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If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad. ~Lord Byron

This is the private blog of author and digital artist Shawna A. Smart, a 40 something female living in the fine state of Arizona, in the United States.

This is the stark fact about me.

.I can go long and long without writing a paragraph of any quality, then be gathered into the jaws of a need so powerful my soul stings with the vigor of cut onion and smoke.

Yawning vistas of fantastical worlds, the dark dreamworlds of urban landscapes, punch-in-the-gut memories of hard knocks, all pirouette through my smoking frontal lobe as my subconscious mind reels under the screeching demands of my creative self, knocking about in my thoughts like cymbals.

This I think is the curse of every true writer, the manic compulsion to capture a nuance, a figment, or a dream on virgin paper, and as is customary for this strange experience called life, also a blessing in true oxymoronic style.

I don’t want to write, in fact I hate the process.

Type, read, curse and try again. Red eyes, sore neck and shoulders, and the needs of the body fading to the background as my fingers fumble over the keys.

Trap anyone you can (poor bastards) to sit through another reading. The frantic rush to get it all down before the fire and flex of the inspiration cool and vanish. But I must when I must, and I cannot stop when the fever takes hold, nor rest or even sleep. Food, time and all the thump and clatter of mundane life recede, superseded by the channeling of the muse.

It is a demon spirit that refuses to let go until spent.

Such is my being.