, that inner narrator writing and rewriting a scene. I even dreamed a book proposal. A whole new story idea just came to me in my sleep. When I woke up, I realized it was completely unusable and historically inaccurate, but I was still pretty impressed with my unconscious brain. And thanks to all this fevered mental activity, I’ve rewritten the first chapter so far. I even wrote the first draft of a query letter, because again, the thing kept writing itself in my head while I was trying to sleep.
So, my muse has returned. But rather than announcing herself with a gentle tap on the shoulder, she’s decided to slap me full across the face. Repeatedly. It seems that my muse, she is a b****.