I took my muse down to the river today for a little “one on one” quality time. The poor thing was feeling more stretched and thin than I am, being charged with the unenviable task of having to continue to keep yours truly inspired in the midst of a life that currently resembles Calamity Central…

I seem, at the moment, to be trapped in a place of “crisis management” – the kind of “okay, what has to be done RIGHT NOW, and the rest will have to wait until they have to be done RIGHT NOW… It does make life interesting, I suppose, but leaves little room for the activities dear to an author’s heart. Like writing.

Aside from juggling (and trying to hold together) a full time job as a property agent in a crisis economy (property, like cars, is currently a “no-go” area), helping my interior designer daughter get her own business off the ground, being Mom, Dad, Zoo Keeper, gardener, pool cleaner, general handyperson, gate repairer, sole breadwinner, domestic executive, doing-anything-else-legal-to-make-ends-meet-person, I’m also busy with edits on The Look which is due soon, doing major rewrites on The Unmaking of Missy, which is overdue for submission (by my schedule, anyway)…

And so it goes. So it figures that my poor old muse should be feeling the fallout… I realised that, as a writer, my muse is really my best friend. I also realised that, most of the time anyway, I tend to pretty much ignore her (she’s definitely a girl, I need someone who thinks Venus and not Mars) unless I want something.

So this morning I hauled her out of bed early and dragged her off down to my river, leaving my dogs on the home side of the fence (much to their disgust, because don’t I know that I need their protection, and anyway since when can I have fun without them?). We sat quietly on a rock in a secluded corner, listening to the dawn symphony of the water burbling in cheerful peace, a fitting backdrop to the early bird chorus and the odd very late frog proclaiming the message that rain is due.

We didn’t really talk. Didn’t touch on the books unwritten, needing to be rewritten, or even the ones half written. We just sat and shared the slow brightening of the world as morning slid into place, caught the first warming rays of the sun through the trees, dangled our bare feet in the cool water and let it wash some of the weariness and stress away.

It was a blissful time. Short, because duty calls and moments like these, sadly, are necessarily brief. But we both returned with lighter hearts and easier spirits, and somehow the tasks ahead seem easier than they did before.

I learned another valuable lesson. My muse, like any loved and needed creature, needs to be romanced now and then. Nothing extravagant or expensive, nice as those moments might be, but in the little things that bring you back to where you need to be…

Jude

Tags: life, peace, romancing the muse, stress, timeout

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