Nonsequitur Life

It is currently 62 degrees outside.

In February.

In Minnesota.

It’s fine. Everything’s fine.

Anyway.

I don’t remember when Basil the Gremlin Muse was officially created. I had ideas about a gremlin muse rolling around for a long time before I created a critter in the game Spore. The game came out in 2008 and the first mention I can find of Basil on the blog is in 2010. So he’s been around for at least that long. (I’m not brave enough to venture into the minefield that is my LiveJournal account to see if I ever mentioned him there.) I’m just drawing a complete blank as to whether or not he predates Bob.

I don’t really subscribe to the concept of a muse as a literal source of inspiration. I just needed something amusing to blame writer’s block on. Recently I’ve come to the realization that maybe what I really needed was a scapegoat to blame the never-ending deluge of What-Ifs leaking out of my brain on. There’s plenty of innocuous and useless ideas that crop up, but there are also a lot of WTF variations of things that I just don’t want to take responsibility for.

I mean, there’s nothing objectively bad, but there’s a lot of…stupidity.

A LOT of stupidity.

Characters revolving around a single conversation and not a complete plot. Inside jokes mostly only Bob and I will understand. (Or just me. Mostly just me.) Fanfiction. Just in general. It’s all stupid.* A lot of just change this one detail to somehow create an entirely different story. Take these two characters that fell flat here and try again with them there. Or maybe over there. Possibly over here. And too many things that turn smutty when they really don’t warrant smut. I’m certainly not morally opposed to smut, I’ve read plenty of it. But I am not a smut writer. The sex scenes I’ve written are very vanilla and tepid. I just can’t dedicate thirty-five pages to one sex scene overloaded with a thesaurus of terms for all the parts involved. The sex is just a thing that happens not the whole point of the story.

There are a lot of things (is a lot? are? is? The internet cannot agree.) that I write that should never see the light of day. Granted I’ve posted plenty of things on The Internet over many years on many platforms that really should have been kept to myself. And in middle age I do have more of a discriminating mind when it comes to what I put out for the world to see. (There’s also still plenty that should have been vetted a little more thoroughly.) But still there are things that I write, read, and think, I really should not put that on The Internet, and then Basil taps me on the shoulder to say, post it anyway.

It’s an annoying conflict of keep it offline because it’s terrible and I’m the only one who’s going to get the jokes or put it on ye olde blog because it makes me laugh and entertains me far more than it has any right to.

Anyway.

Basil is a troll.

Or a gremlin.

Same difference.

And when I started thinking about another unnecessary variation of something that already has too many unnecessary variations, I started writing out the conversation Basil would initiate about it as if he was an actual little, blue gremlin sitting on my desk, spouting ideas like a fountain.

Because I have that kind of time.

Also, I’m not writing much of anything else, so…Conversations With Basil it is.

And it is quite possibly some of the dumbest stuff I have ever written.**

* I’ve read plenty of fanfiction that was really well written by other people. I’m saying the fanfiction I write is stupid. Even if it does involve some of my favorite lines I’ve written.

** I realize dumbest ever is a bold claim considering how many decades I’ve been writing (and writing on the internet), but it really is dumb.

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Kill the Lights Matt Nathanson