My Muse

I’m sometimes asked where I get my story ideas.
(Okay, what they really say is “what the heck is wrong with you?”)
The short and obvious answer is, from my head.
But that’s not tangible enough for some people, so I’ll be more specific, scientific, and geographical.
I get my best ideas in my shower.
Whenever I’m stuck for an idea and my deadline is less than two hours away, I jump into the shower for a good soak.
To be more mystical, I would say that the shower is where my muse lives.
A muse is a mythical creature responsible for creative inspiration.
If you’ve ever seen the movie “Xanadu,” Olivia Newton-John was a muse, who happened to live in an old concert hall that was transformed into a skate bar.
In the movie “Dogma,” the muse was played by Salma Hayek.
Stephen King refers to his muse in his writing memoir “On Writing,” referring to him as a “basement kind of guy,” so I’m not a complete crackpot.
(I wonder what it means when I point to horror impresario Stephen King as my example of normal…)
I haven’t actually seen my muse, but I’m pretty sure he lives behind the shower nozzle.
It took a little while to get comfortable with the idea of an unseen entity in my shower, particularly the way my body looks without clothes (no, please don’t try to imagine), but he’s the one with the great ideas, so I have to accept it.
I hope this doesn’t mean my muse is a peeping tom.
If you’re not comfortable with the idea of invisible creatures, I have another theory.
I’ve read that Lewis Carroll wrote great whacks of the book “Alice In Wonderland” while under the influence of LSD.
Perhaps my enhanced creativity in the shower is the result of a chemical reaction.
If so, I suspect it’s that explosive combination that occurs when the Zest soap interacts with the Alberto VO5 shampoo.
I’m not sure if my results would change if I were to try a different soap/shampoo combination.
Maybe Cameo and Pantene would give my writing style a more sophisticated lilt, or I could purify my content with Ivory and Johnson’s Baby Shampoo.
To get in touch with my feminine side, I could abandon soap altogether and try some of that body wash stuff and a scrubby.
And to improve my horror fiction output, I could try Lava soap and a shampoo of Easy-Off oven cleaner.
But for now, I’m sticking to my muse theory.
It’s more “out there,” which is expected of people who make their living with the written word (we’ve all been led to believe that most writers are artsy, flaky folks with weird lifestyles anyway, so I’m not going to try and swim upstream on this one).
So now, if you’ll forgive me, I’m going to finish toweling off and go dry my hair.