Aka, your muse. That amazing, or annoying, little voice stuffing your over-taxed and under-motivated brain with crazy ideas and pie-in-the-sky ventures, like: Taking a trip. Painting a landscape. Studying a foreign language. Or, God forbid, writing a novel.
You can ignore your muse. Many do.
My advice? Do not ignore your muse in favor of monumental time-wasters. Worse yet, pass to your greater or lesser reward, leaving it unfulfilled, haunting your soul for eternity with an endless harangue about that unfinished project in the garage, the picture you never painted, or the sweater you never knitted.
It’s your muse; whatever it is, you better get to it. Who knows? You might even enjoy—and perhaps excel—at the languishing latency within your psyche on perpetual hold.
I surrendered to my muse by creating a comic strip. Little did I realize that conceptualizing the paranormal premise underlying my Lost Cactus comic strip would open a Pandora’s Box of mythology, world-building, and character development that quickly outgrew the 3-panel strip and led to a shared universe of short stories and full-length novels grappling with mind-blowing themes such as the nature of good and evil and humankind’s ultimate place in the universe.
In retrospect, my muse compelled me across a threshold, but the consequences proved unpredictable and surprising.
A prime example of this is The Powers That Be. What began as a throwaway gag name for a string-pulling top secret organization in my comic strip evolved into a fully-realized 300-year-old, akin to the Skull and Bones Society, at the epicenter of my science fiction novels with a diverse, multi-generational cast charged with fostering humankind.
Granted, my initial concepts for this secretive group involved cartoonish villainy of Bondian proportions replete with speargun-toting frogmen guarding undersea lairs and orbiting motherships with requisite henchpeople (Like how I slipped that in?) in shiny silver suits.
However, while this sort of frivolity suited the comic strip, my science fiction novels’ serious themes, and conspiracy-fueled premises require fewer spearguns and more nuance and gravitas. So, the undersea lair went bye-bye while the mothership idea evolved into the fascinating backstory of an extraterrestrial guild spectating upon our freedom-loving forebears’ struggle against tyranny and oppression. Drawing inspiration from George Washington’s divine encounter at Valley Forge, benevolent beings revealed themselves to key historical actors, forming The Powers That Be, a secret alliance to advise and guide humankind through turbulent centuries into a near future at the threshold of human destiny.
My clandestine organization’s paradoxical name, The Powers That Be (or PTB for short), represents the bogeyman in the modern-day vernacular for when things go sideways, providing its menacing allure. Yet it also conveys intrinsic omniscience proliferating mind-blowing advancements in AI and technologies transmogrifying human civilization and tethering the world to teeming networks of streaming data, essential to modern existence but beyond the grasp of a vast majority of humans. Just press the button, and it works.
What if, one day, it doesn’t? Thus, I give you The Powers That Be.
Circling back to your muse—before looming calamity wipes out the world’s infrastructure, rendering this discussion moot—why not follow the nagging little voice and never let the peanut gallery 🥜 hold you back. They will be sorry when the grim reaper makes a house call, and all they have to show for themselves is a lukewarm flat screen and a half-eaten bag of Fritos. Meanwhile, a blank canvas purchased on a whim at the local craft store gathers dust and cobwebs in the back of their closet behind an old gray overcoat nobody wears.
The mind-altering reading experience known as The Powers That Be trilogy is available everywhere books are sold. Seek them out at your prized local bookstore. If they don’t have them in stock on their Science Fiction section shelves, well, ask for them by name: The Golden Ellipse. The Lost Ship. And The Blue Spark.
