A Fluff Post: On My Muse

He is called Erato, to be distinguished from the other Erato. He wears leather and big zippers, always left half undone. He's green-skinned, has fangs and is covered with tattoos of snakes and swearwords, but his eyes are the bluest of the blue and angelic. When he's home he is very, very good, but when he's out carousing he is horrid. And mostly he carouses, these days.

Traditionally the muses of writing are seen as female, but I have a male muse. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, if it's still allowed anywhere on earth.

Anyway, the idea of a muse is just a summary way to explain the inner water-hose which fuels my writing. Most days it's just trickling. Some days it's off completely. A few blessed, euphoric and totally exhausting days it blows water at full speed, so fast that I don't have time to take it all down. Those days I end up shivering and breathing very hard, wondering what it was that just happened.

Usually nothing very much happened, but that's how it felt. What comes out of the water hose may be just mud or tadpoles, but the experience is exhilarating.

I suspect that all this make-believe is just another way of writing about "the zone", the kind of state we all enter when something totally takes our concentration, when the game seems to play itself, when every dart we throw hits the bull's eye. It's in the zone that hours disappear, when work is play and play is a strange silent place of utter joy.

Or it might be just Erato writing, when he bothers.