MY MUSE WON'T BEHAVE

I'm struggling at the moment. I think it's a sleep thing - my little girl has dropped her daytime nap which means I don't get to write/veg/plot/veg/read during the day. It may have been only 60 minutes (90 if I was lucky) but it was a productive 60 minutes, damnit! Even the vegging 60 minutes! It was time-out time and I've worked out time-out time is vital for my brain to reset itself. If my grey matter doesn't reset itself, I switch into vague mode and my muse goes missing.

I've been in vague made for about a week now. Who knows where my muse is?

This means at night, I will sit at my computer (my darling husband recently presented me with a brand new kick-arse Mac to encourage the 'writer's zone' - a phrase I'm sure he read in a Stephen King article once), open my WIP and then proceed to jump around on the net, google myself (a couple of times - you never know when a new site will pop up with my name mentioned in it somewhere!), download trailers, flip about on my fav sights, and generally do ANYTHING apart from work. One of the time-wasting gadgets on my new Mac is a thingy called Dashboard. It's a collection of things one might need in a hurry, ready to go with just the touch of F12. I have one of the 'things' (I know there is a tech name for these 'things' but buggered if I can remember what it is) set to a countdown. It tells me every day how many days left until my WIP is due. Currently it sits at 51. I'm at 5629 words of a 25,000 word manuscript. *sigh* Vague mode jumps up a notch.

So, what do I do when my muse (a cranky bitch with a mean attitude and a meaner glare) won't come out and play? I go and read just about every excerpt available at Changeling Press, Ellora's Cave and/or Loose-Id. I've done this very thing tonight and it makes me realise something. I have so far to go. There are some absolutely amazing, talented, blow-my-mind writers out there. Writers like Vonna Harper (tonight I read the excerpt for Forced. Has anyone read it? Even the cover made me hot and horny!!), Angela Knight and Dakota Cassidy. One day, I want MY name held in the same reverence I hold these writers. So you know what that means? It means it's time to kick my muse in the arse, tell her to stop being a cow and get to fucking work!!

I've had a gutful of her. Vague Mode is over!

Lexxie