In Conference with the Muse
an excerpt

I often wonder what my life would be like without the three-inch terror currently pacing across my shoulders. Reminding me of the reason I had long ago started sleeping on my stomach – one too many kicks in the chin. She’s been known to do it if none of her other tortures wake me up.
“Move I growl into the pillow while hunching my shoulders. Thankfully, her feet leave and there’s a rustle to my right on the nightstand and I know she’s taken her favorite spot on the alarm clock. I roll to my side and crack open my eyelids. Yup, she’s sitting on the clock her trim, shapely and tiny little legs dangle between the two and the three of two-thirty. I’d kill her if she wasn’t such a necessary evil.
I’m a writer – or rather I’m a girl with a dream of making a hobby a career. The three-inch terror swaying on my alarm clock is my inspiring, temperamental, frustrating and infuriating muse. We have a love-hate relationship. She loves to torture me with new ideas at weird times and places and I hate how she won’t see them through to finish.
“What is it this time?” I manage to say through a yawn. These early morning visits always mean she has a new story idea. Behind me I hear my husband snoring, he isn’t tormented by a demanding muse.