Thursday, 20 December 2012

Muse Missing


MUSE MISSING

            Not the band, obviously, this is a blog, not a headline.

            No, my muse has gone missing.  I haven’t done anything new in days.  I have edited part of my next book, improvements I think, but not got anything new.  I’ve blogged before about two new characters, Mac and Mc, by the way not sure I’ve mentioned that before.  Well last week I wrote another short with them, and again it worked well, so well in fact that I think it’s better than the one I originally wrote for the short story competition that brought Mac and Mc into life.  That’s now led to me questioning how good the first story is and whether or not it’s worth entering in the competition at all.

            Oh, self doubt thou art the bane of my life!

            A couple of days ago – now wait – it was last Saturday (Thursday today) I finished The Impossible Dead by Ian Rankin.  I’m not the greatest Rankin fan, though there is a whole bookshelf in this house dedicated to his books, those books belong to my husband who is a Rebus fan.  I’ve given Rebus a go, but just can’t get into that series.    The Malcolm Fox books, however, I enjoy a lot.  I’m not giving anything away to say that I’ve brought my hubby Standing In Another Mans Grave for Christmas. Original idea was to surprise him, but we were in town a couple of weeks ago and he said he was going to buy it, so I had to tell him it was already hidden and ready for him for Christmas.  This book features both Rebus and Fox so it should be an interesting read, and I get second dibs on the book.

            What’s a bit of a coincidence is that since then I’ve started reading Siege by Simon Kernick, I’m only a few pages in, but the story includes a character named Fox.  I’ve also got a book by Zoe Sharp, Killer Instinct which is the first of her Charlie Fox series. And that’s before I mentioned Fox Mulder and Fantastic Mr Fox.  Doubtless there are other wilily foxes out there, but these are the one’s I’ve come across.

            You might wonder what any of this has to do with a missing muse, I did when I started writing this, well I’ll get to that.  But since I started writing, I’ve done a search on the names of the muses and what they are supposed to inspire, and I was rather surprised to see that there is no muse for literature, though there are two for poetry, Calliope and Euterpe, one for comedy, Thalia and one for tragedy Melpomene, so maybe writers have many muses.  By the way, I’ve checked several sites and they’re all slightly different and I’m no classics student, so forgive me if my interpretation differs from yours.

            But for now let us assume that either one of the muses, or a collection there of, are inspiring the writers of the world, does this explain the frequency of similar names or themes?  No, not really, it’s just part of the law of very large numbers, but that’s rather boring and scientific, so for the moment I’m going back to the fanciful.

            So my muse is missing, after all the centuries she’s been doing the job, she deserves a break, right?  Probably needs to catch up on some beauty sleep, though if the myths are to be believed, beauty isn’t a problem for any of them.  Oh well, that’s my rambling over, let’s hope the muses sleep well and awake refreshed ready to spread inspiration to us all.

            Night night then.

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