“Opportunities are like sunrises. If you wait too long, you miss them.” So said inspirational author, columnist, and poet, William Arthur Ward, who penned many influential inspirational maxims.
There are those scant few moments in the wee hours when an idea, phrase, or needful rhyme will pop up and hover in the ether of my too, too sleepy brain, and I think, “I’ll jot it down in the morning.”
But, when morning comes, “whatever it was” has vanished, leaving not a trace of itself behind, and there is nothing that I can do to jog it back into being. Such missed opportunities can be rather painful.
They leave me with the certainty that I have just lost out on a most brilliant and extraordinary morsel, and this can nag at me for hours and hours. “You should have written it down!” my muse chides.
Some nights, just as I am on the very verge of succumbing to sleep, I will very reluctantly get up, snatch my nearby pen and pad, jot the idea down, and gratefully climb back into bed.
The next morning I might find an illegible scrawl waiting for me on my notepad, or it might even be clear enough to read but leave me wondering, “What in the world was I thinking about last night?”
It seems that my muse loves to set me up with a choice between two tortures, both involving some version of amnesia and a keen sense of loss. But, there is a reason why this matters so much to me.
On those rare evenings and very early mornings when my muse prods me insistently to get up and write, I find the idea and the effort are well worth the trouble, which makes the fruitless nights worse.
Fortunately, I am not regularly afflicted by these ill timed bouts with my muse, but that pad and pen are always at the ready, even when I am not, because I may actually compose something epic, after midnight.
Image (above) provided by my gracious friend, Finnigan Livingstone.
As noted previously, My Echoes E-books are available, in rotation, FREE for download each saturday. This week’s offering is Echoes lll, Even More Neo-Victorian Poetry, and is FREE for download on Saturday, September 26, 2020. Click here to go to the amazon.com link.
There are those scant few moments in the wee hours when an idea, phrase, or needful rhyme will pop up and hover in the ether of my too, too sleepy brain, and I think, “I’ll jot it down in the morning.”
But, when morning comes, “whatever it was” has vanished, leaving not a trace of itself behind, and there is nothing that I can do to jog it back into being. Such missed opportunities can be rather painful.
They leave me with the certainty that I have just lost out on a most brilliant and extraordinary morsel, and this can nag at me for hours and hours. “You should have written it down!” my muse chides.
Some nights, just as I am on the very verge of succumbing to sleep, I will very reluctantly get up, snatch my nearby pen and pad, jot the idea down, and gratefully climb back into bed.
The next morning I might find an illegible scrawl waiting for me on my notepad, or it might even be clear enough to read but leave me wondering, “What in the world was I thinking about last night?”
It seems that my muse loves to set me up with a choice between two tortures, both involving some version of amnesia and a keen sense of loss. But, there is a reason why this matters so much to me.
On those rare evenings and very early mornings when my muse prods me insistently to get up and write, I find the idea and the effort are well worth the trouble, which makes the fruitless nights worse.
Fortunately, I am not regularly afflicted by these ill timed bouts with my muse, but that pad and pen are always at the ready, even when I am not, because I may actually compose something epic, after midnight.
Image (above) provided by my gracious friend, Finnigan Livingstone.
As noted previously, My Echoes E-books are available, in rotation, FREE for download each saturday. This week’s offering is Echoes lll, Even More Neo-Victorian Poetry, and is FREE for download on Saturday, September 26, 2020. Click here to go to the amazon.com link.
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