Striking While the Muse is Hot

If you read my post Oh God, NOW You've Done It!, you heard about the vicious plot bunny attack I endured when Stephenie Masen happened to mention the TillTheWorldEnds Contest. Nine thousand words later, I have a story I'm going to enter.

SoapyMayhem volunteered to do a banner for the story and mentioned that the Tales from the Void Contest is still open. I'd love to enter the contest, but my muse hasn't offered me anything, and I don't have anything stored away that I can use. If I tried to write a new story right now, I'd end up staring helplessly at a blank page on my screen, while she sat beside me and crooned into my ear about what my characters in my post-apocalyptic novel or Sacred to the Memory should be doing.

Maybe I could force it. I did that for some assignments in school, after all, when my muse flatly refused to cooperate. But those stories really sucked, and I'm not just being modest. They really sucked.

When my muse is fired up, it's a frantic fever in the brain. I can't do anything until I have the story done. It occupies my every waking thought. It compels my attention, my energies. The tale seems to almost grow on its own, like I'm channeling a spirit, whether it stays in my head or eventually makes it to my keyboard.

Except for the TilTheWorldEnds story mentioned above, all of the stories I write are ones which have been written in my head over the years. If I'm washing dishes or folding clothes, or driving to the grocery store, I'm writing. Some of the stories have been germinating in there for years, being re-written with other characters, re-working scenes and dialogue.

That's why I write so fast. I'm essentially just typing out what's already there. (Except for the "lemons". I don't write them in advance, and so it takes me a very, very long time to come up with them.) A lot of "work" has been done on the story before I ever sit down at the keyboard. And it's why I can't come up with changes on the fly.


While I was writing Written in the Stars, I had a LOT of negative feedback from Bella's second pregnancy. It was a dangerous pregnancy for her, and everyone was certain I was going to do a Breaking Dawn-style demon spawn pregnancy during which Bella would nobly sacrifice her life, or that she would get everything she wanted and not have to sacrifice anything after all. I got a lot of furious PMs from readers who told me I had just "ruined" the story with "unnecessary drama." (Including one PM in which the reader wrote a 500 word outline of what she "knew" the rest of the plot would be and stated she was flouncing, angry about the plot she had created.)

It was so bad that at one point, I seriously considered taking down the offending chapters and re-writing the whole rest of the story. If you've read "WITS", you'll know why that pregnancy was so important to the rest of the story. Taking it out would have changed the entire last quarter of the tale, because all of the events were intertwined. It probably would have taken me months to come up with a new plotline for the rest of the story. I was sort of depressed about it, to tell you the truth, but I decided to forge ahead and finish the story as my muse had written it. (Though I still wonder if that reviewer is out there somewhere, telling other people her version of the plotline.) And I can tell you with relative certainty that my muse would have flatly refused to cooperate, because she sure as hell wasn't offering me any alternatives at the time and the story probably would have fallen very flat in the latter portions.

My muse is a hard-driving and cruel mistress. She hasn't allowed me to read since October, and for a girl who used to read two or three books per day, this is a massive change in behavior patterns. She's not very flexible, either. I can't switch over in the middle to write a different story than the one she's currently pushing. (I was amazed I was able to do The Better Angels of Our Nature and The Selkie Wife at the same time; that's never happened before.)

In reality, I'm not all that creative. She is. That's why you'll never see me in one of those Iron Pen Contests where a storyline is given to the author and they have to come up with something on the spot. Because I can't guarantee her cooperation. I have to wait until the inspiration hits, and strike while the muse is hot.