Dealing with a bad muse today. Experienced with my buttons, she’s pushing them to get her way.

See, I should be editing and revising. It’s round number five on this novel in progress. It’s coming along well but it has a big appetite for my time. I hope, with another round or two, that I’ll have a finished tale that satisifes me. But that comes with a big sigh cuz I’m a little weighed down with the novel. Sixty pages of editing remain of a section which was expanded and shifted in the last two go-arounds. Complicated, they were sloppy and overwritten so I’m addressing what I see. It’s satisfying but tedious.

Bad Muse knows this. She knows that I’m addicted to the creativity experienced while writing a new novel. So Bad Muse is pushing buttons to continue with a new novel in progress. “It’s going well,” she croons, “and it’s fun. Time away from that other one will give you distance and you’ll find the editing is more easily done.”

I don’t know if her logic is right but I don’t like her tone when she says ‘that other one’. So disdainful. Not calling it a novel. Not even referencing it as a book or manuscript. Like she’s talking about another woman, a past girlfriend or wife or such. Oddly, that tone cements a decision that I’m going to edit ‘that other one’.

Take that, Bad Muse.