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flipflop_divaThe full prompt: "Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life"
I was four years old when I met my muse. I was too young to write, or read, or spell my name, but she appeared to me anyway, like a fairy godmother I had read about in fairytales.
“I am your muse,” she told me that first day.
“Are you going to help me find a prince?” I asked eagerly.
“Even better,” she said. “I am going to help you make friends.”
And just like that, my friends were born.
They were my age, five of them. Rebecca, Mandy, Nicole, Jennifer and Jessica. We liked to play games together. Our favorite was bouncing the ball off the side of the garage at my grandparents’ house, harder and harder, and seeing who could make the most catches. Jessica always won. She was really good.
We also told each other stories and sometimes competed to make the best looking Lego house. No one else could see my five friends, but they were some of my best companions until they moved away when I got older.
The second time I met my muse, she handed me a bunch of lined paper that had been folded in half and stapled down the center, so it formed a book of sorts.
Together, we wrote our first story (though, of course, only my name was on the cover, spelled out in giant letters written in crayon, a different color for every letter like the professionals do). It was about a little girl who wanted to go to school, but her parents wouldn’t let her.
Each page had a beautiful crayon illustration, done in the style of Picasso but featuring an extra special touch where the coloring did not have to be inside the lines.
My parents bought the first and only copy ever produced — for a penny. They left a glowing review.
When I was ten, my muse came back. We decided to expand our talents to the theater. My next-door neighbors, Aileen and Aaron, and my sister, Liz, were the other actors in the troupe we formed.
We practiced almost every time we got together. The dog thought we were doing a remarkable job. Somehow, though, we never made it to opening night. Probably because our parents made us go back to school, and then made us do homework instead of practicing. They were not very understanding.
(Later, my sister and I would go on to produce a successful play, starring every single one of our Cabbage Patch kids. The two seats in the audience sold out quickly, and my parents said it was the best thing they’d ever seen. Unfortunately, the theater went out of business immediately afterward and a second performance never occurred.)
When I was twelve, my muse and I branched out into a series of novels. The Kids on Maple Street. It was going to be as popular as The Baby-Sitters Club. I could already see myself on top of the New York Times’ Best-Sellers List.
Together, my muse and I sketched out the first ten books, writing out the main plot points in a little notebook. We also drew pictures of every character. By the time we were ready to start writing book one, we had more than a hundred characters. Maple Street was a big street, after all.
We started writing our book series, a little bit every day. Until the day my muse went away and I was left with a pile of half-finished stories written in colored notebooks stuffed in the back of a drawer.
I didn’t forget my muse, though — and she didn’t forget me. Fairy godmothers never do, really; sometimes, they just give you a chance to figure out what it is you really want. And I wanted to write. I wanted to tell stories that brewed inside me. I wanted to dive into the words on the page and get lost in a story only I could tell.
So my muse came back. I was in college then. She appeared in my dorm room and looked around at the piles and piles of suspense thrillers I had been reading and said, “Don’t worry. We can do that!”
We did do that. We wrote every day for months on end until we had pages and pages and pages of a finished novel. About a girl named Cassie who didn’t know she was a clone of the real Cassie who had died until the government started to hunt her down for reasons the muse and I never quite fleshed out (though if they had been fleshed out, they obviously would have been really good reasons).
I graduated, and Cassie’s story went on to a floppy disk that I probably still have somewhere. (There might also be a printed copy, tucked away in a box that was never unpacked after moving a few times across the country, but that rumor cannot at this time be either confirmed or denied.)
A few years later, the muse came back again. She told me to turn on my computer. “There’s something you have to see!” she said. And together, my muse and I held hands and jumped into the rabbit hole known as fanfiction.
It was a strange world — sometimes inspiring, sometimes disturbing, sometimes amusing, always enjoyable. But it was a world that did something that nothing else had been able to do — it convinced my muse to stick around.
She gave me story after story after story. She made the characters live in my head. And she made sure her words that she gave me were so intense that there was no way to go for long without letting them out on to a blank Word document or typed on the notepad app on an iPhone.
I worry that someday my muse will go away again. I worry that I won’t be able to do this without her. But for now she is here, in every word and every sentence, watching over me.
(Although she has an odd habit of appearing very close to deadlines. Some day, we might need to talk about that.)
non-fiction. except, of course, I've never actually seen my muse. but I used to imagine she looked just like the fairy godmother in cinderella. now, she's kicking back in jeans and flip-flops and drinking a glass of wine.
Thank you for reading! This was written for Week 17 of the![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
therealljidol. We each had to write five entries this week. If you would like to read the entries from the other contestants, you can find them here!
I was four years old when I met my muse. I was too young to write, or read, or spell my name, but she appeared to me anyway, like a fairy godmother I had read about in fairytales.
“I am your muse,” she told me that first day.
