Befuddled Muse Is All Jamie’s Fault

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I have written all 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 years as a newspaper reporter. 

Even after leaving journalism, getting married and having two daughters, becoming a graphic and web developer and eventually a programmer, 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 would find a creative prompt every month, 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 loved writing. Many of the stories in this book came from this challenge, though, as you will see, I tend to take the prompts pretty loosely. 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. 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.