The Writing Moment
The muses insist, “Write, write.” They follow their own order and structure, indifferent to what’s happening in his life or the real world. They don’t care what goes on there. They are there to make him write, no matter how his mind and emotions teeter with the events overtaking his life.
The Writing Moment
He awoke writing in his head, picking up the story where he’d stopped the previous day. Cats were first fed because he wasn’t inexperienced. The cats would haunt home with song until they were fed, and, you know, responsibilities, right? An agreement existed which must be honored on his end.
He settled into his office chair, typing fast for fifteen minutes. Insulated in his fictional world, he heard his wife’s activities as she pursued her post-rising rituals. Mental countdown beginning, he typed faster, racing through the scene to grab it all. The cats joined him, one on the windowsill behind him, speaking to his back, the other jumping up onto his desk, heading for his right side, waiting for him to reach for the mouse, intercepting his hand with a nose mash as he tried selecting a line to copy, paste, move. Then his wife entered talking.
He didn’t know what she said. Muses still shouted words in his head, but he knew the writing moment was done, at least for the moment.
The Writing Moment
“You overthink things,” the muses said.
“Guilty.”
“Don’t. Trust us. Write and enjoy yourself.”
The writer sniffed, a response delivered with a tincture of hurt indignation. “Easy for you to say.”
A muse sighed. “Easier for you to do, if you’ll let yourself.”
Sure, the writer thought. Sure.
The Writing Moment
He kept quiet as he typed, making as little noise as possible. Muses had turned out in a large number and were offering terrific guidance. He didn’t want to scare them off.
The Mt Tam Dream
Mount Tam, full name, Mount Tamalpais, is part of the Marin Hills. Twenty-six hundred feet high, it won’t awe with its rise about the land the way that Mounts Hood and Shasta do, or McLaughlin. I knew abut it from living in the SF Bay area and Peninsula for fourteen years. We’d read about it, and visited twice, maybe three times, during our local explorations.
Didn’t stop me from dreaming about it. First came name confusion. I was being told to go to Mt. Tam. Mt. Tam? Yes, Mt. Tam. We exercised some Laurel & Hardy exchanges about what was being said. I’d quickly reached the point where I understood that I was being told to go to Mt. Tam. My point, which I struggled to convey with little humor, was, why do I need to go to Mt. Tam? But they — the unseen folks I was speaking to, but who sounded and seemed male — were fixated on ensuring that I understood the place’s name without clarifying why going there was important. The back and forth eventually felt as painful as a bad tooth.
They gradually led me to believe there is something in Mt. Tam, the something never being explained, continuing my stretch of exasperation. I’m supposed to go to Mt. Tam to get something that’s there that I’ll know what it is when I get there. Seems significantly vague.
Then, going over the dream, I wonder, was Mt. Tam a literal destination being directed to me from my dream masters or a metaphor for matters churning through my subconscious? Bonus discussion points, for me, anyway: how much of this dream was influenced by The Overstory, as I’m currently reading that. For that matter, how much is generated from wrestling with the novel in progress?
Michael Seidel, writer 