(№4.1)

The beginning of a story is always the hardest part, as there is only so much to write and create and to be inspired for. You need to be kissed, embraced by a beguiling muse, who caresses these little roots of inspiration to begin with. To let ideas sprout, characters arouse from nothing. Born adventurers, a dystopian world painted in darkness or catching the sombre, macabre aura, the ambiance of a childish lullaby teaching with the lent aid of monsters to eat their vegetables procured on tables without protest and do their chores most efficiently.

You might have the hunch of an idea, what to type, what to write or how to start your epic and glorious story, storming the world in a heartbeat, magical as in a fairy tale.

Of course, it's never so easy.

Let's pretend you worked it out, have your idea, your plot totally placed out, indicated to the last decorated facet, maybe invented some quite interesting persons on the way with the most different physical or ethnical attribution you'd die to meet in reality. Let his eyes be blue! Or, as red as dawn in January. Let her hair have the colour of curated honey you battled a storm of a thousand wild ired bees, skin tanned and as soft as silk. And so on. 

You write and write and lose yourself in the story, feel the fictional persons, in fact you are delved, indulged, dipped in with your eager toes, until the muse stops singing and your flood, the ride of the tale is over in result of lacking inspiration. Terrible headaches follow with the slightest inclination to gather pen and ink again, to continue seemingly impossible. The blockage is in some cases so serious, so beyond reach that a mere dozen die. Ideas, not people, never people, sadly. That would be too easy. Never say never though. Separated from your most earnest friends by mere declining mental capacity due to writing a novel and a wall of pure, untouched canvas hence the possible output of your misery may turn the one or other fellow mad. And madness allows the door of death to swing ajar.

Well, a lot of sparking concepts for stories are ended even before touching your consciousness, reaching with dampened fingers even never paper or stone, so in total the number might be incalculable for even the most gifted mathematicians.

I'm going to tell you somewhat of a secret; Decide what you do with the knowledge.

In order to craft stories, spinning them like cobwebs are by witted spiders awaiting crusty flies alike your desire to attract daring readers in your boost of over confidence, foolishly believing to achieve that by laying out unanticipated, cunning traps of entangled paragraphs and loving description fine and with a fragility to end borderline tragic, excel in conniving motions to trick them, loving and fearing for the characters you admire exactly as they do, only to kill them on the very last page, beyond retribution. Cruel, but graspable. You don't need to be delighted every then and now, you don't have to figure it out all at once in a hushed, rainy afternoon of conspiring clouds because you have nothing better to do, invest your pathetic life in something efficient, maybe. Perhaps it'll work. Rather it won't.

That couldn't be further from the truth.

Of course, some do it, some don't. But you have to agree with me, this "technique" might not bear the passionate-amazing-wonderfulness you'd expect, yet still can guarantee some high-quality in wording and thinking.

Let's be real, folks; A lot of tales are baloney these days, written by authors who should pull quite literally the trigger to conclude their life, ashamed as rightfully as they should. Before this liberated gesture perhaps be inflamed by the pricking audacity to set their scriptures and notes on fire, so their beloved might not resume to scratch their eyes out after reading this abomination of a farewell note.

A story – to let it flood most realistic – should be handled as in real life; Have the ideas on a sheet and paper, let your imagination rest for a couple of days, until the pressure grows so high, you literally feel how your characters give you bad looks and want to continue their fictional lives, your limbs quiver with bursting foreseeable excitement that's already half of the pleasure you'll sense when that book is finally published to the grand wide world.

A story must beg you to be continued, if it does not, you should consider it probably shouldn't have begun in the first place.

You don't have to feel the need to barely rip the all-so-well-known muse at her hair to you, until she's bald, but let the inspiration come again when it is time, when it is appropriate, when it burns and singes every one of your fibres composing your entire being and your mind constantly grasps and grabs, tears at you, until begging for mercy and began again the games of running and hurrying through that excited bubble of creativity and fantasy come alive.

