Missing muse

Time was when prose flowed from my keyboard like water over Niagara. I thought that it was going to be pretty much like this always and didn’t pay much attention to it. I concentrated instead on my career and family. Then one day, out of the thousands since, it stopped. I didn’t know it could do that. Some people can dance, some can sing – I thought it was writing for me. Now I’m realizing that writing is something I have to work at, it takes practice and it takes effort. And mostly, it takes persistence. You can’t just expect to pick up a pen and spit out prose like Mark Helprin directly, I can’t anyway.
It’s a lesson that took me years to learn. I had just given up because it didn’t seem important enough at any time. I have never been able to lie to myself very well so I always knew that I would not become a professional fiction writer, something I wanted to do when I was in school. Oh, that and an astronaut or maybe something like Dirk Benedict’s character, Starbuck, from the original Battlestar Gallactica series.
But I do write a lot. In my line of work, I have to translate endless pages of documents from another language to English. But that’s work, there’s none of me in it. There can’t be any of me in it if I ever want clients to come back with return orders. Most of them are official documents which require a totally different mindset. I am not supposed to put anything from my end in them. So that doesn’t actually count. I read somewhere that if you are getting paid for writing fiction and you are still alive, then its probably not very good, just popular, :).
That’s why a blog seems like a good idea. Even though it is a month old now, I still have to try to find the time to write an entry for it. Sometimes I just don’t feel like it. Sometimes I write a piece then never get around to uploading it because the subject matter may intimately apply to people I know and I don’t feel justified in posting it.
I haven’t told anyone about my blog yet, no friends, no family (except for VP in Taiwan). I think it is easier to share information with people I have no clue about or that no one will ever read than about someone who may actually be involved in parts of it.
But if nothing else then at least I am getting practice at writing. That’s something I am proud of. Till last month, I kept procrastinating any kind of writing that didn’t involve me getting paid for it. But this is different, there’s some of me in every blog I write and I like the feeling. I can feel the muse beginning to stir again. Its not anywhere near like the jackhammer I used to feel in my youth, but I can definitely feel the tiny chipping by an ice-pick around the cemented edges of my mental gears. Its nice.
I just hope that this time the muse decides to stick around for a while. I’ll try to be more appreciative and actually try to do a better job. Like most things in our lives, I guess we are more grateful of things that are lost and found again than those that are never lost and we tend to take for granted.