just another good ol'fashion rambling mind dribble drabble...

 Just trying to get connected to the muse... again... I used to be able to do this quite easily, in fact, it used to be so easy to do that I think for a number of years I was plugged in and connected to the muse more than I was not. Those were the highly productive years when I was working on my Cemetery Girl photo project AND writing my Cemetery Girl novel... a good seven to ten years I was in that state of continually flowing inspiration... easily the best years of my life. I had no boss other than the muse, and she LOVED me, soo soo much.

How did my marriage to her disintegrate? I think this is a question worthy of deep contemplation. But maybe I should go back to the beginning of how and when I first met her. In the mid-2000s, when I first decided to experiment with stopping taking psych meds (which took about a year to clear out of my system and to begin to feel freedom from the mind control my pdoc exerted over me)... the agoraphobia started to wane and I signed up for an anthropology class at the local junior college. Mind you, I was already practically a full-fledged anthropologist after all the years of study at UCSC... I just needed to step out of my fear zone and begin to exercise my mind again. It was while sitting inside that classroom with Professor Jayne Smithson, a full-fledged anthropological guru that gave many, many students spiritual awakenings of many mystical types... that the inspiration to write a novel crept into my mind and heart, and soul. By the end of that semester course, I had a fully outlined and researched plot established. 

Was Jayne my muse? In some ways, yes, she was a physical embodiment of pure, raw inspiration for me. But what about the timing of why and when I signed up for that course. Plus my body and mind were free of chemicals... all these components constituted a perfect recipe of Muse Soup for me... after I left her classroom the muse was alive and well and fully attached to my active duty willpower that propelled me into close to a decade of hyper-real artistic productivity.

What would be extremely interesting to me would be to examine the astrological configurations I was going thru at that time. Perhaps I was experiencing a once-in-a-lifetime series of transits that fully supported exactly what I surrendered myself unto at that time. And why I have found it difficult to replicate such powerful inspiration yet again.

There were times in the last years that I was writing seriously that I could foresee myself being able to come up with story ideas profound enough to enable me to write novel after novel, right up until the end of my life. Thinking back on how inspired I was during those months and years, it feels like an aspect of myself that I could slip back into... what stopped me from writing, from completing the work of editing the first novel that I wrote were feelings of inadequacy in regards to being able to do the grunt work of editing and rewriting my draft. For at least two years, during the height of my creative phase I fought and struggled to create some kind of discipline to get that work done, but I repeatedly gave up in utter, hair-pulling frustration. I felt completely unqualified to do that work and begged the gods to bring a person into my life that loved to do that kind of work, who would work by my side to do it all for me. God, let me just be free to be in this creative zone where I can pour out novel after novel, and then hand my drafts over to my "assistant" and let them do the dirty work that I cannot do... I'd give them so much acknowledgment and credit for their labors!  Oh, how I begged god for this, but no one ever appeared to step into this position for me... so I ended up resigning to the fact that I was destined to be a failure at any attempts to be a successful writer.

And yes, I know that the internet is full of success stories of millions of self-taught writers/editors that overcame these obstacles and edit their own work and are their own agents and get all the book deals they could ever dream of having... I tried to follow their instructions, I honestly did, until my eyes and fingers bled from frustration... I just don't have the full toolbox of mental wherewithal to do that for myself.

The last time I got to this point of trying to decide if its worth my while to write, even if just fo the sake of writing to please only myself... I thought perhaps it is... it's just this damned socially driven internet world that keeps pulling at you saying, "Oh we are all successes at this, you can be too..." that tries to pull me back in... I literally wrote three full novels worth of text during those years of inspired devotion to my keyboard. One of the novels I shared with two people that read them... the other two, which in my humble opinion are better, no one has seen those. They are locked in files on my cloud account. And maybe it will continue that no one will ever see them. After all these years of feeling like I wish someone could see and read them, perhaps I'm getting close to the point where I can say, ahhh to hell with the world. What they don't know they are missing won't hurt them. I HAD SOUL SATISFACTION sitting here at this keyboard for 100s of hours writing those words, JUST BE SATISFIED WITH THAT SATISFACTION YOU EXPERIENCED. This might be the answer that I need to just be content with. Sit and write my heart out until my fingertips bleed and just be happy for that flow of divine inspiration that poured through your heart and mind and LET IT BE. 

Until someone walks into my life that hungers for raw writing to edit because that's what their muse urges them to do, I may only be able to write for the cloud. I need to surrender to this.