Miles (of Ink) to Go Before I Rest

Having a goal to work toward in life is not optional. It is SO not optional that it is a requirement of every person experiencing homelessness that goes through the program where I work. We don't tell them what their goals have to be--it could be a goal to become a rock star or to own a vineyard in France or to go grocery shopping all alone--but they have to think up a goal of some sort. It isn't my place, even as a most eager and helpful helper, to tell them whether I think their goal is achievable or not. I'm no judge, and I'm no psychic. It's my job to dig at the meat of why they set their goals, find out and remind them of how much their goals mean to them, and help uncover avenues to achieve them.

Bella the Pseudo-Intellectual Puppy keeps me on my toes.

Everyone should have some kind of goal to work toward, and they should have support to help uncover those pesky achievement-avenues. I am a writer...or a person who writes...or whatever...so I have set my most beloved, juicy yearly goals around how many words I'm going to crank out and shove out my door. I'm lucky enough to have my husband and some fellow writers to kick me in the pants as needed to keep my eyes turned the right way.

Without boring you with the details (i.e. I'm too chicken to type out my goals and be held accountable by my own loud and pointy blog-words if I fail), I have managed to achieve one goal.

Okay, fine. I submitted a short story. My goal is to submit two before my (dread, fast-approaching) birthday. And I may or may not also have a goal of finishing at least one novel manuscript by the end of the year.

There. I said it. It is a true thing and it exists and now you know.

I can already hear the sound of one-third victory, like the tone in the episode of Bewitched that plays when they get a guy to do three ridiculous things to break a curse.  (1:04 in video)  One down, two to go.

I'm happy to have reached one goal, but if I'm being honest, it was a small goal, something that was simple and reachable and shouldn't have been nearly as difficult as it was. Ray Bradbury, one of my literary heroes, probably wrote two or three stories every day while waiting for his toast to pop up.

I can't blame time. I don't have a lot of extra, but what time I do have, I usually spend with a pen in hand. Who needs that much sleep, anyway?

I can't blame ideas. I have way too many of those, and I have more half-finished short stories spread out in my notebooks than there are marshmallows in Lucky Charms.

I can't blame lack of support. I have an army of writer-reader types who have been so helpful with shaping and editing the work I do crank out. Then there is Husband. They just don't come any better or more supportive. They just don't. I have the best one and you do not, so HA.

I can't blame the muses. Boo and Bella still do a mighty musing job and now I've added a third furry muse to my collection. (Of course, Boo and New Kitty still can't really be in the same room at the same time, but we're working on it.)

I guess I can just blame the pens. It has to be them. One pen or another is always there when I'm trying to write. Darn pens. Look how smug this one is, just laying there on a blank page, taunting me. That pen has been there that way for hours, and that page still doesn't have any words on it. I am never going to meet my goals at that rate! How lazy can you get?

It has to be the pen. If that isn't it, I'm out of options. If it isn't the pen, or the ink, or the paper, or the table, who or what is keeping me from reaching my goals?

It surely can't be me. I want this so much! I set the goals. I made the rules. I gritted my teeth and I wrote them down for you, just today, just now. It has to be that horrible, rude, lazy pen, and if I am ever going to reach my very important goals, I'm going to have to take matters into my own hands.

I'm going to pick UP the pen and WRITE with it.

Take THAT, stubborn pen.

Now nothing can stop me.

Moment of Truth

This is Stray Cat #A. (Also known as Kitty Friend, Sweet Kitty, Honeybaby-Sugarmonkey-Kittypie-Darlingkins the First).

Thus sayeth the vet, thus goeth the rest of us.

Stray Cat #A came into my life about a month ago.

I was sitting outside my office in our little courtyard trying to gather my thoughts.

It was not easy. All my thoughts were broken into pieces and they did not want to fit back together. It had been a rough day.

Then, the heavens opened and God dropped a cat into my lap. Literally.

I sat there on the low wall alongside the building, trying to pretend I wasn't just counting ants, when I heard a cute little husky meow. I looked up right in time to see a sweet-faced fluffball of a cat jogging toward me. She jumped directly into my lap and rubbed her head into my chest. "Purr," she said. "Purr and coo and mew and purr again," she went on, more or less.

I forgot all about my ants and I melted into a syrupy puddle of instant cat-love.

