Jan 1st words

This is the first 750 words thing I did.

   "Write," he said.
   "I don't know what to write," I replied. "I am all out of ideas, all out of energy."
   My muse considered this. He turned away from me, so that all I saw of his face was his profile, almost obscured in the late winter sunshine. "I'm not here to do it for you," he said eventually. "I mean, I turn up, and we talk. I'm here to bounce ideas off, I'm here to spark your creativity, but what I usually do is just listen to your bullshit and whining and your excuses."
   I didn't know what to say. My mouth shut in slightly shocked silence. Never before had my muse spoken to me like that. He'd always been there, firstly as a childhood imaginary playmate and then simply as a voice in my head. Many times I thought I'd lost him, that he was lost to me, but he always came back eventually. Swaggering back into my life with all the confidence of someone who knows he'll always be welcome, no matter how long the absence, no matter what terms we parted on.
   "You call yourself a writer," he said, "you say you want to write and yet you don't. Not as much as you could, not nearly as much as you should."
   "I'm no bloody good at it," I said.
   "You're whining again."
   "No, I'm not." I was. I realised then I was, and I shut my mouth again.
   "Of course you're not as good at it as you would like," he said, "how do you get good at something? You do it. Lots and lots. Even when it's hard, even when it looks like all your effort is wasted, even when you read work of someone else's and think you could never be as good. You keep on doing it, and you'll get better."
   "Life gets in the way," I mumbled, and knew I was making excuses.
   "Oh really?" My muse laughed, "so other people don't have lives?"
   "Yes, but..."
   "But fuck all. If you want to write, you'll write. You're just a lazy slacker." He said this last with amusement in his voice, a goading banterish comment but it cut deep. He pretended not to see. "Make time. Turn the TV off, turn bloody facebook off."
   "I don't watch TV," I said.
   He raised an eyebrow. "Facebook?"
   Guilty as charged there, and I knew I was. I opened my mouth to speak but didn't. Everything I wanted to say was either a whine, an excuse or some sort of bitter comment. I stared at my nails instead, bitten ragged, the nicotine staining on my finger not yet faded.
   "Change," he whispered, "you've done most of it, keep going, more changes, think of yourself as a work in progress. Don't stagnate."
   Stagnation, he was right, it had almost killed me once. Like the boy and horse in the Neverending Story, I had almost sunk. I'd used small goals like knots in a rope to pull myself out. I thought I was clear of all that.
   "Out of the swamp maybe," he said, my thoughts as always, his thoughts too. "But where are you now? Not in the grassy meadow are you? You're on the muddy slope of the swamp, and if you just sit on your arse, pretty soon you'll be back in the middle."
   He was right, he was always right.
   "Make some more goals," he suggested. "Those you didn't hit, scale them down, go for them again. Those you failed, have another go. It's only failure when you stop trying."
   "I still don't know what to write."
   "Does it matter? If you start, something will turn up eventually. It may not be any good, it may not be what you wanted to write, but at least you're not sitting there making excuses and bitching that you don't have time to do anything."
   "I won't keep up to it," I sighed, knowing he couldn't counter that. I'm not sure I'd ever managed to keep to anything in my whole life.
   He shrugged. "So you miss a day, hell, maybe you miss a week. So go back to it," he laughed, "at least it's easier than weight loss, if you skip a couple of days it doesn't set you back a week! It's still more words than what you had before. It's a no-lose proposition."
   I agreed. There was nothing to lose by having a go, if nothing else it would give me something to look back on this time next year. I smiled at him and my muse winked. I hoped we were going to have a lot of fun together.