It comes and goes in waves. And it's just the thing, sometimes that the ocean detaches itself from shore for the greater good. The shallows greet you from afar, for example.

That all applies of course only till the greatly feared deadline gets a say in all of this.

After all, stories are not quiet. They are not dead, as long as people keep them alive. Some unfinished might scream to trick their fate, others remain mute, or they are shrieking in agony without an ear to listen and comprehend.

At least, that's my opinion. But what do I know, right?

Now, how to finish one's other story? A tale, a myth, a legend in real life – more or less – had gently put into perspective as happened yesterday, the wide-unlearned past, even today, but never touched upon tomorrow.

How to take care of that? How to spin the tales of something that hasn't happened, yet will one day? Confined - given - in a world of cardboard and white sheets.

You don't.

Rather than adding on something you should not stick your nose in, try to imagine what happened before this, this very moment you want to let continue. Think about the story of the origin, investing people even far more with how everything began.

Tell a legend the other way around, headed in the other depth of eternity, concerning the past that would conclude to these very actions. The other eternity digresses backwards and yours onwards, forever destined to move, and stretch as far as possible akin to the constant pulling universe.

If the blockage presses the ways onwards, reverse the direction, change the gear and speed backwards.

People back in the olden days thought so too.

Of course, once the Skeleton Crew did sail every place, brought plagues upon Empires and kingdoms, let them be the primordial centre of attention for a few centuries, people would whisper stories about them, mostly bedtime stories to teach their children and warn them about their undeniable fate of tragically getting munched on by the demon residing beneath their beds, both inconveniently secretly collaborating, Crew with monster, if they were to deny to do their chores.

People started panicking in the midland, when the sleek blue bow was to be seen at the shores of a river, another rule to be silenced, another one to be broken as the limits of the Sea didn't seem to concern or hinder them in any sense, bend the goal. But the humans did like the way rules were chiselled perennial in a stone and couldn't be defied out of simple leisure.

A handful of villagers embraced the thought of the Crew and retold the sweet melody in lamenting veracity, to what beautiful places they travelled, seen so much yet so less, only to follow their paths and the horror of how this marvel fated to crumble would look after their departure.

No one at least believed the invented stories, as they weren't accurate, weren't believable and soon those storytellers would be forgotten too, succumbing to their own foul intention of once again figuring reality versus myth out.

No living soul, no one but the Skeleton Crew was to increase their reputations of being demonic minions by visiting cities, playing their music as they must and disappearing before the fatal consequences would arrive, as if fleeing of their own skin.

Concluding in yet more deaths, heart breaks, losses, tears, sorrow, personal void, low self-esteem, and more horror for several villagers, being punished for what seemed inconsistent reasoning.

Rather than making stories up about the present of future, they over time asked themselves, of which nefarious hole this bunch had crawled out, now sanctioning and maiming the beings of them quite unjustly, shortening life where it was unnecessary, yeah truly, where did the Skeleton Crew actually come from?

Thanks to the fact of obtaining quite a large amount of fame over time, each culture thought differently of their origins and inclusively the reason for such anomalous behaviour.

In ancient China, people thought of them not to be something evil; The wicked rather was lurking in their rows and ranks and every death was to cleanse the population of weak ones, a gift from the Gods they worshipped, a constant reminder of what higher standards they needed to push themselves unto, until their last breath drawn, hopefully performed by golden old age than due to the misfortunes unleashed of the Cursed Crew of the seven oceans and every sea in between. It was merely a ritual, only for the strong supposed to be won and succeeded, the ones who got to bless the Earth with their offspring, essentially cleaning their gene pool to garner only with the best and the starkest for the future.

The old tribes in North America had another point of view in that matter, as once in a while, when the Ship of the Death was to pay them a visit, which didn't occur very frequently, they sneaked at the shores in rehearsed manoeuvres prepped for years in case of use, to attack them with sharp arrows, trunked in snake venom or lethal plant poison, yet not a single was ever to reach the deck or touch the jet-black wood, rotting slightly out of time and bounded rules of biology.

