From the Heart: Doors close, and new ones open.

If you aren’t aware, here soon I will be shuttering this here blog.

It’s a melancholy feeling.  On the one hand, I’ll be turning it off simply because I’m moving every bit of content over to the new platform (yet to be announced).  On the other…

I launched my dreams on this boat.  It’s not the best one out there.  To be quite honest it’s a ramshackle mess which makes any market junket look like a palace by comparison.

Yet this has been my home.  I’ve grown a lot trying to care for it.  I’ve learned what it means to have to come in, labor daily, and not see any immediate returns for the time invested.  That’s perhaps the single greatest lesson any writer can learn.

Writing isn’t an overnight Youtube video.  It isn’t a list of five things that goes viral and suddenly you have a career.  Writing is geology: it is the application of time and pressure.

Time is invested with every word written.  The irreplaceable gift of our short waltz on this Earth in exchange for future glories, real or imagined.  Time spent learning how to be better as an author by learning from other authors, by learning from history, by learning about history.  Telling a story is a complex affair, and for one such as myself who had more enthusiasm than knowledge, it’s taken years to pound even the basics on structure and pacing into my thick noggin.

I have ever more things to practice and study, and to do that I will need the appropriate dojo.

This is not that place.  At every turn, the opportunities to build this into my own personal fortress have turned to ash.  I suppose it’s my fault, although I’ll be damned if I can get someone to tell me how.

These things happen, however, and it is not up to me to storm the gates and tear down the edifices of power.  I can’t; I’m just one guy and I wouldn’t even know where to begin even if it were possible.

It’s up to me to persevere.  It’s up to me to survive the strain, to be unyielding in the face of the assaults without as I build strength within.

Time and pressure.  It turns coal into diamonds.  It turns men, women, and those in-between into authors.  There exists no substitutes, no quick fixes, no shortcuts.

Stare into that abyss, and don’t blink first.

Justin