Flirting With Inspiration

Here it is Monday evening already.  I have a steaming cup of coffee beside me (still without International Delight French Vanilla creamer … thanks for asking).  I have Peter White on the headphones (his “Caravan of Dreams” CD).  My feet are up on the aging ottoman (an entire empire for my feet).  I’m already in my lounge wear (which somehow sounds more refined than “pajamas”).

Life is good.

I’m feeling in a very write-y mood tonight.  I’m sure, my fellow writers, that you know this feeling well.  It is that feeling you get sometimes, a sort of giddy head-rush that comes on like lightening, and suddenly you think you can write anything.  You feel, if you could just get to a keyboard or a blank journal, that you could dash off the next great novel or poem or short story or essay or whatever.

Unfortunately, the feeling often dissipates like vapor when I actually sit down to write.  Life … particularly the writing life … is funny like that.  Inspiration comes and goes on its own schedule.  It is very cagey and elusive and capricious.  It is like the worst lover you ever had.  She is in and out of your life, making you feel giddy and heady and elated one minute when she arrives to “give it another chance”, and then making you morose and despondent and disconsolate when she leaves the very next moment for no particular reason that you can discern.

So you shout after her, “Well, go on then!  I didn’t need you anyway!  I’ll be just fine without you!”

But she’s already gone.

So you just sit and stare at the keyboard awhile.

Then you get up and go to bed.