My muse & its awkward timing.
Most of my best ideas have arrived at inconvenient times. Not when I’m sitting at my keyboard with a fresh cup of coffee and a perfectly open schedule, but when my hands are buried in dishwater or I’m halfway around the block with the dogs tugging at their leashes or I’m mid-debate with a classroom full of kids. I’ll be thinking about grocery lists and school emails or lesson plans, and suddenly a voice that isn’t mine will say something like, But Mommy, I don’t want to die. And just like that, a story has found me.
I’ve learned that stories don’t seem to care whether I’m ready for them. Ideas slip in while I’m busy attempting to be a responsible adult—while grading papers, walking Buck, or folding the same load of laundry I could swear I just folded yesterday. Inspiration arrives unexpectedly, and if I’m not paying attention, it will drift away. I have learned that when I later sit with my journal and try to force what came to me so effortlessly earlier, the result is never as good as the original, which is why I have so many journals—two by my bed, one in the tv room, one continuously in my school bag, three more in various places in my classroom, and a small spiral one that is always in my purse for quick jots of inspo when I’m on the go.
In 2025, I shared a video of walking my dog Buck at o’dark-thirty in the morning before sunrise and the only discernible part of the video was the crunch of my feet on the gravel drive where Buck and I were walking. The screen was black with indistinguishable slightly darker shapes throughout but the sound of my walking was the key. As I walked, it sounded like orc marching and my head, the scene of the thousands of Black Guard marching out of Shara formed in my mind. I still believe what I came up with on my walk is way better than what was written in book three, The Dead; but I still really like the scene anyway. It never occurred to me to take a journal on my walk with Buck, and if you’ve ever walked a curious bullmastiff at any time of the day, you would understand why. At any moment, you can be pulled off your feet to go investigate a smell, a sound, a ghost, whatever; and don’t think it’s anything your puny human senses will register to give you advance warning that you are about to be rendered airborne.
This happens to me a lot—scenes, dialogue, ideas, characters—shooting out of the blue at me and I’ve learned to be prepared by having a journal always at hand to quickly write the ideas down before they fly away. I know that if I simply think I’ll come back to it at a more convenient time, the result won’t be the same as the original. Every time these musings have developed into the scenes and characters in my books. Often they are disjointed sentences, bullet points, quick fragments of thought that when I return to them develop into larger ideas. More often than not those ideas develop far beyond the original inspiration or thought. Some rare times, I get to actually sit with the idea and flesh it out right then and there; but those times are truly rare. And if I’m being honest, I like jotting quick thoughts and then mulling over them in my brain for a bit until I have time to sit down and fully flesh them out. It’s not the best time when standing in a room full of teenagers to have your mind elsewhere, so, the majority of my musing doesn’t occur during school days. But it will occasionally slip in here and there. I mean, honestly, if the kids can have license to daydream and tune me out, why can’t I return the favor?