Riley asked David Wong:

When exactly did you relize that hard work looks like magic to those unwilling to do it? Did someone teach you that or did you come to your own conclusion? Reading those words were a final push in a series of really wierd apiphanies that made me understand integrity and lazyness completely differently. Also, I made them and the sentence prior my senior quote this year.

David Wong It was through my entire 20s, remember I didn't get my first paying writing job until I was 32. But I spent seven years writing and promoting John Dies at the End, and after it was done got a lot of people asking me how I had the idea, as if the whole novel struck me like a bolt of lightning and success is just waiting for that to happen. The truth is JDATE was nothing whatsoever when I started writing it, what you're seeing in that book is a collection of five thousand ideas I had over the course of most of a decade and hundreds of sleepless nights, while working two jobs. All of the actual great things in the world (not that I'm lumping JDATE in with them) came about this way - endless tweaks and touch-ups and fixes and obsessive attention to detail. Simply taking more trouble than any reasonable person would. Then you show them the result and they're like, "Wow, I wish I was so magically talented!" Well, my biggest "talent" is that I was willing to work myself to death to get it just right.

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