Aww, but they're classic!
Maybe not in the modern sense of the term, as in there's this philandering caddish artiste that just hops from person to person trying to find somebody to fall in love with, to be their "muse" and inspire them, but they're really just playing with people and using them. (Or are they? It might only come off that way if someone's capital-a Art is one of their only modes of expression.)
But in Greek classical mythology, there were nine muses. Depending on the region and spot on the timeline, there could be three that became the graces or the furies or something. Thalia is the muse of comedies, Melpomene is the muse of tragedies, Calliope is the muse of epic poetry... what baffles me though is Cleo, muse of history, because, uh, doesn't history just sort of
happen? And there's a muse for astronomy.
One of my favorite--sadly, now defunct--webcomics,
9th Elsewhere, had this whole organization of muses so they were half muses and half guardian angels that could be shuffled around a bit. That, combined with
Percy Jackson and the Olympians, and maybe a bit of Neil Gaiman's
Sandman, inspired me to create a world populated by muses of different races:
The nine muses up in Mount Helicon are basically the governing body, because the Olympians are too busy partying and stirring up family drama to do anything really important. There's a race of muses that come out of depression and misery, another race that are birthed from rage and frustrated injustice, another that comes out of joy, and another that comes out of a cerebral sort of clarity rather than from any emotion. Their wings are color-coded to make racism super easy!
I have this idea that muses are sort of associated with people's feelings, but it's ambiguous whether a misery muse would
make somebody depressed by hanging around them or if somebody's depression lays a muse egg in this overlayer otherworld that
creates a misery muse. (Now I'm thinking that the muse eggs could be made out of stones smoothed by one of the many mountain springs that are sacred to the muses, and the spring water is the substance of the collective subconscious of real people. So, a lot of miserable people in the world for example would influence the water quality and make a lot of Melpomene-type muse eggs. The Helicon muses collect the eggs, sort them, and adopt them out or foster newly-hatched muses at Helicon. So, that works out nicely.) (The biology of mythological beings are difficult to write about! I had an argument with a friend about how it's possible for a fictional creature to have shoulder-wings
and forelegs if the species is prone to twinning and semi-conjoining the twins during development, because the other person was so stubborn about these creatures just evolving insectoid symmetry that ends up looking like quadrupeds.)
The thing is, if I try to take that system outside of the story that has these as part of its worldbuilding-- if I have another story that I want to write, that doesn't have anything to do with modernizations of Greek mythology, and I try to classify that other story (or song, or poem) as a personified muse, or under the charge of a personal muse-- it just doesn't work. My imagination's just not really shaped that way, to create this imaginary friend who's a gatekeeper for what the story is supposed to be like, who I can just talk to and argue with as part of the creative process. I
do do that, but rarely, and with specific characters rather than some personification of the whole story or my own creativity as a whole.
Novelist Bunnies: Do you write in order? 
