What happens when your muses move out?

My inspiration

My world is changing at the moment. Gorgeous daughter is getting married in less than two weeks and youngest son moves out to live with his girlfriend next week. Think eldest son will be moving out very soon too also to live with his girlfriend. I will have an empty nest. What has that got to do with my writing. Quite a bit actually because they were my inspiration. They are part of the reason I wrote young adult fiction.

But as you can gather from above they are all in their 20s now so are at the top end of YA anyway. Does that mean I need to change my writing? Do I have a right to continue writing YAF? What happens when your muses move out? Will I be able to still write? Rachel Ward wrote a insightful post on a similar idea this week on Author Allsorts Blog. I have no idea what the answer to these questions are going to be. It will be a wait a see moment.

As you know from last week I have a new story to write and though it has a young adult protagonist it is very different from anything I have written so far. I am loving writing and am very inspired by it but have yet to find out whether IC thinks it is working and worth pursuing. IC and I were having a conversation this week about writing (we weren't supposed to be talking about that but we had gone off at a tangent as we do oh so frequently!). We were talking about the need to maintain momentum if you get published. You need another book (or at least a good idea) there ready. But of course there some people who don't want to write anymore. They have had their one book published and that's all they wanted. This I find very difficult to understand. I have to write, or at the very least I constantly have ideas going round in my head, and I know from some of my writerly friends they feel the same. I cannot imagine just writing one story. I watch people and make up stories about them. I look at artefacts and think about what has happened to them, what might they have seen? My world is full of 'what ifs?' just like Rachel.

I am hoping that with my empty house I will have 'a room of one's own' to write in.I also hope this will give me the head space to create wonderful narratives. And even though my muses will have gone the stories will still flow because, like Rachel Ward, I find teenagers fascinating. I love to see them trying to work out who they are and developing such strong identities with their whole lives ahead of them. However, I must continue to keep an eye on teenage culture, continue to read young adult fiction and watch what is making their world turn.

Yesterday I had to set up a royalites account for an academic book I am about to write. That is pretty daunting too. All very grown up. It is based on elements of my PhD but also a lot more. I will be relieved to have the space to research and write it in too.

Time to embrace the new world and fight the fear. Please excuse the obvious sentimentality of this but they may be moving out and starting wonderful, well deserved new lives but they will always 'still belong to me'. Thank you for being the best children anyone could ever wish for CH, LH and TH and good luck for the future gorgeous people. I am so proud of you all. (Oops is that vomit sounds I can hear?!)