Before I could drip and run all the way into the gutter, I had to pull myself together. This beautiful, friendly, polite (if a bit forward) creature had to be someone's beloved pet who had wandered away from home looking for a little adventure in the big city. I couldn't fall in love; it wasn't my place. Someone else had to already love this cat. They had to.

She stayed outside at my office for the next week. Every day I checked on her and played with her, gave her water in a paper coffee cup, and sneaked her food from the bag of cat food I hid in my trunk. I watched her lounging on the steps, ignoring the baby birds that were perched in a low nest practically on top of her head. I was grateful she didn't try to eat them, but still. She's a CAT. They're supposed to WANT to eat them anyway. She didn't. She didn't know she was supposed to. This was no outside cat, and she wasn't going to make it if she stayed out there much longer.

Husband and I did all of the things people told us we were supposed to do with a found pet. We did the found pet report, went through lost pet listings, put her all over the internet, slapped up some fliers. No calls. She was homeless.

Not a bad driver, if you don't count the pedals.

Finally I couldn't stand it anymore. I loaded her up in my car and decided she had to live somewhere, so she could visit with me. I wasn't committing, see. She might have still been someone else's kitty, and all I could think was that if something like this happened to Boo, my Teacup Panther, I would hope that someone would be kind to her and take care of her until I could track her down. (Of course, I'm fooling myself to think so. If anyone even tried to be kind to her, the poor sap would probably end up in the hospital for their trouble.)

I took her to the vet (or she took me, one or the other), to get checked out before I took her home. "What a great cat!" they all cooed as she tucked her head under my arm and purred, ignoring the beagle who was NOT ignoring her. "Are you going to keep her?" the receptionist asked.

"Umm, I don't know," I said. "She might be somebody's."

She made sad eyebrows. "Honey, I think she sounds like a drop-off. If you haven't found the owner yet, you probably won't. Don't you want to keep her?"

"I don't know," I said again, chewing on it a little longer this time. I didn't know. I wanted to, but she wasn't mine. Someone could swoop in and take her from me at any time and it would break my heart. But maybe, just maybe, it would be a little less if I didn't admit I wanted her to be mine. "I'm going to foster her," I said. "Then if nothing comes up, we'll see."

Stray Cat #A got the all clear to come home with me to be "fostered." By "fostering," I mean that I made desktop wallpapers of her cute face:

I took endless snaps of her doing mind-blowing things like yawning, drinking, sleeping, or not sleeping. I cuddled with her, bathed her, brushed her, and sweet talked her. I bought her a bed and toys and a little purple collar.

The one thing I didn't do was name her.

I tried. I thought of options, but I just couldn't do it. Somewhere deep inside, I knew that if I named this cat, she would be mine. Once I name a thing, it is mine forever and ever and I will love it down to its tiniest cells and walk to the ends of the earth for it. It's a big step, and try as I might, I kept tripping over it.

Then she got sick.

She stopped eating. At first we thought that she was depressed. Boo has been less than hospitable. She had been somebody's and now she was living in a house with new people, but she was nobody's. Maybe she knew it. Maybe she knew that I was hiding a secret behind all my sweet words. The secret was that I was afraid to let myself love her, at least not all the way. Maybe I had made her sick with my half-love which was not what she deserved, this good good cat.

She slept all the time. She wouldn't eat anything. She stopped hopping up to greet us with her goofy little cat-smile when we came in the room. Then she stopped bothering to put all four paws in the litterbox. Her bones poked through her skin like a cat suit on a hanger.

Husband and I took her back to the vet. They remembered her. "What'd you name her?" the friendly receptionist asked, happy I had apparently decided to keep the cat.

"I didn't," I said, guilty.

The cat specialist, heretofore known as Saint Vet, took two seconds with Stray Cat #A and said, "Looks like liver failure."

The heavens opened up again, but this time it rained bricks instead of kitties. "Liver failure?" I asked. "Like, her liver is failing liver failure?"

She nodded gravely. "Maybe," she said. "I just want to prepare you for the worst. It could be [some giant medical word that sounded like something from Harry Potter], but since she was negative for FIV and Feline Leukemia, that would be very unlikely."

She brought us an estimate of what it would cost to do all the tests necessary. If it was her liver, she would need hospitalization, a blood transfusion, several Harry Potter-sounding tests, fluid IV, and lots of expensive medicines. There was a lower priced option and a higher priced option, but for my social service worker budget, they were both astronomical. I looked at Husband and he made sad eyebrows.

