Samhain Publishing Ltd Weblog

The Voice

One of my favorite poems starts off –

There is a voice inside of you
That whispers all day long,
“I feel this is right for me,
I know that this is wrong.”

Shel Silverstein made it sound so simple. But what do you do when the voice inside you starts speaking in tongues?

A few months ago, my inner voice started nagging at me. When I was writing, it told me that I wasn’t working on the right project. Wrong people, wrong genre, wrong point of view, everything about what I was writing was just not right. I tried to argue, and kept my fingers on the keyboard long enough to squeeze out the first few chapters of my next elf book. Then I decided I was writing the wrong elf story, and started a new one. A few chapters into that, I finally accepted that the voice inside was speaking was the truth. These were the wrong stories for right now.

Around the same time, the voice started nagging me about a few other things. Personal life things, and again for a few weeks I tried to ignore the voice, or pretend I didn’t understand what the voice was saying. But the longer that voice kept talking, the more I began to realize that again, the voice was right. There were some things that needed to change in my life, things I needed to do for my kids, for our family.

So I stopped fighting myself. I temporarily shelved the elf stories and started this odd little project that was so far outside my comfort zone, I couldn’t even find a safety net. It’s scary, but in a good way. I’ve found something here, something I’m still not sure is going to be important, or marketable. But maybe that wasn’t the point.

I made changes in my life outside writing. Changes that were even harder than the writing ones. Like with the writing, once the decision was made, everything else seemed to fall into place. The kids are happier, the house is more peaceful, and now a few months later we’ve all adjusted to the new rhythms.

You can call that voice whatever you want. Your conscious, your muse, the alien from Upsilon 7 that shares your body. Your smarter twin (or evil twin, if you think you’re the smart one). But when it starts whispering in your ear, try slowing down for a minute and see what it has to say. It just may surprise you.

Find out more about Ember Case