Every cancer patient has to go back to work–it’s inevitable. It’s also hard work, especially when there’s no paying job to return to.

My kids no longer need me to be their crowd-pleaser. You know the drill. The parents see their kid and wave, and then the little kid excitedly spots them sitting in the audience and waves back. And the parents leap up–what bliss to see their kid again (it’s been a whole 15-minutes since they dropped them off). The kids are ready to pee in their pants to see their parents again. Maybe I’m going to start waving to other people’s kids.

And I can’t go back to writing about my cancer experience. People wanted to know what was going on when I was in the thick of the battle. I was good for a story or two. Now I’m a burnt cigarette butt trying to look like a brand new cigarette again.

You know where this is going, don’t you? (And no, I don’t smoke). It’s just the analogy I’m going for here. I’m a discarded cigarette butt in an ashtray with the red lipstick imprint all over it, a mama who writes a muse to amuse herself.

Even Alex told me, “You know you don’t have to tell everybody you had cancer. You don’t look like a cancer patient anymore.”

But I can’t so quickly get cancer off of my mind. I want to tell and retell the same stories. It’s way more fun than taking care of business.

Who am I? Ouch! Tricky question; there’s a bunch of stories behind that somewhere, but the truth is, check out my About Page. Didn’t I cover all of that a couple of years ago when I still had long hair?

And then someone approached me asking to be a guest blogger on my muse. Either it’s a practical joke, or I’m glad I got a cancer degree so I could play dumb and not answer her. I mean, really?

I haven’t had the mindset to do anything more than publish this muse once a week, and now I have a guest amuser prowling around my inbox wanting submission guidelines.

It opened up a whole slew of self-identity issues for me (besides the one already mentioned), like what’s my niche?

Whether I get paid for it or not, I’ve got to take care of business, eventually. Because if I don’t know who I am or what I stand for, how can you?

See what this poor girl did to me? I’m going through a mid-life blog crisis now, and it’s all her fault.

So, I wrote an index to figure out what I’ve been talking about for the past two years. I learned that I wrote 110 muses. Heck, I even promised to give away $110 to the lucky winner. (Now we’re talking business).

And while we’re on the topic, it wasn’t a scam or marketing gimmick. We have an official winner. Drum roll, please. Let’s hear it for Kelley. We both know how to keep each other laughing. Congratulations!

So now that we’ve celebrated our second-year muse-iversary, I’ve discovered the kids are grown up and don’t need me to wave to them anymore.

Growing up a coach’s daughter didn’t make me a coach. Covid kept us locked up and took away our sanity. And then I finished a comedy writing course just in time for the sickest joke of all–why getting cancer, of course.

With tracks like this, where am I going to go? Wherever it is, I’ve got to screw my wig back on tight. We’ve got some serious business to take care of in the meantime.

Could we start small? Maybe with some submission guidelines, perhaps?

So, here they are:

1. You must subscribe. (Yes, subscribers would be lovely!)
2. Submit your best headline idea and outline for your proposed post. (You don’t expect me to be the only funny one!)
3. You’ll promote the piece on social media. Maybe you’ll have better luck than I do because you’ll have time to respond to people’s posts).
4. Pitch on topic (tell better jokes than I do).
5. Know the audience and its wants and needs (good luck figuring that out).
6. Edit so that it’s grammatically correct. (Grammarly gives me weekly insights that make me feel good (or dumb) about myself, supposedly it’s checked over a million words that I didn’t know how to spell).
7. Free from plagiarism. (At least someone’s thinking about legal issues here.)
8. Your muse should be a procrastination break for a world that needs laughter sent straight to the inbox ad-free. (Does that work as my new slogan?)
9. It must pass the amusement test: if it can amuse mama, it can amuse you. (Now we’re getting down to business).

So what do you think? Eventually, no matter what has happened in our lives, we’ve got to take care of business–even cancer patients have to go back to work someday. So why not make sure to have some fun taking care of business.