Dear Lover~
I read an article tonight in the Arts and Entertainment section on the Wall Street Journal’s website. The article was about the loss of artist’s—poets and all others—muses. The writer mentioned Zelda, Gala, Yoko, Gonne, Georgia, and Suzanne (Fitzgerald, Dali, Lennon, Yeats, Stieglitz, and Balanchine’s respectively). There were other famous muses that I remember reading about over the years, it also mentioned others that I had no knowledge of, my incomplete education, I assumed.
The journalist only mentioned male writers, and their female muses! Appalling reporting I thought, what about us women, and our muses. I have to think all women artists have their own muses, but I couldn’t think of any except for Lillian’s Dash. According to the WSJ writer, the muse-world has thinned out, and while the male artist might still have a muse, the infamous relationship between the muse and the artist is no longer. My heart ached for the romance of the past.
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I enjoy the overstuffed Laura Ashley chinch cushions scattered carelessly around my cerebral office, like a cup of Joe on the go, so is my office. An anywhere room to retreat to, make notes in, to take comfort in, to sip Coppla’s Claret from cut crystal wine glasses, as needed. I purposely decorated the virtual Room of my Own to resemble the real one—it reduced my bank balance by eighty thousand dollars and the single biggest purchase in my vast, and color-tainted life—because the physical room is the gateway to me. It’s where my girl and boy collect. ‘Mommy, can I? Where are my…? Do you know..? I need twenty dollars. Do we have the book called Wuthering Heights?’ I wonder if the eighty thousand was wasted. 
To the left of me is solid and lanky dead asleep. To my right in the corner under the watercolor is my computer. Inside of me is my muse pushing me out of my bed away from a solid known quantity to the right hand corner of my room where the blank white word document and blinking curser are waiting impatiently. She woke me from a peaceful and physically sated deep sleep, solid and lanky is responsible for this. My nasty muse saw a woman today in red boots, they were not the sexy sort with pointy toes, high heels, nor were they sporting the words Tony Lama. 
Disconnected.
I use my blog as a writer’s journal. We writers are supposed to keep track of our thoughts and observations; the annotations in our journal are the fodder for our stories and missives. If you adhere to the credo on writing, a writer should have at least one journal, but more is better because a writer’s thoughts are diverse, and having more than one allows the writer to catalog and keep track of those diverse thoughts. Not able to grasp the concept of multiple journals I only kept one, but I ended up writing ‘Dear Diary’ entries, ‘ he loves me, he loves me not’ and after the first month or so would leave my journal at the bottom on my bag collecting purse crumbs. Determined to conquer journaling because of the innate benefits the writer yields from the daily practice I started quizzing other writers about their respective writing processes. 
Tall and lanky, ethereal and elusive, is mine.
On the eve of the New Year, not the one that just passed couple of days ago, the previous one, I had an idea for a short story. I wrote passionately for several days and quickly realized it was a book length tale, and not short fiction. I didn’t think of my story as a book because doing so would require a commitment, and since I have issues with committing to a weekly television show I didn’t think I could say aloud to myself that I was writing a book. I continued referring to it as a ‘story’.