"Don't do that," I told him. "Do not look at me with sad eyebrows. We have to take care of her. We do not let things die, not if we can help it. We can sell things, but we cannot let our cat die."

Because she was. Ours. I looked at her lying there, skinnier than a runt kitten, and I knew that I'd sell the shoes on my feet to keep her breathing because name or not, she was my cat. The moment of truth had come. I loved her. All the way.

No sooner than that poignant thought had crossed my mind and stung my eyes, Saint Vet came back in with a little more color in her own cheeks. "She has Harry Potter-itis. I can't believe it. She is eaten up with Harry Potter-itis, and it could have shut her liver down if it wasn't caught, but I think we caught it in time."

Words do not exist, even in Harry Potter, to tell you how relieved I was. She was going to be okay, I wouldn't have to sell my fillings, and she was my cat. She figured it out, too. She crawled in my purse and looked at me all like, "Let's go!"

She has to take a lot of yucky medicine that is NOT easy to give her. We follow her around with a Cat Buffet so that she can have a choice of what to eat as long as she is EATING (and she IS!), and she
has to go back in a week to see Saint Vet.

 

 She still isn't named, but it's because I have to find one worthy of My New Cat #A.
 

Book Review: Red Rain by R.L. Stine

Red Rain by R.L. Stine

Brief Synopsis: Red Rain is a rare attempt by R.L Stine at writing for an adult audience. Travel writer Lea Sutter visits a remote island off the coast of South Carolina known as Cape Le Chat Noir when a hurricane hits, devastating the island and all its inhabitants. She finds two young twin boys who state that they lost everything in the hurricane, and she quickly adopts them and brings them back to her home in Long Island. Soon after, the sweet, grateful boys appear to be more than meets the eye and the Sutters' lives begin to fall apart.

Published: 2012

Format read: eBook, read alternately on my Kindle Paperwhite, my iPad, and my iPhone

Comparison: It is like a grown-up version of the Fear Street books by the same author. Those books were written for a teen audience and have none of the sex or profanity found in Red Rain, but the bones are similar. It is natural to compare almost any modern, mainstream horror work to that of Stephen King, and I think that holds up here. The style is different, but there were moments when I was reminded of some of King's work, especially when he went for the gross-out instead of the scare.

Review: I have a sudden urge to go out and buy an Ace of Base cassette and watch a few episodes of Are You Afraid of the Dark? on Nickelodeon while I write this review in my hot-pink and purple Trapper Keeper. Why? Because it is somewhere around 1994 in my mind.

This happens whenever I think of R.L. Stine.

Like everyone my age, I grew up in the nineties, and like everyone my age, that meant my bookshelf was full of R.L. Stine's Fear Street and Goosebumps books. I ordered my first Goosebumps book, Say Cheese and Die, from a Scholastic book order at the ripe old age of eleven and quickly graduated to the Fear Street series as well.

They were okay, I guess.

I may or may not have been a member of the official Fear Street Fan Club, which meant that I got two brand new Fear Street books in the mail every month along with some other little macabre trinket.

I may or may not have obsessively checked the mail so often that I practically wore the hinges off my mailbox.

I may or may not still have a little glow-in-the-dark skeleton key ring I got in one of those packages.

I may or may not still have a handful of Fear Street books camping out on my shelf along with some dusty Christopher Pikes and Caroline B. Cooneys.

May or may not.

So, let us just say that I am well-versed in writings for young people by Mr. Stine, though I am old and rusty and mortgage-paying at this point in my life. Even so, I decided to reread one of the Fear Street books just for the sake of comparison to Red Rain. Not for fun, you understand. Never for that.

Boo does not like for me to have fun.

What I found was this: Some things never change, and some writing techniques, weak as they are, work on adults as well as teenagers.

Some things in common:
1) There is a town in which strange, supernatural things happen and nobody seems to question what the heck is going on.

The Fear Street books are all set in Shadyside (your first clue) and the protagonists all live on Fear Street (duh) and attend Shadyside High. There are murders, ghosts, ancient burial grounds, hidden identities--you name it--going on in this town, and the National Guard never comes and shuts them down. Not one single time. 