“Are you going to help me find a prince?” I asked eagerly.
“Even better,” she said. “I am going to help you make friends.”
And just like that, my friends were born.
They were my age, five of them. Rebecca, Mandy, Nicole, Jennifer and Jessica. We liked to play games together. Our favorite was bouncing the ball off the side of the garage at my grandparents’ house, harder and harder, and seeing who could make the most catches. Jessica always won. She was really good.
We also told each other stories and sometimes competed to make the best looking Lego house. No one else could see my five friends, but they were some of my best companions until they moved away when I got older.
The second time I met my muse, she handed me a bunch of lined paper that had been folded in half and stapled down the center, so it formed a book of sorts.
Together, we wrote our first story (though, of course, only my name was on the cover, spelled out in giant letters written in crayon, a different color for every letter like the professionals do). It was about a little girl who wanted to go to school, but her parents wouldn’t let her.
Each page had a beautiful crayon illustration, done in the style of Picasso but featuring an extra special touch where the coloring did not have to be inside the lines.
My parents bought the first and only copy ever produced — for a penny. They left a glowing review.
When I was ten, my muse came back. We decided to expand our talents to the theater. My next-door neighbors, Aileen and Aaron, and my sister, Liz, were the other actors in the troupe we formed.
We practiced almost every time we got together. The dog thought we were doing a remarkable job. Somehow, though, we never made it to opening night. Probably because our parents made us go back to school, and then made us do homework instead of practicing. They were not very understanding.
(Later, my sister and I would go on to produce a successful play, starring every single one of our Cabbage Patch kids. The two seats in the audience sold out quickly, and my parents said it was the best thing they’d ever seen. Unfortunately, the theater went out of business immediately afterward and a second performance never occurred.)
When I was twelve, my muse and I branched out into a series of novels. The Kids on Maple Street. It was going to be as popular as The Baby-Sitters Club. I could already see myself on top of the New York Times’ Best-Sellers List.
Together, my muse and I sketched out the first ten books, writing out the main plot points in a little notebook. We also drew pictures of every character. By the time we were ready to start writing book one, we had more than a hundred characters. Maple Street was a big street, after all.
We started writing our book series, a little bit every day. Until the day my muse went away and I was left with a pile of half-finished stories written in colored notebooks stuffed in the back of a drawer.
I didn’t forget my muse, though — and she didn’t forget me. Fairy godmothers never do, really; sometimes, they just give you a chance to figure out what it is you really want. And I wanted to write. I wanted to tell stories that brewed inside me. I wanted to dive into the words on the page and get lost in a story only I could tell.
So my muse came back. I was in college then. She appeared in my dorm room and looked around at the piles and piles of suspense thrillers I had been reading and said, “Don’t worry. We can do that!”
We did do that. We wrote every day for months on end until we had pages and pages and pages of a finished novel. About a girl named Cassie who didn’t know she was a clone of the real Cassie who had died until the government started to hunt her down for reasons the muse and I never quite fleshed out (though if they had been fleshed out, they obviously would have been really good reasons).
I graduated, and Cassie’s story went on to a floppy disk that I probably still have somewhere. (There might also be a printed copy, tucked away in a box that was never unpacked after moving a few times across the country, but that rumor cannot at this time be either confirmed or denied.)
A few years later, the muse came back again. She told me to turn on my computer. “There’s something you have to see!” she said. And together, my muse and I held hands and jumped into the rabbit hole known as fanfiction.
It was a strange world — sometimes inspiring, sometimes disturbing, sometimes amusing, always enjoyable. But it was a world that did something that nothing else had been able to do — it convinced my muse to stick around.
She gave me story after story after story. She made the characters live in my head. And she made sure her words that she gave me were so intense that there was no way to go for long without letting them out on to a blank Word document or typed on the notepad app on an iPhone.
I worry that someday my muse will go away again. I worry that I won’t be able to do this without her. But for now she is here, in every word and every sentence, watching over me.
(Although she has an odd habit of appearing very close to deadlines. Some day, we might need to talk about that.)
non-fiction. except, of course, I've never actually seen my muse. but I used to imagine she looked just like the fairy godmother in cinderella. now, she's kicking back in jeans and flip-flops and drinking a glass of wine.
Thank you for reading! This was written for Week 17 of the
therealljidol. We each had to write five entries this week. If you would like to read the entries from the other contestants, you can find them here!
no subject
Date: 2019-03-13 12:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-21 04:36 pm (UTC)This was a fun read!
no subject
Date: 2019-03-21 07:46 pm (UTC)I had a spell where I continuously sang my life as an opera when I was really young! "I'm walking down the street... and I'm about to go into the sweet shop" etc... haha!
no subject
Date: 2019-03-21 08:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-22 05:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-22 05:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-23 05:46 am (UTC)