Seriously, brain, must we do this?

Imagine the scene: it's approximately 2am. I'm snuggled into bed, covered over with blankets (because it's freaking cold here in the PNW), nestled into pillows, happily NOT sawing logs, but only because I have a strange plastic tongue-sucky device that is keeping sleep apnea at bay (yay for that), and all of a sudden, whammo! I'm awake.


"Hello," the muse says, looking up from a copy of Paris Vogue.


I blink and remove the tongue-sucker from my mouth (because it's hard to think while it's sucking away). "Hrrn?" say I in that erudite way I have at two in the morning.


"About that book we're writing," the muse says, examining a chocolate orange cookie.


"Wuhull?" I ask, and pull myself up to a sitting position. The hub, whose tongue-sucker is lying on the pillow next to him, snores happily to himself. Lucky duck. He's never woken up by a pesky muse.


"The one with Baltic in it," the muse says very slowly, enunciating the words carefully, the way you would to a particularly stupid dog, or someone who has lost his/her wits. "We are writing it. With our fingers. On a keyboard. Do you know what a keyboard is?"


"There's no need to be condescending," I tell her, whipping out my drool cloth and wiping down the tongue-sucker (a side effect of the suckage is a bit of slobber). "I know exactly what a keyboard is, which is more than I can say about some Milano-cookie consuming, Vogue-reading muses I could name."


"It needs an epilogue."


I may have blinked at her at that point, I'm not exactly sure, because all I could think of was how much I wanted a chocolate orange Milano cookie. "Vogue needs an epilogue?"


She sighed a martyred sigh, as she always does when she holds conversations with me. "No, the book. You have to write an epilogue to it, so that readers don't e-mail you and demand to know what happened to this person or that person, and whether or not Ysolde did any more cooking."


"You woke me up--" I was breathing heavily by then, and not because of my asthma. "You woke me up to tell me I have to add something about Ysolde cooking?"


"Yes." She ate another cookie and flipped a page in Vogue before gesturing with an elegant hand. "Get on it."


"It's two in the morning!" I protested, pointing to the clock in case she'd missed it on her way in to torment me.


"I don't see your point."


"I'm not going to write an epilogue at two in the morning!"


She shrugged, one of those sophisticated Gallic shrugs that Rene the taxi driver was always making in Aisling's books. "Suit yourself, but I feel I should point out that other writers, writers who care, writers who love their craft, take care of their epilogues right away. They don't let them sit around and get stale. Those writers have standards."


I stared at her for a minute, then put my tongue-sucky thing back in and said indistinctly, "Hi het ugh."


"I beg your pardon?"


I removed the tongue-sucker. "I said that I hate you."


"Pfft. You always say that when we're writing. You'll worship me again once you're done. Which you would be if you'd stop being a lazy slug, and write that epilogue. But far be it from me to interfere."


She left after that, having done her job. I was awake until twenty minutes before the alarm went off, wondering if I should get up and write the damned epilogue, or if it could wait.



Note: It's written now. Everyone can relax.