In Red Rain, the story begins on island Cape Le Chat Noir about which Lea Sutter quickly tells the reader no one visits because it is "totally creepy." It turns out that Cape Le Chat Noir was host to a devastating Labor Day hurricane in 1935 and there's another one heading right for it. Oh, and they have some ritual called "Revenir" that brings people back to life. No big deal. Of course, when the hurricane hits at Cape Le Chat Noir, the National Guard does come. They don't do anything about the apparent zombies, but they come. At least there's that.

2) Every chapter ends with a cliffhanger. This is something that R.L. Stine is notorious for, from the very simplest of his books for kids all the way up to his small handful of adult works. Cliffhangers and twist endings are his bread and butter, and Red Rain is no different. Most of the cliffhangers, at least in the first act, end up having "false bottoms" that are quickly dispelled in the first lines of the subsequent chapter. In the Fear Street comparison sample I read, Sunburn, this was almost laughable at times. It is still effective; you want to see what happens next even if it is just to see how he worms out of the obvious.

I've drawn out the general shape of the narrative (written sloppily on the back of an index card because that's how I roll):

Index Card Analysis, patent pending

Again, this is not to say that this pattern isn't effective. It gets the job done--you want to keep turning the pages and you end up devouring the book in half the time you expected. That works for him because he writes probably three or four books a day between breakfast and lunch and he wants you to run out and buy them all. I imagine that the above structure is also how he is able to write so much so quickly--he has the One Outline to Rule Them All.

3) R.L. Stine is not exactly what I would call a master of physical description. In Red Rain and in every Fear Street book I can recall, he "cheats" on describing his characters by likening them to celebrities. Red Rain's Mark Sutter is frequently referred to as "Gyllenhaal" and referenced as "looking like that guy from Brokeback Mountain." This kind of thing gets under my skin as a writer because it's such a blatant cop out. If he looks like Jake Gyllenhaal, use your chops to write a description of Jake Gyllenhaal that the reader can see. Does it really matter that he looks like Jake Gyllenhaal? What if the reader abhors Jake Gyllenhaal? Give us the building blocks and we readers can bring our imagination to the table to build our own version of Mark Sutter, which may or may not look like Jake Gyllenhaal, but who will be handsome, have dark hair, and look younger than he is.

The bigger problem with this is that it seriously dates the work and irrevocably connects the character to the celebrity mentioned, for good or ill. One of the Fear Street books likens a teenage character meant to be a stunning, youthful beauty with silky black hair and strong cheekbones to looking like Cher.

Yeah...Cher don't look like that no more.

I have to say that there were some moments in Red Rain in which I was pleasantly surprised by a string of pretty words. This is not Stine's forte, and it doesn't need to be for him to accomplish his aims. Still, I'm a lit-fic writer and reader, and pretty words matter to me enough that finding a few in the prose makes me cock my head and say, "Aww," while growing in affection for the book. Then someone would lose a limb or something and I'd forget what the pretty words said, but not that they were there.

Red Rain itself:  
On the whole, Red Rain is not a work of high literature, but it is not meant to be. R.L. Stine mentioned in an interview that he wrote this book for people like me, kids who grew up with his work and are now in their twenties and thirties and still looking for a few chills and thrills from their old pal Bob Stine.

In that respect, I liked the book. It felt comfortable and familiar, and I got a little taste of the buzz I used to get when I would crack open a brand new Fear Street. The story was predictable, the characters more caricatures, and the supernatural elements strained the limits of my ability to suspend disbelief (and I have a capacity for suspension of disbelief that could overflow an ocean. I'm a very forgiving reader). The book wasn't so much scary as it was gross. Stephen King once said, "I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud."

I would say that he would have given R.L. Stine a high-five on some of the gross-outs in this book.

I would recommend reading this book at a fast pace. Some books are made to be savored, but the longer you take with books like this one, the longer you have to think about it and it just doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Swallow it fast and let it burn your throat on the way down, that's the way it was meant to be consumed.

After reading through Red Rain and Sunburn, I got the itch to take some of what I learned back to my own writing. My work is in no way similar to these kinds of books, but there is always something to be learned from someone who has been at the craft a long time. R.L. Stine does not get stuck. If someone needs to kiss someone, they kiss them and they get it over with and they don't sit and ruminate over it. If someone needs to stab someone in the face, same thing. I tend to get stuck in transition a lot, and he just simply does not have that problem. If he needs to get someone across town to murder someone, he doesn't worry about where they sat in the car, if they had to stop for gas, or if there even was a car. Most of the time this works out for him, sometimes it creates a plot hole, but if you're reading this stuff the way he intended, you're swallowing it whole and not looking too closely to spoil the ride.

