The Muse–Fact or Fiction?

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I’ve been giving a lot of thought to whether The Muse™ is a real thing; a little fairy in diaphanous Grecian garb who plunks herself down on your shoulder and dictates all your best ideas while you loll, helpless and half-conscious, like some Delphic oracle mad on fumes from the underworld.  Or perhaps it’s just a prosaic source of prose that emanates from some intuitive area of the mind we can only see with a stealthy peek out of the corner of our consciousness.

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Thalia, Muse of Comedy

Certainly, ideas do seem to pop out of the ether, whether that be ethylene-induced, absinthe-derived, or pulled right out of the proverbial arse.  I do experience that “it came to me in the shower” phenomenon so many writers describe.  (Which may suggest the muse is a bit of a perv.)  Characters, plot points, jokes and denouements all pop out on the page without me deciding anything.  Now, far smarter folk than I have investigated this topic exhaustively, though I don’t think I’ve heard a comprehensive explanation that quite covers it for me.

Product of the unconscious mind? Sure, I can get with that. But until philosophers and neuroscientists map that out, we have no idea how that works or even what to do with that information.

So shall we go with Grecian demigoddesses, metaphorical though they be?  Why not.

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What to Expect When You’re Expecting…

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I was just thinking… I haven’t really gotten a chance to share what it was like to find a publisher for BLISS–what, in fact, the whole process of writing it and shopping it around was like.

Short answer?  Like birthing 65 bowling balls without an epidural (or an explanation for why I would be pregnant with bowling balls).

But let me back up.

I’ve known I wanted to write novels since I was able to read novels.  And I’ve never had a desire to do anything else, at least professionally. (I delight in being a dilettante with baking and crocheting.)  When I was very young, right out of college I had the almost-too-easy experience of selling my first novel, a historical romance, to a major publisher without an agent and without shopping it around.  That’s a story for another day, but I will say that it gave me a skewed-as-hell idea of what it was like to get published, how rare and difficult it is.  Later, I worked in the industry as an agent’s assistant and saw firsthand how tough it really is–even for great writers, which I was not.

A few years and a few life left turns later, I… Continue Reading »

Beginnings

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Welcome, dear readers, if any there be. Wonderful things have happened to me this year, and I’m so glad to be able to brag… er, I mean, share my good news.  So, what am I on about?

Well, a year ago somebody asked me what my goals were. I said, without hesitation, that I’d like to get my novel published and to be a normal weight by the time I was 40.  With a little help from Weight Watchers and the folks at Redhook Books (for whom I would gratefully bear firstborn, do laundry, wash windows, etc), I’m getting to see both these efforts come to fruition.  After 7 months obsessing over “points” and sweating out details on my magnum opus (or maybe it’s a minimum opus – that’ll be for you to decide) I lost 42 pounds (my favorite number, because of Douglas Adams) and BLISS is coming out in November.  And I’m still just 39.  (I will probably stay that way for a good ten years, but it’s actually true for now.)

Yee to the HAW!

This blog will serve to share more triumphs, admit to struggles, keep you abreast of doings both great and small, and inflict pictures of fuzzy animals and sweet desserts on you whenever possible.  I hope to share snippets of my novel-in-progress, “outtakes” from BLISS, and whatever else strikes m’ fancy.

For now, here’s a little something from my “research” for Book 2.

Alpaca3

Three Crocheted Cupcakes