People often ask me where my ideas come from. The honest answer is that I haven't the foggiest idea. That's not me being modest — it's just that the Muse doesn't leave a forwarding address. Nor does she give away her secrets.

I know many who wish they had a consistent Muse like mine, but believe me, they wouldn't want her. Most Muses cajole their worshippers, tempting them with ideas to tease them.

Mine carries a whip!

What I can tell you is what it looks like from the outside — or rather, from the inside of my head, which may be worse. Walk a mile in my shoes with me and learn why I am so weird.

Morning: Peace, Quiet, and the Best of Intentions

It usually starts harmlessly enough. After breakfast, I sit down with a cup of coffee and a full hydration bottle, open whatever I was working on the day before, and read back through the last few paragraphs to get myself back into the flow. At least, this is the official plan.

Sometimes, it works.

At other times, what happens is this: somewhere between the first sip of coffee and opening the document, the Muse decides that what I really should be writing is something else entirely. Not the story I left at a crucial point last night. Not the one that’s almost finished and just needs one more scene. Something new. Something shiny. Something that has absolutely no business arriving at half past ten in the morning.

Yes, I get up late! I’m ‘retired’ and don’t have to ‘go to work’. So sue me.

And I can’t ignore it because that’s not how this works. If I do, she sulks. The new idea sits in the back of my mind, poking at me like a persistent child in a supermarket wanting to go to the sweets aisle, and I can’t concentrate on anything else. I’ve learned — the hard way, over 2.19 million words — that it’s much easier just to write the damned thing down.

If I resist her long enough, she gets sneaky.

Once, she wanted me to rearrange the thirty books I was working on at the time, moving stories from one to another. I resisted her for days. Then, she came up with an idea for another book: an origin story for my narrative universe. I thought that, if I gave her this, she would let me off the hook on the rest.

Fat chance. Once I’d got the first couple of thousand words down, she struck! I ended up making the moves she wanted, creating another six books, including the origins one.

“Twenty minutes,” I tell myself. “Four, maybe five hundred words. Just to nail it down, get it out of my system, and move on.”

Reader, it is never twenty minutes.

Late Morning: Down the Rabbit Hole

Here’s the thing about being a Pantser — a Discovery Writer, for those who haven’t come across the term. I don’t plan. I don’t outline. I don’t know what’s going to happen in my stories any more than the characters do. I give myself a prompt (a word, a sentence, a picture, sometimes just a mood) and I find out what happens by writing it.

This means that later in the morning, I usually find myself somewhere completely unexpected. A character who was supposed to be a minor player has taken over two chapters. A story set in Paranormal City has somehow developed a time-travel subplot, which I did not see coming and am not entirely sure I can sustain; I consider moving it to my time-travel book. A fairy story that started as something light and whimsical has just taken a rather dark turn, and I find myself rather pleased, chuckling satanically.

Don't even get me started on what she does to me if I'm researching on the internet! 

This is, I should say, completely normal. For me, anyway. My genres cover science fiction, space opera, urban fantasy, horror, fairy tales, noir, detective fiction, humour — to name but a few — and often more than one in a single tale. My Muse is not what you’d call genre-loyal; instead, I would call her genre-diverse or even fickle. This makes it difficult to find publishers, but she doesn’t care.

Lunchtime: Allegedly

I say ‘allegedly’ because lunch has a habit of not happening on the days when the writing is going well. I’ll surface at some point, realise I’m hungry, glance at the clock, and discover it’s 3 pm. The last of the coffee went cold two hours ago. This is not ideal. I end up grabbing something from the fridge and heading back to my office. 

On the days when it’s not going well, of course, I’m very good at remembering to eat. Funny how that works.

I think they call it ‘being in the flow’.

Afternoon: The Non-Writing Shift

If the morning belongs to the Muse, the afternoon is where I try to deal with the consequences. Read, revise, edit, wash, rinse, repeat. And repeat. And repeat… I’ve gone over some stories dozens of times and still found things to improve.

Annalisa — my writing coach, for newcomers — has done a great deal to help me understand that what comes out in the first draft is not the finished product. It’s just the raw material. The story’s there, but it needs to be brought out, like a sculptor chipping away at the block, or a jeweller taking a rough chunk of stone and polishing a diamond out of it.

The afternoon editing shift used to be, I’ll admit, my least favourite part of the process. Not because I don’t see the value — I do, very much so — but because it requires the kind of sustained, focused attention that the Muse actively works against. She doesn’t want me editing. She wants me to write something new. There’s always something new.

At least, nowadays, she listens when I tell her to shut up. In fact, she sometimes comes around to my way of thinking and gives me some really good ideas for extending the story.

If I'm not editing, I'll be working on writing-related tasks, such as submitting, preparing graphics and text for a blog post, or getting ready to share links on Facebook, Instagram, X/Twitter, etc. Again, these aren't particularly creative, despite what you may think. The Muse thinks the same and keeps giving me new ideas to work with. 

Evening: When She Really Gets Going

And then there’s the evening. This is the Muse’s favourite time because she knows I’m tired and my defences are down.

I’ll be on the sofa, watching something mindless on the telly, or browsing YouTube for a bit of relaxation, and she’ll pipe up with an idea so good I must pause whatever I’m watching and scrabble for the nearest piece of paper. (Notebooks, napkins, the backs of receipts — that’s a whole other blog post about how I started using electronic notebooks.) Sometimes it’s a single line, a perfect opening sentence for something that doesn’t exist… yet. Sometimes it’s an entire plot for a story I wasn’t aware I wanted to write.

And sometimes — the truly inconvenient times — it’s 2 am, and I’m getting ready for bed or have settled down for the night. The Muse decides that now, right now, is the moment to deliver what feels like an entire short story, fully formed, demanding to be written immediately before it dissolves.

Sometimes, I get up. I write it. I am a night owl, after all. This is not a choice. This is just how things are. If I don’t, she will torment me with a sleepless or disturbed night full of crazy dreams. Don’t let anyone tell you that you dream only during REM sleep; I can dream at any point in the sleep cycle.

In Conclusion (If There Is Such a Thing)

As Harlan Ellison once said something like, “An author is a person who is lucky enough to get their name on the cover of a book. A writer is some poor schmuck who can’t help putting words on paper because the Muse has got her claws into them.” I think about that a lot. Not because it’s encouraging, exactly, but because it’s accurate.

I’ve written over 2.19 million words in nearly 14 years. I’m working on somewhere in the region of thirty-five books, covering nearly 600 short stories and chapters. The Muse shows no sign of slowing down, and I’ve long since stopped asking her to.

In fact, I’m not sure I want her to.

I’ll only stop writing when they peel my cold, dead fingers off the keyboard.

Mind you, knowing the kinds of stories I write, it’ll probably be one of my own creations that finally does me in.

❤️ If you enjoyed this, you might also like the Books, Books I have contributed to and Whittlesey Wordsmiths pages — where you can discover some of what the Muse and I have produced together — and the Online page — where there are some stories for you to enjoy, free of charge.