In which I talk about books that are nocturnal and require sugar

Some of my books refuse to be written in daylight. They are nocturnal.
It's quite bizarre. Raymond, for example, was written very quickly: 21 pages in 3 days, and most of it written between 15:00 and 03:00 (3 p.m. and 3 a.m.). It was written in Winter, and where I live, the Winter dusk starts to fall at about 16:00–17:00. So the vast majority of the story was written during the hours of darkness. If I tried to make progress during daylight, the ideas would not flow. As soon as the sun went down, the muse awoke, and the story unfolded itself in my head. I did not try to fight this phenomenon: it very quickly became apparent that this story had its own way of doing things, and I was not about to argue so long as the ideas kept flowing.
Seven years later, when I wanted to edit Raymond for publication, it refused to be edited in daylight. I spent hours staring at the manuscript on my computer monitor, but could not make any progress on editing it, no matter how I tried. And then, inexplicably, as soon as the sun went down, I could.
After the editing was complete, I needed to format the text for publication, and this the story allowed me to do during daylight. Formatting requires little creativity, so perhaps that is why I could format in daylight; although, in theory, editing doesn't require a lot of creativity either. Editing does, however, require lots of decisions to be made – lots and lots of tiny decisions – and apparently I couldn't make them while the sun was up.
The sequel, Raymond's Nemesis (due to be published in December 2018) was the same: in daylight, nothing; at night, the inspiration flowed. It was harder to write than Raymond was, and took much longer, so there were more sleepless nights and more sugar was consumed.
Incidentally, some stories require certain sorts of sugary treats – in addition to my usual hot chocolate, masala chai lattes, or mochaccinos – to be consumed whilst writing them. Raymond's Nemesis, which was also written in Winter, was – if I recall correctly – the strawberry Oreo book: I had access to a large box of those biscuits, packaged in threes, and every hour or two would leave my computer to make another hot drink in the benighted kitchen and retrieve another packet of Oreo biscuits, to be eaten at my desk while the heater blasted warm air into the room. Another nocturnal book, The Vine, required a large box of Turkish Delight, which I already had in my possession (I love Turkish Delight), and which I started eating so that I could describe the taste of it really well for the story, then kept eating because I was writing at night and wanted the sugar to keep my physical brain awake and functional while the muse fed ideas into it.
To anyone who does not believe in muses, or who is not possessed of an artistic temperament, or whose muse is less capricious, this must seem ridiculous. Surely, one can set a time for writing, then sit down and write. How hard can it be to put words on paper, or on a screen?
Certainly, that is what one tries to do. But there is a thing called 'inspiration'; one cannot wait around for it, else nothing will get finished: one must write regardless of how uninspired one feels; but at the same time, inspiration is the magic without which stories simply cannot exist. One cannot force it; one cannot wait for it; and when it does arrive, one must allow it to seize and drive one's imagination for as long as it will do so, because the result of such possession is always wonderful and beautiful and far better than anything one can produce without it.
So if inspiration descends upon me late at night when I am tired and want to sleep, I have a choice: tell it to come back another day, and risk it not doing so, or stay up and write for as long as I can, until either I or the inspiration is exhausted. This is why I call the particular type of inspiration that comes to me my 'muse': she seems almost like a person, with whims and moods, sulks and passions. Sometimes she ignores me; sometimes she pesters. Sometimes I can almost see her in my mind's eye. And the magic – the inspiration – that she causes to flow through me is worth losing sleep over.
These nocturnal, sugar-laden writing processes are neither healthy nor sustainable, occasionally frustrating, and certainly not my preference; but when that is how the story insists on being written – or how the muse insists I write the story – that is what I must do, and a series of nights of sleep-deprivation and sugar highs is worth it in the end when I have a complete, or near-complete, story before me.

In which we discover that G. Wulfing cannot write to a deadline

My muse is dreadfully fond of yanking me around. I posted the following to Tumblr about a month ago, and it has always been true.

My muse loves to play the following trick on me. She gives me masses of inspiration for a story, so that I feel I must write it immediately, and I temporarily drop the piece I’m currently working on, telling myself that I’ll write this new story quickly, get it out of the way, and return to the piece I was trying to work on. The inspiration then suddenly dries up, and I’m left with two half-finished stories: the one the muse just inspired me to write, and the one I dropped in order to write it. I glare at the muse in frustration and resentment, and she shrugs and disappears, leaving me to slog, at times painfully, through my attempts to finish the story that she dumped in my lap. Eventually she will return, but not to help me finish any of the stories I have half-written: no; she comes to bring inspiration for yet another story.
She is a brat, but she is also what will make me great. I am nothing without her, and she knows it. Occasionally she takes pity on me and helps me to finish, or at least make progress on, a story that is currently incomplete, but this is rare. More often, I am left to finish alone what she urged me to start.

The Enemy Soulmate is a perfect example of such a caprice. I began it near the beginning of this year, and, as mentioned in my previous blog post, hoped and planned to get it finished in time to publish in July; and at the rate at which it was progressing, that seemed entirely possible.
And then the muse vanished with a flutter of glittery wings, leaving me knee-deep in the swamp of a first draft, her illuminating glow fading with her; and as I continued to slosh, step by step, through the mud, the fog gradually lifted to reveal that the shore, which I had thought not far off, was in fact nowhere to be seen. And I have been slogging, at varying speed, ever since. O inconstant fizgig, that trifles with my very soul!
Because of this 'adorable, playful little quirk' (read: 'cruel, deceptive, nasty little vice') of my muse's, I invariably write multiple stories at once. I currently have approximately fifteen stories in varying stages of first draft, with other, fragmentary ideas in waiting. When the muse abandons me in the midst of a story, and I cannot squeeze anything more out of my brain regarding it, I skip to another one, so that I can always work on something. The downside to this approach is that it takes forever to get any story actually finished, but the upside is that I can always feel that I am making progress on something, even if it's not the book I'm currently trying to complete.
For The Enemy Soulmate, however, I wanted to see if I could get the story finished within a few months, if I focussed solely on it and persevered with it even when uninspired. I wanted to finish it quickly and get back to the story I had been working on when the muse decided that I was going to write The Enemy Soulmate instead. I am told that that is what 'professional' writers do – finish the book no matter how uninspired they feel – so it must be achievable, mustn't it?
The result of this intention is that I have spent a disappointing number of hours staring at the manuscript on my computer screen, cudgelling my brains, frustrated and impatient and half-inclined to throttle my mercurial muse next time she has the impudence to appear.
My deadline of July scuttled past, and then my next deadline of August ... and although the shore of the swamp seems to have appeared, hazy in the distance, it could simply be a trick of the murky light, and I am loath to set a third deadline lest I miss that one too and the concept of 'deadlines' start to become rather meaningless.
It appears that I cannot write to a deadline. Hours spent trying to write do not equate to progress being made. The stories will be finished in their own time, and I cannot pressure them into hurrying. I had always suspected that this was the case, but I had hoped to be proven wrong.
In fact, trying to finish the story by a certain date increased my frustration when the muse disappeared, and certainly took a lot of the pleasure out of writing it. I cannot say whether I would have made more or less progress had I not been trying so hard, but I am sure I would have been less frustrated.
Still, it is good to know, so that I can avoid setting deadlines in the future. Apparently, I have no say in when my stories finish themselves: I'm just the writer, and all I can do is make sure I have the tallest, most waterproof boots I can find, and plenty of snacks in my backpack.