Kissing the Muse

Creative people understand that you need to kiss the muse if you are to stay in the game.

This lovely lady likes to sneak up on you and inspire you at unpredictable moments.

You’re grocery shopping. You see a jar of peanut butter. Suddenly, a poem about peanut butter sandwiches in your childhood comes to you fully formed. You’ve been kissed by the muse.

You’re driving down the road. The yellow dotted lines on your left remind you of the dotted line you signed when getting divorced. A song springs into your head, melody and lyric. You have to keep singing it to make sure you don’t forget it, so when you finally stop you can record it. (Or, as I sometimes do, you pull out your phone and hit “record”). Again, kissed by the muse.

Recently I was thinking of a girl I knew in Law School. We barely knew each other but I remembered a moment during a co-ed softball game. I played catcher, she came up to bat. She was a short, thin woman, red-haired, lovely with a spectacular posterior. I recall her disdainful look as she batted, as she was wearing shorts and she knew I was hypnotized by her posterior.

As I remembered her, a whole unconsumated relationship emerged in my head. I called her “Pixie” (she was not known by this name in school). I had an entire scenario of how we disliked each other but ended up in bed together and eventually married. Nothing like the truth, but the muse was kissing me, French kissing me, her hands all over my imagination.

I have always wanted to write a mystery based on a weird incident which happened when I was at Boalt Hall School of Law in Berkeley. The story of Pixie and my imaginary avatar seemed to dovetail into it.

So now I am 5000 words into a new mystery, “The Socratic Method.” The protagonist is a Vietnam Vet named Socrates Holmes. (People keep asking if he’s related to Sherlock Holmes, and he says “Sherlock Holmes was a fictional character and I am not. So, no.” But eventually he gets tired of reminding people of this, so he just says “He was my great grandfather.”)

A professor is found stabbed to death and Socrates’ friend Judith is found holding the knife. So now he has to find the evidence which will acquit her.

And yes, he and a young woman student named Pixie do not like one another but end up in bed together. To spoil the outcome, Pixie ends up pregnant at the end of the book and Socrates proposes to her in the hallway of Boalt.

Romantic, yes?

The muse likes that kind of stuff. She’s all over me these days on this book. So I have to write what she gives me.

Thanks, girl. I needed that.