Inspiration strikes the writer. It comes out of nowhere. However, at other times, you have no choice but to sit down and write without any flash. Slowly working through the process until you end up with a polished gemstone, instead of having some magical fairy dust turn a rock into a diamond.
Right now, I write for the sake of writing without fairy dust. And usually, if you’re writing to write, you have no clue what you’re uncovering, polishing, and cutting. But I always write because I must. I don’t have fairy dust rain on me like mist because I don’t deserve it. It’s only truly hard work that gets you closer to the shore of mastery, and there, if you look hard enough, you might find some dust on the ground worth collecting.
There’s always the exception when dust comes from nowhere, but the true source is on that precipice of mastery and beyond. I hate that it likes this. Maybe when I get to the other side and look back on whatever I become a master in, I’ll think about how rewarding that journey was and how it was better that there was no shortcut. And if there were a bridge built over the stormy seas that I, with little help had to navigate, I might be envious and disheartened by the newcomers who didn’t have to go through the painful, yet enlightening experience I did.
But they’ll find their own stormy sea further ahead than me. They would adventure deeper and deeper into the great beyond, unsatisfied with the quality of the fairy dust on this island, searching for better on later lands, all for truly magical fairy dust. And I wouldn’t accompany them or even share that journey with them. And there’s so many shores of mastery in the different crafts of the universe that I won’t even see, let alone consider travelling to. To all those people on their own journey, in whatever they’re in, I hope and wish for their determination to last so they can succeed. And I hope you’re on that journey as well, to your own island where few have gone before.
How nostalgic a sight so far in the future seems. If it’s in the future at all. I mean, who’s to say that I’ll even reach a shore of mastery.