My Muse
By Margaret Hopkins
What do you do when faced with a nasty bout of writer’s block? What do you do when all those fabulous phrases, adorable adverbs, and perky paragraphs just dry up like that once-red geranium sitting on my kitchen windowsill? But unlike the care of the geranium that I admit to neglecting, I’ve nurtured my muse: I read good literature, studied writers’ websites, journaled, poured over guideline pages.
Still, my muse Bob is gone. Perhaps he left me for a younger writer. That often happens to women in my age group. That’s right - maybe Bob wanted a TROPHY writer. Someone who’s flashier, someone who’s fancier, someone who TikToks! Maybe someone who’s writing true crime novels or podcasts. Those seem to be all the rage nowadays. I gave my muse the best years of my life only to be left at the curb like a bag of nonrecyclable packing peanuts! He didn’t even think about the ‘progeny’ he left behind - all those articles and stories we sweated over late at night. I thought we shared something meaningful. The times we laughed together over pieces we finally completed after weeks of sweating over them, cried together over heartless form rejection emails. I know I won’t get any consideration, any compensation from Bob. Maybe he’ll send a few crumbs here and there, like a particularly snappy phrase or a germ of an idea at dawn, while I hover between wakefulness and sleep, it becoming only a vague, nagging itch the next morning on fully waking.
In days to come, he may stop by now and then but damned if I’ll get chummy with him again. After all, how do I know whom he’s been slumming around with lately: one of those hacks from the tabloids, a “how-to” book author, or, heaven forbid, a POET? I could catch something, something bad like dangling participles or split infinitives!
I will just have to move on, find someone new. But I can’t see myself going to the trendy cafes in bookstores, sitting there drinking a latte, giving off those ‘available’ signals, waiting for some muse to approach me. I’m too old for that. There’s nothing worse than a cougar writer strutting her stuff around the bestseller displays or weaving in and out of the literature section looking for a hook-up. It’s just wrong. It’s just pathetic.
I might try websites like musematch.com but I don’t have much hope for those. You never know what you’re getting. A muse might write a profile bragging about how he was previously muse to Stephen King only to find out it’s not the Stephen King but Steven King out of Locust Grove, Georgia who writes manuals for toilet installations.
Maybe I should take a whole different approach. Explore the yin/yang and go with a female muse this time. That’s right, think outside the box. For sure she’ll be more sensitive to my viewpoint as a woman. Maybe she’ll be more understanding and feel less threatened. We could try breaking into the romance market. Who knows? We might even end up sharing shoes!
As for Bob? Well, since dumping me, things have gone downhill for old Bob. What goes around comes around, I guess. Turns out he’s muse to the guy who writes the labels for soup cans. Go figure.
Margaret Hopkins is a freelance writer from the Chicago area. Her humor pieces have appeared in many national as well as local Chicago publications. She has recently reconciled with her muse, Bob.