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I woke at 3 AM this morning. One moment I was asleep and the next wide awake. I stared up into the dark listening to Jonathon’s deep breathing beside me and thought damn it, why am I awake? Then my muse and my brain started talking to each other and I realized it was because my muse had an idea. The first idea was about my talk on Saturday at the St. Louis Science Center for SciFest. I’m talking about some of the research I’ve done for my books, and how the new technology had changed both the coroner’s office and SWAT, and how research sparks and changes ideas, but this morning my muse came up with that extra little piece to add and bring it all together. I was grateful and I scrambled for my writer’s notebook that is always beside the bed. (I used to have glow in the dark pens but they all died and I can’t find refills.) Writing in the dark is something I’m used to, but my handwriting always sucks in the dark. But I got the idea down and I laid back down certain that now that I’d written the idea I’d be able to go back to sleep.

I worked until 12:30 AM so I’d only had 2 and a half hours sleep so I was convinced that I would go back to slumberland. Nope. I laid there and stared into the dark and tried not to move around so I wouldn’t wake Jonathon. I snuggled in closer to the warmth and pulse of him, and waited for sleep to return. Then my muse got louder in my head and I suddenly knew something I hadn’t known 2 and a half hours earlier. I knew the end of DIVINE MISDEMEANORS the current Meredith Gentry book that I’m working on. Now I’d known who done it from the beginning and why and how, but I wasn’t sure the order of the last clues or even completely how my first person narrator was going to find out everything we needed to know to solve the mystery. I love first person narration, but it does have limits when it comes to needing your protagonist places and meeting all the people she needs to meet. How to do it in a realistic manner?

If any of you reading this thought, "Realistic, why does a paranormal thriller have to be realistic?" shame on you. My rule is the more fantastic group of fictional facts you’re asking a reader to believe the more realistic the rest of the book must be. Merry Gentry is a fairie princess and a private detective and if I want my readers to believe that both of those facts can be true I need to make sure my real life facts are as real as possible. The more fantastic your fiction the more realistic your facts need to be so your reader will suspend disbelief and believe in your world.

By 4 AM I was in the bathroom that adjoins our bedroom. The door was quietly closed, the light on, and I was scribbling furiously in my notebook. Which is why its beside the bed. I’ve made the mistake before of waking up at 3, or 4 AM with a brilliant idea and think wow, "That’s a great idea." Its so brilliant that I’ll remember it in the morning. No, I won’t. Especially if I fall back to sleep the idea will not usually survive a few more hours of rest. I’ll wake up next morning with this vague feeling that it was a great idea, but I no longer have the faintest idea what it was, and the more I can’t remember the more I am convinced that it was THE idea. The idea that would have been an amazing story, or the start of a novel, or the solution for that plot problem I’d been wrestling with, but now its gone. It’s gone and I’ll never get an idea that good again. That is the feeling, and I never want to have it again, so I sleep with my writer’s notebook by the bed. There’s also a pen with the notebook tucked into the spiral top so that I have both paper and a writing implement. And yes, I have had that moment where I can find the notebook, but no pen. I need both so I try to make sure I have both. Part is for my sanity and my muse’s use, but part is so I don’t go riffling through the bedroom in search of a pen and wake my long-suffering husband from a night’s sleep.

For a truly geek moment I was moving around the darkened bedroom getting dressed by the light of a Harry Potter light up wand. I got it for Winter Solstice last year from Carri and Pili, and put it on my present list just for this use. It’s enough light to get dressed by, but its dim enough so it doesn’t bother Jonathon. Now I’m dressed and back at the desk, but I don’t feel tired. I feel energized. It’s like that when the muse is at a white, hot heat which is where she was this morning starting at 3 AM. There will come a point today where I crash from too little sleep, too much typing, and just the writer’s high fading, but until that happens I will write, and I will chase after my muse. No chase isn’t the right verb, or image. That’s not how it feels.

It feels as if my Muse woke me up, grabbed me by the hand, pulled me out of bed and started running, pulling me along, urging, faster, keep up with me. I stumbled at first, but now I’ve caught my stride and I’m running beside her, her hand still in mine, her words in my ear like some friend that is always getting me out of bed to do something crazy that my parent would never approved of, but I don’t care because every time she drags me out of bed its an adventure. A wonderful, glorious, arm-chair dangerous, adventure.