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I’ve already discussed the emotional issues that can stop the muse and the artist in their tracks in the last two blogs. Today I’ll talk about the more mundane, but no less distracting parts of everyday life. In fact, I find that this is where most artists crash. We can muscle through emotional angst, but it is the everyday, relentless, demands on us that can eat your creativity alive, and leave you with nothing to put on the page, the canvas, or the stage.

Let’s take housework. I hate housework; always have. First, there’s no way to win against housework. You dust and a few days later the dust is back, yes, it’s not the same dust, but it’s still dust, and you still have to dust again. It never ends. Ah! Vacuuming; the same. Dishes, cooking, anything, everything that helps the domestic scene run smoothly is like a Sisyphean task. You never get free of it. I still remember the day my then agent called and told me I’d sold my first book. I’d been folding laundry when she called. I took the call, did the happy dance, made sounds only bats could hear, and then I had to go back and finish folding the laundry. After just learning I’d accomplished one of my major goals in life, it seemed wrong and a let down to have to go right back to it, but as everyone knows the laundry does not fold itself. *pout*

Artists seem to be divided in two main categories on housework. There are those who can’t rest unless everything is spic and span. This type doesn’t produce a lot of art, because domestic duty eats them up. Then there are those of us who will ignore the mess until it either envelopes us, or grows legs and begins to try to take over the world. I’m in the latter camp. I do not notice mess when I am writing. If I’m really concentrating my family is lucky if I notice them. Having said that, I do have a family, a child, a husband, family of choice, as well. So housework must be done, but not by me. I find that if I concentrate too much on that part of life, it saps my energy for writing and since that’s what pays the bills, not good. There are only two reasons that people will help you with housework: love, or money. My first husband didn’t help me. In fact, we were more like two roommates fresh out of college, both waiting for the other to do the dishes, vacuum, whatever. The two of us did this for over ten years. As I made more money from writing, I vowed that since love wasn’t help me, I’d try money. The first person I hired was the wonderful, Sherry. She is a domestic marvel, and can organize the hell out of all of it. She has stayed with me for over a decade, helping organize this house full of artists, because my now husband, Jon is also a writer, and Trinity, our daughter, has been bitten by both the family affliction, and the stage, so she’s a double artist. It means none of us have Sherry’s vision of how to organize a house. It is simply not our strength. I can clean a room if you tell me what to do, but left to my own devices I just sort of move things around, and the room looks just as bad as when I started. The piles are simply in different places.

I have recently been blessed with someone that helps me out of love. Pilar loves to cook, none of the rest of us do, and now most evenings she organizes the evening meal. We sit down as a family with her, and her partner, Carri, and the five of us have our little slice of domestic bliss.

For those who can’t afford help, you must enlist aid from those who love you. This is crucial after children are added to the mix. I don’t know any artist that is in charge of all the housework, once you add children, that still has time to do much on their art. You must have help. Housework and children are two of the deadliest things you can do to your muse. Now, children can inspire and new ideas come from even housework. I’ve gotten story ideas from dusting, and taking out the garbage, but mostly it just sucks my time and energy. I value being a mother and I would be a less well-rounded person without Trinity, but when she was a baby I thought I would go mad. Babies take a lot of time. Toddlers take a lot of time and are mobile. Hell, crawling babies are amazingly quick, and have no fear yet of much of anything. As a parent you must protect them from themselves until they learn things like, fire is hot, gravity works, and just because it looks cute doesn’t mean it won’t bite.

I’ve written Anita Blake books with baby, Trinity, tucked into the back of a kitchen chair with our first pug, Pugsley, beside her. It was a big chair, and I had trained Pugsley that she sat in my lap while I wrote. The pug had been with me for five years before I had the baby. If I didn’t put them both up in the chair Pugsley barked at Trinity like a hound baying a raccoon up a tree. That drove me nuts, so up in the chair they both came. I perched on the edge of the chair, typing on my portable little laptop, while the baby and the dog squabbled over treats behind me. The kitchen table was more frequently my office than my office when Trinity was a baby, because it was baby proofed and my office wasn’t. Also, there was nothing in the kitchen that I would have cried over if it had been broken. Toddler and a small dog; you do the math.

I wrote the end of Obsidian Butterfly with both of them in the chair behind me. It is one of my most violent books. I wonder why? Yes, I’m being sarcastic. I loved being Trinity’s mom, but I hated being a mother and a writer. I have always found combining work and motherhood a very difficult line to walk. If I was with Trinity my muse was tugging at me to get to work. If I was writing, I felt guilty because I wasn’t paying attention to my child. Even as she enters her teens I am still torn, though the Gods know, it’s much easier now. I love this whole independence thing that teenagers do. It’s great! All my other friends are bemoaning the fact that their kids are getting older and they don’t want to hang with the parents anymore. I see it as a healthy sign that we’ve done our jobs and created independent human beings. Rock on, guys, rock on. Actually, Trinity still loves to hang with Jon and me. My friends with slightly older children tell me that will change soon, so we’re enjoying being the cool parents while we can. But I do love that she’s growing into a person I can talk to in depth. It’s great. I found babyhood very frustrating, because she’d cry and was unable to tell me what was wrong. I loved it when she started talking early, it helped.

For tiny newborn babies, it is the lack of sleep that is the muse-killer. I went back to trying to write when Trinity was three months old. She was not sleeping through the night yet. “The Lunatic Cafe” was the first book I finished after she was born. It was one of the most violent books I’d ever written at that time, I was so tired the morning I finished the book I was hallucinating. Those shapes you see out of the corner of your eyes, had turned into mice in my tired brain. Scarily, when I decided to prove to myself there were no mice, and approached one of them it stayed a mouse in my head as I got closer. I actually had to touch a rolled up electrical cord before my mind would see it wasn’t a mouse. I was that tired. It was a horrible year, and a wonderful year, because she was great, but Gods, I was exhausted.

I guess I don’t have any advice on how to combine parenthood and domesticity with being an artist. My solution was to hire help around the house and divorce the first husband. Not a possible, or recommended solution, by any means, but in the end it was what I did. My husband, Jon, has always understood that this was my career, and he was OK with that. My first husband had trouble taking it seriously, and couldn’t quite stop seeing me as the young woman he met and married in college instead of the very different career woman I’d become. I guess that’s my best advice on the home front, pick someone who will support you. Support you by helping divide up the domestic duties, especially childcare. There were nights I met my ex at the door with the baby. I handed her to him, and I went to work. Yes, I should have given him a few minutes to decompress after his work, but the muse was calling. I am aware that the failure of my first marriage wasn’t all him. But I wouldn’t change anything, because it helped me keep up a demanding book schedule and got me to the success I have today, and to a husband that suits me much better, and who I make much happier on the wife front.

I find the demands of everyday to be real soul-killers. It all drains me of energy and takes away from the muse, the art, the ability to produce pages. I always wanted the 1950’s wife, that probably never really existed, but someone that would subsume their life to support me in my career, bring me food and cups of tea and run the household. Problem is I’ve never been attracted to the kind of man that would do that for me. *laughs* I find myself drawn to other artists; writers, painters, sculptors, clothing designers, singers. Though haven written that, Pilar is an artist and a musican, but even there she cooks, but I do not expect her to do all the housework and organizing. That wouldn’t leave her time for her own art. The only Girl Friday I’m ever going to have will have to have a paycheck attached to her/him, not a love affair.