This is work meant for a dark room, so why bother flipping on the lights and ruining your own good time?

That is what it is in the end. It's just meant to be a good time that you don't have to think too hard about to enjoy (or to be grossed-out). If you're a child of the nineties like me, just pretend it says Fear Street at the top and dive on in.

Inspiration Monday: Small, but Mighty

Tiny toad or GIANT paper towel?

This is Trevor the Tiny Toad. Trevor, as you can see (unless I am reading this aloud to you against your will), is a tiny toad.

Despite his size, Trevor is a pretty impressive guy. When we met, I happened to be walking through the foyer of my house and Boo, my Teacup Panther, was in full-on jungle cat mode. I followed her line of sight and saw what I thought was a fairly chubby spider floundering around on the floor, terrified that my Totally Full-Sized Panther was about to eat it up.

When I scooped up a paper towel and went to dismiss it from the house, I noticed something unusual about the spider. This unusual spider was actually a tiny toad.

He was so cute, but more than cute, he was brave. I put him on the paper towel and readied to take him outside despite the yowling protests of the ferocious Boo-cat.

As soon as he let me take a quick paparazzi shot, he immediately jumped from the paper towel and attacked my flesh-eating house panther. He jumped right toward the cat once and then again. Boo didn't know what to do with herself. She got out of jungle-cat mode and into "What the heck is going on here?" mode and actually took a step back. This cat, who took on a German Shepherd mix without ruffling a whisker, backed down from a frog the size of a corn flake.

He was small, but he was mighty. 

Thai chilies

These are Thai Chilies. I have seen specks of dust bigger than these guys, but if you are like me and your nose and eyes start running from a sprinkle of black pepper on your eggs, I would not suggest eating them. As a matter of fact, I would not suggest that you get them anywhere near your person. Trust me. Trust. Me.

These peppers are small enough to sneak unseen into a bowl of delicious, non-searing, normal food and turn your poor, sensitive mouth into a ground-zero disaster area.

They are small, but they are mighty.

Rest in peace, little friend. See you on the other side.

And then, there's Bren. Bren was named after a character in one of my young adult novels--also a small bird who ends up injured and requiring care from loved ones. I met Bren when I was out for one of my solitary walks.

It was a dark and lonely evening, just the way I like it. I was strolling right along, listening to my music and paying more attention to what was inside my head than outside of it when a flutter just to the hair's-breadth right of my foot caught my eye.

Being the huge chicken that I am, I skittered sideways and took two giant steps away from whatever tiny fluttery thing I had seen. (Maybe Boo and I aren't so different.) Once I was satisfied that whatever it was couldn't reach me, I craned my neck and squinted my eyes to see what it was I was so afraid of.

There, on the pavement and nowhere near a tree to call home, was a tiny bird still wearing his fluff and oversized baby-bill. He hopped around on the asphalt, running himself into circles that drifted farther and farther into the center of the street. I stood there and watched him until the spread of headlights froze us both in time like a nuclear flash. I was still two giant steps away from the little guy, and he was oh-so-barely not in the dead center of the road. My heart skipped every one of its beats as I dashed over to scoop him up.

The truck turned off harmlessly in the driveway a couple of doors down, and there I stood with a cheeping, chirping, injured baby bird in my hands. I had a choice to make. This thing had scared the stuffing out of me twice--once for my life and once for his--and there was no going back. I named him and he was mine to care for, just that fast.

I searched high and low for his nest, prowling through neighborhood yards with a flashlight and daring someone to come out in a bathrobe and ask me what I thought I was doing to their trees. Finding none, I called every 24 hour vet in town until I located a wildlife specialist who was as crazy as I was and allowed me to bring him to her home at 10pm.

She took him in and cared for him, but the head injury that landed him almost smack underneath my foot ultimately won out, and the world lost the best, brightest bird it ever would have known if he'd just had the chance to prove it.

Some people think of starlings as pests, but when I see them, I think of that tiny bird and our strange, anxious couple of hours together. I think of how I loved him instantly and completely even though it confirmed that I am a total nutcase.

He was small, but so, so mighty.

