Favourite thing I’ve written and why #evernighties

Dear readers, the Evernight Authors have banded up for a year-long blog challenge, with a new prompt every Thursday meant to encourage our tired brains to post more creative and interesting content (or so we hope). So here I go with my first post, and it's a whopper, if I say so myself.

I am always utterly in love with whatever I write. I cannot write in a lukewarm, premeditated, mechanical way. But my favourite things are certainly Woman as a Foreign Language and A Muse to Live For.

Having to choose, I will go with Muse. Both of these two stories belong to my loosely interconnected transgender trilogy (Spice & Vanilla being the middle book), and both have a strong autobiographical streak, but whereas WaaFL’s main character, Nina, is based on a much younger version of me, Nathaniel, the hero in A Muse to Live For is an alter ego much closer to my present self, and he allowed me to put into words a whole scary lot of emotions that had nowhere else to go.

I have always been attached to the concept of “muse”, muse as a specific person, not muse as a disembodied, psychological state of creative fervour, because I always very much felt it on my skin.

A muse is different from an inspiration... you pick an actor or a model to give a face to a character, that happens all the time, and it can be wonderful, it can bring a character to life in ways you had not anticipated... but a muse you don't pick. It barges in your life when you least expect it and turns your vision upside down ... A muse brings you to places, creatively, that you had never imagined or suspected before.

It is mystery, and magic. It is wonderful, compulsive, and terrifying. Sometimes it's all you can do to hang on and hold it together, while your puny talents are used to try and express something much, much too big. Where does it come from? I do not know. It is a power not of this world, and when it leaves, it leaves you in pieces.

It makes me laugh to read the “experts” saying "there is no muse, only habit". Poor bloodless saps, if only they knew.

Having been thoroughly “mused” in the last eighteen months, and having gone through the most intensely creative period of my life after four years of writer (and painter) block, I felt this topic to be especially poignant.

I wanted to write about the fearsome, transforming magic of true inspiration, the powerful and entangled feelings and flows of energy that bind an artist to their muse, and the devastating depression that can result from the loss of all this.  How to describe a relationship that includes elements of love, obsession, and a sort of mystical reverence, but also a kind of fear, and a harrowing sense of dependence? Because if an artist is not creating they become an irrelevant person. They might as well not exist.

And how to convey the astonishing disconnect between an artist’s perception of their muse as something noble, pure, almost supernatural, and the everyday, down-to earth, flawed, fragile human reality of the person who, for some mysterious reason, carries this inexplicable power of inspiration, and is often as puzzled as they are flattered by the artist’s fascination?

And how to morph all this creative/destructive power into the deliriously wondrous ever-after that such energy can fuel, once released?

The choice to base the book in Victorian times was partly due to the fact that I wanted my artist to be innocent of the revolting cynicism brought to poetry, art and literature by Freud and his minions. But I also specifically wanted to write a Pre Raphaelite, if not one of the original Brotherhood, at least an associate of the second Pre Raphaelite movement. I have a veneration for Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who also, undoubtedly, knew the power of a true muse first hand. 

It was strange how many eerie coincidences kept cropping up between my characters’ story and Rossetti’s life, which I only researched more extensively while writing the book, culminating perhaps, with a line he wrote to his mistress and greatest inspiration, Jane Morris, when she was away in Germany, “…no one else seems alive at all to me now, and places that are empty of you, are empty of all life…”. When I discovered this, it gave me the queerest shiver, because I had used almost exactly the same words in my story, and because that is the absolute and terrifying truth of it all.

I do not know if a Muse to Live For is able to express all this in any coherent or intelligible way—there was so much emotion, and words can only do so much—and somehow wrap it into a beautiful, and believable love story. But I gave it my best shot, and such as it is, it is my most beloved story to date. It will be coming soon from Evernight.