No matter how strong they tried to capture the boat, the whole Sea trimmed against them in every way possible, by letting them drown, captured by circular waves or currents accompanying them for miles to let go of them where they eventually would die in the wilderness.

The tribes believed not the slightest that their Gods sent those demons to them and they just were another form of existence, this time not fighting for humanity but desperately attempting to extinguish their beings, to erase the human race completely.

Stupid villagers, if everyone was to die, where would be the fun in that? What toy then was left to break, if all of them bereft in a haze?

Who would then be there to carry the corpses away? To mourn the lost in a deliciously pathetic house parade? I guess the answers to this cannot be found there.

Leftovers were necessary, as not the dead ones were those with pain, loss and darkness, but the living were. The survivors were the real victims.

And that's what made them cruel.

They had no mercy.

They had no grace.

They had no empathy.

No feelings.

They left only blatant, neutral apathy for the slaughters they brought, the terror that stayed. They refrained from visiting the over-ambitious indigenous people not because being scared the slightest, yet somewhat they appreciated the desperate struggle for life, to survive, comically laughable and certain enlivening to what circumstances they encountered in boring, prude Europe, where no one had the spine or will to come to battle in centuries. Ignorance hurt even them. Was it to any avail, the peculiar war-wedging of the fighters, for being spared?

Of course not, don't be ridiculous. Their numbers greatly suffered also, if only for the measure to not get so comfortable.

Only hollow and voidness, that's what you'd find by digging deeper, hidden in passionate music and temptations human lust could not reject nor stampede other than being consumed by it, relishing in this swagger for as long as they could. Allowing its addictive component to infect their minds, craving furthermore thus which made them sick, which killed.

In Spain, highly influenced by roman Gods, people believed the sacrifices giving to the huge and powerful Gods such as Juno or Jupiter or Neptune weren't enough, it wasn't never enough and that they wanted more and more of mankind until reaching the point where any more sorrow would be unbearable, yet never crossing it truly, a mercy stripped at last from the frosted, golden-glazed hearts infused by ichor of their respectful gods.

Whenever the ship came, people tended to behave differently and instead of hiding and denying the undeniable dancing of the dance of Death one night, they'd gather together around a fire, sacrificing old style relics or lamb to honour their ancestors, descendants and those higher beings ruling over them, those who were marked by foolishness and restless folly dancing the night away.

It never worked though, but as ambitious as these residents would be, they wouldn't give up after centuries, when the old rules slowly entered the sweet oblivion, and the fear of the blue ship was just as high as in other kingdoms. The crew had quite a good laugh about it though, that you can believe.

Yet, you can call it sacrifice or enforcement or whatever you please, after all their arrival would mean punishment and distress for every human soul, no one would even think about that the pain and punishment might be shared, reciprocated.

Perhaps the Skeleton Crew was being punished also, held at the throat with fervour and scrutinizingly animated to impede doom for a crime committed long ago, but had yet to be forgiven and forgotten from both parties.

As always, it seemed the Egyptians had the right idea how to interpret this the most difficult conundrum of humankind:

A high culture candidly skewing knowledge served for the after-generations who forlorn ideas and corrupted these, a belief of higher beings, multiple Gods, and everything in between. The very inspiration for generations. One of the first people to prosper, to flourish. One of the first to bear evil unlike any seen before.

One might argue that the Greeks and Roman honoured multiple Gods too and revelled in fortunes similar, but let's face the actuality of the unparalleled comparability to these three Empires, since the Egyptians were the very first to do so, with original ideas, foreign ideas, basically the original story that other nations took the liberty to end or continue, with crucial details lost in translation or bloody aftermaths of capturing important figures, the story-tellers themselves.

After all, it might be only a story, told to children and their descendants to be as a bedtime story at night, a horror story to let the fear of the Unknown be evaluated and cherished the highest.

But I hear the old souls of the Egyptians rise earnestly to tell us their story, and perhaps we should listen, understand the message, and go on with our lives without further worrying us the hair from our scalps: