Peter gets his mojo back

The muse comes. And she goes. And she comes again, but only for a day. And then she goes, and you can't even reach her on the telephone. In fact the number seems to be disconnected.

I'm happy to report she's back. The muse, I mean. After 7 days of deep, deep, deep despair over my novel - during which I took up Extreme Napping as a hobby - I decided to force the situation. If I couldn't get inspired to write any scenes for my novel (because I'm terrified of not getting into my characters' heads or the historical situation creditably enough), I would do something different. I would finish a short story I started years ago, called Divine Applesauce, about a struggling writer, to whom God appears as a talking apple. It's a humourous piece. God turns out to be not very nice, kind of petulant and childish really, and He's thinking of revoking mankind's free will.

And that seemed to unblock the block, because when I forcibly squeeeeeeeeeezed out the concluding quarter of the story - it was the psychological and creative equivalent of being on the loo when you're seriously constipated - I was not unhappy with some little bits and pieces in my ending. (Although I've since thought of other brilliant things to do to it, and the other writers in my little writing group say it's not finished.) Anyway, the point is that the next day I wrote a lovely scene for my novel, easily, smoothly, as though I'd take a lot of literary-psycho-creative Exlax. Lisa, from my writing group, (who has the most awesome novel about carnival folk inside her) loved my novel scenes which I sent her and told me, essentially, that I was neurotic. She is absolutely correct. Still, it doesn't help in the moment.