On the subject of my inspiration.

My ideas are sometimes like errant children that wake me in the night.

I'll be minding my own business, laying there trying to wind down from the day. I've a busy mind and this generally takes upwards of half an hour. Yet, slowly, I'll come to some sort of peace and begin floating into much needed slumber...

Insistently, insistently will my stories then come to me. A phrase so powerful it shocks through me will wake me, send me scrambling for pen to scribble in the dark. Or an image, a scene, will replay itself again and again until like the sound of hushed voices one must finally hear and awaken to stop.

This has happened recently. Just the other night, as I lay sleeping, a piece of fiction occurred to me. I saw the same hospital scene repeatedly, felt the overwhelming sense of ironic finality and cosmic banality... it awakened me, the feel of fluorescent lighting through my closed eyelids. Of course, there were no lights on in the room. I told myself that surely I would remember such an idea in the morning but then, despite my exhaustion, I roused myself to take up a pad and a piece of paper. I wrote down my idea. I was saved.

Well, at least my Muse isn't on an unspecified trip to Tahiti.