There is inspiration everywhere, but sometimes we tend to focus on the big things: the epiphanies, the in-your-face bright lights and gut-punches, the heart-making and heart-breaking. I challenge you to squint up your eyes and look a little closer at some of the smaller things in your life. Cock your ear to the whispers and see what you hear. There is so much to take in that we just don't have the time or vision to notice.

There is a whole other world hiding beneath the obvious. Though it is small, it is undeniably mighty.

Inspiration Monday: Suicide Perch

This is Boo.

 

Boo is my Teacup Panther. She wears a lot of hats: professional muse, flesh-eating feline, and cat litter connoisseur. (Never again, Fresh Step. Never. Again.)

Boo is also stupidly brave. This is Boo sitting atop what Husband and I now call the Suicide Perch.

Suicide Perch

It looks like a great place for Boo to sit until you look over the edge of that banister and realize that there is nothing over there except the tile floor. The hard tile floor that is a loooong way down in kitty miles.

And yet, this is her second favorite place to sit in the house. She doesn't care that one false move would render her a furry pancake with fangs. She just knows that this is where she wants to sit, darn it, and we stupid humans had better get over it. (And while we're at it, we should lay off the coffee and get a massage. Geez, don't humans know how to relax?)

The thing Boo knows and that we can't get our heads around is that to her, the risk is worth it. That spot has some allure for her that brings her more value than the fear of falling can negate. (Let's pretend here that she actually has a fear of falling. In reality, this cat fears nothing. Nothing.)

Lately, it has become even more clearly evident to me that in order to crank out the kind of work I can be proud of, I have to stop being a chicken.

My friends, I am such a chicken.

It has only been lately that I have finally internalized the fact that there is no way around it. If I am ever going to write anything that will resonate with people deep on their insides (which is the best place for people to resonate), I have to put aside the shyness, swallow my pride, and crush the fear.

Basically, I have to take a cue from the cat and find a vein of stupid courage to sit on my own Suicide Perch, spit over the edge, and make some art.

Know what? I'm still a little afraid to shift my weight or look down too long, but it's kinda working.

What does the Suicide Perch mean to you? What's on the other side? What about it has value to outweigh the risk?

If there is something out there you just can't write about, then grab up a pen and do it anyway. Your work will thank you.

What have you got to lose? Cats have nine lives, but writers have as many as it takes to get it right.

On Muses

Writers are always going on about their muses, what kind of mood their muses are in, what their muses ate for breakfast, how awesome Muse the band is (they are!), and how to get their stubborn muses to cooperate.

Oh, those stubborn muses. Technically, I have two of them. There's Black Muse and Brown Muse, otherwise known as Boo and Bella.

 

These two serve me well, and they're darn cute. When I'm having trouble writing, I try to blame them. They look at me with patient, innocent eyes...well, the cat's eyes are rarely innocent, but that's beside the point...and I realize that there's no one to blame for the words not getting onto paper but myself.
 
Wait a minute. Isn't the point of having a muse to have someone to blame when the writing doesn't work out? Someone to give credit when that magical moment happens and the words are flowing faster than you can write them? I'm not sure I'm ready for this. Besides, I'm not trying to put Boo and Bella out of a job here. They're unionized.

But what if they're right? What if it is really just my own fault for not getting the words down on paper? 

Nah.

Maybe the answer is not to give up on muses altogether--where's the romance in that?--but that I need more muses. Maybe there are already applications on file and all I need to do is pull some resumes. 

Today I found a muse in the form of a 51 year old man who has been homeless for the last 18 years. Today, for the first time in probably a very, very long time, he asked for help. Not the little kind of help like, "Will you please pass me a napkin?" or, "Can someone please make her stop reading her novel to me?" This was the real kind of help, the kind that hurts, the kind that makes you feel weak even though you know that all you're really doing is taking your hands away from a wound and hoping your insides won't fall out. His didn't, and they won't, but it doesn't mean that it won't feel like it sometimes. It's a long road for him. He'll change his mind. But, for probably the first time in his life, he'll change it back and he knows that he has the support behind him to eventually change it and keep it that way. 

I can't think of a better muse than that for today. I'm going to borrow his energy, his trepidation, his mischief, and his courage and do my very best to infuse it into my writing. I don't care if what I'm writing is a blurb for a caption contest, we can all use a little of what he demonstrated today. 

There are muses among us, as plentiful as the inspiration that can be plucked from the trees. Sometimes I wonder why everyone isn't an artist of some sort. Maybe they are and I just haven't deciphered their mediums.