Neil Gaiman described his muse at inkwell in 2002:

quote:

"Harassed (...) She never knows what she's going to have to come up
with next.
(...)
I think she has a slightly hunted look, actually.
On the stage I compared her to Steve King's muse, who, i said, spends
most of her time going "hey, Steve, you see that chair? you could do a
story about a chair THAT EATS PEOPLE!"
I think my muse has tangled hair and a butterfly mind..."

So what's your muse like?

I've posted about my muse before, so this is him:

quote:

He sits on my desk all day, drinking my booze and saying random things like:
"Kill 'em all off. All of 'em."
Or: "Hey, what about some incest to spice things up?"
When I'm writing he reminds me how great it would be to play pinball instead. When I'm doing that, he tells me to get back to work.
I have to keep him on a tight leash.
Well, I guess he's cheap.

I'm not really sure about my muse, it comes from inside my head and is mainly based on a life I wish I had.

Though I suspect that it's quite similar to Steven King's muse.

This is an excellent question. I have a guy named Fred who is my writer of the subconscious, but he's not the same as my muse (Fred looks like Robert Crumb's Mr. Natural, btw).

My muse...is still asleep right now.

My muse dances and plays with all of the characters I've created, and has fun little adventures with them then tells me about them with a lyric in her voice that says "you should be writing this down, lalala". Fortunately for me she has these adventures, since it keeps the characters on the radar, but it teases me just the same, dangling the vingnettes like hooks with juicey worms, enticing me to the keyboard. Unfortunately, hearing about them, I often get discouraged and figure I need to wait for something else more exciting to come along, something worthy of writing down, something the characters haven't done yet. It's only then, when I beat my muse to the punch, that anything gets written.

edit: and that is perhaps the most creative thing i've written in quite some time ~sigh~

My muse doesn't want me to tell you his name. He doesn't like crowds. I don't know how he found me, but now that he has, I can't get rid of him.

He rides with me in the car to work, sits with me in my cubicle at the office, follows me home afterward. All the time smoking cloves and always offering me one (which I turn down, but second-hand smoke is only so bad -- I get a good whiff of his). He drinks unhealthy amounts of coffee (which I always partake in). Occasionally, he asks what I want to listen to, but most of the time when it's just the two of us, he just puts on music. He sings along to a lot of the songs in his rough, gravelly voice. He's always tapping his fingers, but sometimes he dances. Always antsy. Always angsty. Always quick to smile. He'll make you flinch with a flippant and offensive comment one second, then says something heart-breaking and beautiful -- filled with understanding -- the next. He curses and drinks and swears and preaches and flirts and prays and laughs. God, he can laugh so hard. Surprsingly, he's got a great sense of humor.

Then he looks at me, with that fantastically wicked toothy grin, the one that's extremely contagious, and with smoke curling up from the clove between his fingers, he points at me and says, "Hey, listen to this shit..."

I can't imagine what it'd be like without his company.

My muse is mostly nice. She cares very deeply about all of my characters, and hates me killing them off, or otherwise ruining their lives. We occasionally need to have long chats about what exactly entails "drama."
Me: OK, so where are we going?
Muse: Well, the characters are going from point A to point B.
Me: I like it. Only, to get there, we need to have character 1 fall into a pit, and character 2 needs to be eaten by a dragon.
Muse: Oh, but I like those characters. You can't kill them.
Me: Me too, but sometimes you need to let things go for the greater good. It's art.
Muse: YOU CAN'T KILL THEM!
Me: *sigh* fine.

Also, she has a bad habbit of giving me really good ideas when I can't write them down, like when I'm falling asleep, or at work.

My muses (I think I have two?) come from the second or third novel I ever attempted at writing. For some reason, I can't exactly get them out of my head. Both are self absorbed males. One of them more vocal then the other. Ignatius and Sigmund, they are, by name. Sigmund smokes and drinks in unhealthy amounts and has a skin condition. He's also much more vocal and much more... of "a character." He also has the habbit-- or un-habbit, as it were--of not bathing.
Ignatius is British and moody. They are friends and enimies with long histories of fighting each other. You can find them in the novel I'm working on, Paradise Blood. (plug plug!) Hopefully, one day, they will leave me alone.

My muse is dolphin-like. He swims through the turbulant waters of story telling leaving curling swirls of narative in his wake that overlap and blend into each other in a confusing mish-mash. Sometimes we swim along so fast it is like flying. Other times we dive so deep I think I may never find the surface again.

Interesting that so many muses cuss, smoke, and drink. Maybe mine should start? I dunno. The shit she comes up with is weird enough sometimes. And I'm not sure she'd be any more inspiring if she did.

JP, it all sets a really good mood, which seems to help me (my children's stuff is always better when that guy's cursing in my ear, smoking and drinking -- makes for some interesting kid fiction -- then again, none of it's published, so maybe it's not that hot after all). I don't really know how much it actually helps, besides the tone. Did you see Live at the Aladdin?

I do all the cussing smoking and drinking, so my Muse is more concerned with housework and paying the bills.

quote:

Did you see Live at the Aladdin?

Nope, never did see it. What's the connection?

There's a funny little poem/story that Neil reads about writers-drinking-to-get-inspired-and-produce. The Martha Soukup poem. It doesn't work out so well for the narrator, but it's very amusing. Check it out some time, if you have a chance.

Um, Cavenagh. Can I swap your muse with mine for a month or two?

my muse tells me to burn things.

mostly i don't listen.

mostly.

Yeah, we've all seen you burn cookies before.

they don't let me bake cookies anymore.

not since the "Incident"

i'm not allowed to threaten people with the big knives either. spoil sports.

Good god, woman. You've been here just over a year and you're at 9k. I've been here nearly 5 years and I'm just now approaching 10k.

shhh!

maybe no one will notice...

I've got 5 years and I'm at 650 lol

My muse has gone on holiday. She didn't think to bring me, the bitch!

Hopefully she'll come back!