Five years ago a muse nibbled on my brain and created a neat nest for herself. She built herself a comfy homestead. No matter how many times I advised her to move along, she blatantly refused and entrenched herself deeper. Molly is her name. She is my alter ego who encourages me to do better, learn more, and leave my hermit writing cave to buy groceries. She could very possibly be the warden at the station of the obsessive-compulsive disorder of my writer self.

Molly is self-employed, an entrepreneur so to speak. Her business includes the tasks already mentioned in addition to suggesting better vocabulary, plots, characters, She often reminds me to be careful with character motivation and hooks. She will encourage me to rewrite narrative as dialogue and remembers to advise me to create a balance between description and conversations. She insists on character and plot arcs, on black moments, on the heroine’s journey. She likes strong women with self-determined lives. She leans towards love stories during or in the aftermath of war.

Imagine brain synapses as bridges and highways and Molly proposes stopping along the way to think deeper by asking What if…? While I develop my work in progress, she races around my synapses causing major traffic disruptions and delays halting the traffic of plotting to force me to think,, think, think deeper and deeper one level at a time.

I have to say Molly’s adrenaline is high with imagination and low on physical activity in the real world. She often proposes in the middle of the night that we go to yoga class or the beach the instead of writing. In the morning she forgets about yoga or the beach and leads me directly to the keyboard with the cola in hand. Right, a cola. I’m not a coffee drinker but need the caffeine and cola does quiet well so I can keep up with Molly.

I love Molly, but I have to say her sense of time is off. She has none. No sense of balance between the fantasy world of writing and the reality of my physical world. No sense of day and night. Minutes and hours are all the same to her. Never mention a calendar to her. She has never heard of one. She is a muse for independent authors. The word deadline means nothing to Molly. She will interrupt a line of thinking for a work in progress to put forward another plot or character. She will have two works in progress at a time.  There are times I want to slow her down, but no, I really wouldn’t do that. After all, she is a muse, my muse and I couldn’t live being an author without her no matter what my opinion thinks of her faults.