I spent most of the day in glorious goof-off-ed-ness. About the only thing I accomplished was the washing of dishes and the making of dinner (thus creating more dirty dishes). My manic depressiveness was calm today, neither up nor down.

I'm rewriting one of my stories, "Daytime For The Dead," and it's turning out completely different. I'm using some suggestions from my writers group and, especially, avoiding the things about the story that they disliked (and in retrospect, so do I). So, now, about the only thing it has in common with the first version is the name of the main character, and the setting. It's not really my setting, though. I'm blatantly robbing ... er, paying tribute to ... Salvador Dali. The story for the most part takes place inside his paintings. A lot of the plot changes came to me while I was doing dishes.

Weird. There's three places where I can always count on my muse to show up.

1. Taking a shower.
2. Driving.
3. Washing dishes.

This afternoon she materialized next to me while I was up to my elbows in dishwater suds. She sat on the kitchen counter, swinging her legs and popping some gum, and said, "Hey, drop all that moral crap from that story."

"Say what?"

"Drop it. No one wants to hear it, and you're only putting it in there because you think it's dramatic. It's not. It was dramatic when Mod Squad dealt with it in the 70's, but since then it's been done to death."

"Mod Squad? What?" She'd lost me.

"Think about it. What is the one common thread between all your literary heroes?"

I frowned, thinking hard. What in the hell was she talking about? My literary heroes over the years... Kurt Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick, Hunter S. Thompson, Mark Twain, Jonathan Lethem ... and now Chuck Palahniuk. They had something in common?

"They're all anarchists at heart," she told me. "They buck the rules, they're contrary, they're iconoclasts, and so are you. Write true to yourself."

It was like a punch in the gut. She was right. Lately I've been writing watered down stories, too cautions, void of rebellion. Milquetoast. "Eew!"

"That's right," she said. My muse hopped down off my kitchen counter, sauntered over to the refrigerator, and took my last beer. Then she was gone.

And I have this burning desire to write something.