My daughter Jamie is the muse that kicked me in the butt to get me back into writing.
My daughter Jamie is the muse that kicked me in the butt to get me back into writing.
I have written all of my life. As a kid, I wrote as a way to deal with a challenging home life. I spent ten of the best years of my working life years as a newspaper reporter.
Even after leaving journalism, getting married and having two daughters, becoming a graphic and web developer and eventually a programer, I still tried to keep writing. I wrote a few pretty good stories, always planning that someday, after the girls were grown, I would find the time to start writing again seriously.
But life got away from me and I have always had a distinct problem using the word “no” so I got involved with so many things that I could never find enough time.
Jamie, who was finishing up at the Cleveland Institute of Art, saw through my excuses and came up with a simple solution she knew I couldn’t resist. She suggested a collaborative challenge, we’d find a creative prompt about every month and she would create some form of visual art and I would write a story.
Thus was born the website Songs of a Befuddled Muse and I remembered just how much I love writing. Many of the stories in this book came from this challenge, though, as you will see, I tend to take the prompts pretty liberally and after the first few standard writing prompts, Jamie and I began creating our own and feeding off of each other’s creativity.
In the next series of posts, I will talk about the many inspirations for the quirky, wide-ranging stories in the book and also show off Jamie’s work as well. Both of us have grown a great deal in our artistry since we started this challenge, but it was from these humble roots that Songs of a Befuddled Muse was born.
To find out more about Jamie, Check out here Artist’s Bio on this site, visit her Instagram or her website at www.jayckarts.com.
