The elusive muse

There's half an hour until midnight.

Wasted the evening in feverish attempts to get the look and feel of this place right - a warm dark melancholy space for my musings.

Anyway. So here I am. Procrastinating from my creative works. I say 'works' in the present tense, but really, it's stagnant. I'm pressed for a short piece. Which is really actually a long piece. But 700 words to start. Right now.

So I'm sliding into that dark padded feeling of a frustrated writer. I have no story. Correction. I have no words for this story. I've been threatened by all sorts of cliches. Bombarded, in fact, by them. A muddy mind is a very vulnerable place for cookie cutters. O. And a set of characters who I've been arguing with since its inception.

The delete button is glossy from my abuse. Sentences gobbled up into the nether. Well. If it sucks - it should be obliterated. Okay. I lie. I delete an awful lot. But I save an awful lot of dribble as well. Just in case. Not that I've ever gone back. Hehe. Byte me. Geddit? Forgive me... its late.

So I decided her name would be Ellie. It's completely random and slightly haunting how characters just appear. To be precise, I was having one of a frozen meals. I do that often. Frozen meals because I don't like to cook. The preparation puts me off. The food juice on hands put me off.

There's a security camera at the kitchen of my office. I wonder if they think I'm slightly OCD... Work have bins posing as kitchen drawers. A minimalist kitchen with no handles. Not that I would do any different with handles. I use a paper towel to open it. Sometimes, I leave it open. But I lean away, paranoid of the warm fumes spreading with tendrils of bacteria... I digress.

So Ellie has appeared. Like a bullet in my head. It was the same with Snowflake and Patience (I still call her Scarlet sometimes - that was what I began with. Aha! Another idea... I won't share that now though. Surprise later. Maybe...). Leonard, Eden and Dolly materialised in the same fashion, as did infact the whole world they inhabit.

But that's where it stops dead. That is. For me. Writers have all sorts of epiphanies and quirky processes. I admire those particularly who can write complex schemes and plot a world class net work of conspiracies. I feel completely lame next to them. I write settings. Descriptions. A picture of a moment. And then what?

And that's the frustration. Ellie is not happy. She sat patiently on a blank page waiting for my words to materialise. They do. And many times over. I flung her down the stairs. I held her captive in a hospital room. She even enjoyed a moment on Bondi Beach. She knew as well as me - none of those were her true beginnigs. So now we're stuck.

Where to Ellie?
Beats me.
You're the writer.
Hmmph.

So I abandon her completely. Try a different angle. Lets audition Faith, Joshua, Ethan... But their performances don't gel, there is no spark. No creative itch that sweeps them through one door into a another and another. Well, how can they really, I'm not sure their names are for keeps. 'Working names'. It's insulting really.

Maybe tomorrow will be better.