This is Alma Alexander’s Muse

I am not here to apologise. Hey, guys, have you MET me? I am not wafting about with a lyre wearing diaphanous robes that float about me, smiling like an angel, gently whispering encouragement. I CONTROL this woman, I always have done, I am the sergeant major barking orders and I expect to be obeyed. I have her so trained that when I abscond for a while I have her whimpering and begging for my return, knowing that I am going to turn up and demand that she give me twenty push-ups before I say another word. (and she does. trust me. I stand over her and count.) But here’s the thing.

I am part of this woman, so intertwined with her that you might call me her soul, and yet I can be knocked out of the driving seat by things that are beyond either her control or mine. During times of trauma she kind of stops remembering how to listen. it’s happened twice that I know of – once after a particularly bad break-up back in the last century (yeah, that one), and once more recently, in the last six years, when she was losing everything and everyone in quick succession. She retreated into silence – she retreated into silence from me – she says her voices stopped talking to her – not true, her voices were screaming, she just could not or would not hear them. That first time, what woke her up was the slightest of whispers that I managed to slip past the barriers – “start writing again or we all die”. And she gulped, and picked up a blank page again , and for a while she was measurably worse than she had been before she started to get better again when she had put in the necessary work to climb back up the ladder again But we got there. I had to rig up an emergency harness every now and then, but she remembered how to tell stories. It is not a thing that she is able to forget. I do not permit it. And then she wrote up a storm, in the last twenty-odd years. Many novels. Tons of stories. She had people who believed in her, people who loved her out there in the real world, and that helped. A lot.

And then life landed in a dump, and she lost them all, one by one. And lost me again, along the way.

Yes, even though the voices were screaming.

And then she remembered that still small voice maybe. “Write or we all die”. And she picked up a novel she had abandoned some six years before. One she had to restructure, and reorganize, and rewrite, but one that was important to her, and that one turned into three, and she was working on long-term stuff again. But those voices I told you about, the ones that were screaming? THEY HAD A GREAT DEAL OF CATCHING UP TO DO. Sometime in this new era I managed an attack book, and “The Wind’s Four Quarters” turned up at the end of 2025, unlooked for, blindsiding her. She did as I commanded and wrote it. I threw in a bunch of short stories – she doesn’t write short-form regularly, or even willingly, but the voices wanted what the voices wanted. In the space of the last 18 months or so she actually sold four or five stories at first submission. That’s a lot, for her, given that she usually can’t say hello in fewer than 5000 words. She also finished all the hard graft that was necessary for that novel she went back to, and finished it, and worked on it to make it better. And then she started work on the second book in that trilogy, in good faith.

And I threw her a curve. There was a storyseed that had lived in the back of her brain for a while. All i had to do is allow her to see something, online, that clicked with that seed, unexpectedly and irrevocably. And she’s been working on THAT for days now, growling and cursing me.

I can’t help it. It’s what I DO. *IT’S MY JOB.*. I am not here to apologize.

If you are someone who likes what she produces when I have her knuckled under and working, you can thank me later. For now… the woman’s busy. Check back in a while.