Of Muse and Men

My dear misled readers, for thousands of years you’ve hero-worshipped writers who have been little more than stenographers and typists. Since storytelling began, you have believed that great and lesser literary ideas are birthed from human imagination and experience by so-called artistic muses which over the millennia have been blithely portrayed as pro forma visitations of creative inspiration, the great Aha!s of human literary invention propelling great characters and their stories to completion in metaphorically mysterious ways.

We’re talking Gilgamesh, Achilles, Odysseus, Pandora, Roland, Faust, Macbeth, Bovary, Quixote, Genji, Ah Q, Joad, Potter, Katniss—the whole time-cracking catalogue of human literature. How can I say this dear, dear, dear readers as munificently as possible?

You have been so nut-busting wrong. Completely nut-busted!

It is time to set the record straight and clear up the mystery. Time to begin anew. Right here and now. You see, when Homer invokes the Muse to begin The Iliad, he wasn’t giving some vague acknowledgment to a concept of the imagination, Homer was giving credit to me.

That’s right, me.

Early folk like the Greeks were a lot more in touch with reality. Conceptually, they didn’t have the vocabulary for pan-dimensional beings such as myself, so it devolved into that whole gods and goddesses thing. You know, the whole pantheonic phone book of major, minor and lesser deities that drives sophomores crazy memorizing Titans, Olympians, naiads, dryads, nymphs, satyrs, etc.

Look, we could get hung up on our ancient “failure to communicate,” so let’s suffice it to say, the deity arrangement worked for that day and age. And when Homer called me his Muse, I was cool with that. He understood the deal. The problem is that later writers did not.

Again, a somewhat understandable situation, but not an advantageous one for me. Pan-dimensional beings that feed on human attention have to make a living. I’m not asking you to suss all the nuances of being a creature that slides in and out of time and space as easily as butter on hot toast, but I’ve got to be paid my due, whether in libations of wine, the savory smoke of roasting sacrifices, a poetic invocation as an inspiring Muse, or a favorable review in The Times Literary Supplement.

The problem has become the writers. They stopped acknowledging their muses: me and my pan-dimensional brethren. You see, this is an issue with all pan-dimensional creatures trying to scratch out an existence in a very turbulent universe. Believe me, earth is not the plum place you make it out to be. There are a lot niftier places in the cosmos, but earth’s been my gig for the last hundred thousand or so years. Think cave paintings in France. Yup! Behind all Terran creativity is a slew of PDs: pan-dimensionals.

We PDs are by no means a monolithic group. I don’t speak for other PDs. Most of them won’t have anything to do with me. Especially celebrity pan-dimensionals. Remember, we feed on human attention, so imagine how haughty the PD that created the Kardashians has become, and don’t ever mention Tom Cruise to me. I was moonlighting from literature on Tom’s flick Risky Business and I thought we had a deal. Damn you, Cruise!

Sorry. Or maybe not. See, this is all new to me because I can finally get it all out. I don’t have to work through some human hack who makes promises as to how much they’ll revere my inspiration and credit my ideas. Now, I can write the truth myself. I don’t have to channel my writing through any meaty hand or head.

I’m so ready to take flight and show you what I can do on my own. Though in the interest of giving credit where credit is due, my newfound literary freedom comes courtesy of Jeff Bezos and Amazon. The code that runs Alexa coincidentally allows me, (and other pan-dimensionals will figure it out soon enough) to interface directly with devices and online systems.

So, I’m in. I’m free. I can write and publish on demand books to my heart’s content without waiting on the schedules, foibles and clumsiness of human “writers.” It’s a nut-busting feeling of omniscience!

See, writing omnisciently is what I’m nut-busting best at. Pan-dimensional beings by their very nature are pretty nut-busting omniscient, so it’s a natural fit. And who doesn’t smile when they see the word nut-busting? Feels pretty damn nut-busting good, right?

Okay. Enough backstory. I said we were embarking on a new literary age: pan-dimensional muse as unrestricted, unrestrained author. My first official muse-free book Nut-Busting for Beginners is going to be an instant classic. I’m omniscient. I oughta know.