As I prepared for the publication of Alice I Have Been, I found myself knee deep in guest blog posts, Q&A’s, interviews, etc., for both print and online book sites. It’s a rite of passage these days, and while it can be time consuming, there’s also a very appealing aspect to it all; it requires an author to pause a bit and reflect upon the whys and reasons and the very definition of the creative process.

One of the questions I find I’m asked repeatedly has to do with my muse. Do I have one, what does it look like, what advice can I give other authors about following it? This is the kind of question that can make me feel very inadequate, because I’ve never thought in terms of a muse. I think of myself as a hard working author who just tries to get it done, and if one thing isn’t working out—as has happened to me in the past—then I switch gears and try something else until it does. Where’s the muse in this? I admit I’ve never seen it; I just see a lot of hard work and perseverance.

Yet I suppose there is one thing I do follow, but it’s not exactly my muse. (Honestly, I don’t believe I’d recognize a muse if it perched itself on my laptop and screamed, FOLLOW ME!)

Thanks to all these interviews and Q&A’s, I’ve come to realize that what I follow, what leads me to places I’ve never gone before, is my curiosity.

In the run up to the publication of our book, my husband/co-author and I have been encouraged to embrace a variety of promotional schemes, including a twitter campaign. I don’t want to sound like a Luddite, but I am a tad resistant, so I’ve compiled these objections in the following listicle which I will be linking to my Facebook page and adding to my RSS feed on my blog on The Huffington Post.

1. I write first person essays. If I am twittering approximately one hundred and forty characters, something in the neighborhood of nineteen words a tweet, maybe five times daily, in six days I will have used up enough material for one essay—in less than a year, two books worth of words and ideas. Not only will I not have anything left to write about, but who will pay to read my writing if they’ve followed my twitters all year long?

2. “Sound like yourself” was the sage advice Kurt Vonnegut penned in 1999 to aspiring writers. Andy Borowitz is perhaps the writer who comes to mind as most successfully marrying his unique talents with the medium. Every day he entertains 11,259 Twitter followers, 5,000 Facebook friends, and tens of thousands of blog readers with his pithy observations, including many well under the limit of 140 characters. (“Lou Dobbs Returns to His Planet; ‘My Work Here is Done'”) His events regularly sell out, but can I successfully craft such a distinctive style in time for publication? Perhaps I’ll have to think really out of the box, like one of my favorite writers, Mark Danielewski, whose debut tweet read: “NAM Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σίβυλλα τί θέλεις.”