Writing is like riding a bike. When you fall off and crash on the pavement, you have to climb back on the bike and pedal your ass off on your journey. When your laptop crashes and you lose over a year’s worth of material, you have to get back behind the keyboard and write your ass off. If you wait for the scabs to heal, you may never get going again.

In a moment of weakness, I wanted to throw in the towel. After losing so much, I wanted to crawl under my desk and never do this again. But then she spoke to me. In the back of my mind, I heard her song and I longed for her to put me under her spell again. The Muse is nothing to take lightly my friends. For a few days after the crash, I didn’t write. Those few days became rather painful and I felt like going insane.

You see, this writing thing is not something you do to be rich and famous. The need to create is driven by the singular ideal that not creating would drive me out of mind. The Muse is not something standing silently in the background while you do something else. She sings a song in the back of my mind. She wants to tell me her story and to deny her this outlet is to deny me my life.

And oh…she can be jealous…

The days after the crash put me in a really bad funk. The idea to never try to go back and recreate what had been lost slowly began to win. Losing most of two novellas and a forth of a novel killed me. I ignored her calling to me. She went away for a day to let me grieve, but she soon came back. Slowly, I started having trouble sleeping. The lost works resurfaced in my mind while I tried to sleep and the ideas rolled over again and again. She whispered in my ear; taunting me to begin anew. Her voice teased me with the thoughts of changing things to make the lost works better.

I believed her.

I believed her. Not to make her quiet, but I wanted to believe I could climb back on the bike and get the journey moving forward again. Armed with a new PC and my new trusty ways of backing up my work, I began to answer her song. She sang to me and the words came flowing back. As I sit back and reread the new versions of the lost material, I find myself glad the old stuff was washed away. There has been a rebirth of sorts and the drive I thought had crashed and burned with the laptop has returned.

And I sleep at night.

She has been soothed with the outflow of ideas and tales.

We have found our balance again and the darkness in my mind is sated with her speaking through me. Now, I must return to the work because she calls me and I can no longer deny her the song she sings to me.

Goodnight,

Brent