Hovering bedside, the demon started out in a playful mood. He toyed with ideas of escape from imminent danger, entangled relationships from disparate social circles, and added a smattering of spooks and creeps where appropriate. His specialty was not so much in blood and gore, but illusions of deformity, illness and the like. He liked to throw in possessed children, depending on the dreamer.
This time she happened to be an insouciant waste of time. She was one of those. One of those who like to write on the side. On the side, top, bottom and middle of their daily lives, they were unassuming emotional vampires, sucking the beauty and chaos out from any situation, as if they couldn't cope without arranging words to process the things that did and didn't happen. Getting chills in her bed, she secretly lavished in the scared feeling. Instead of waking up, forcing happy thoughts, or crying out to God, she seemed to be trying to actually prolong the nightmare. Could this be this right? Along the edges of his consciousness, the demon began to suspect that she was working out descriptions of characters and setting from what she saw. Infuriated that the writer was using even this opportunity to cultivate plot fodder for scenes of her next book, shook her awake with a loud shriek and dissipated out of the room.
The demon returned with new strategies, worse images. But the woman in her fear, welcomed it and would wake up to begin writing furiously before the details tapered out. This of course challenged the demon even more....
Sometimes our muses aren't friendly. I was thinking, that writers make muses out of anything, seizing upon facts, thoughts, events, all the time with a persistent ulterior motive: in part, to exploit them as material for their writing. Whether it be the experience of a nightmare, a loved one's financial or health struggles, romances of all kinds, etc., we are opportunists of all we encounter whether or not we like it.
What do you think? Are we vampires?
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