In the last 45 days I have:

• Broken a tooth.
• Sunk $2k into car repairs on a vehicle that’s 11 years old.
• Watched my brand-new MacBook air drown in front of me and die.
• Gotten “the worst case of poison ivy” my doctor has seen in years.
• Had to cancel a vacation.

Believe me, it’s been sucksville around here for a while. But I’ve also been using my favorite form of therapy to deal with it: I write.

I write out every irksome thing one of my bosses does to irritate me. His character flaws become my flawed and irritating character.

I pile up that frustration, that anger, that sense of futility in the face of a universe determined to smack you around, and I weave a protagonist who fights their way through it, and not always with a lot of grace or dignity.

What doesn’t kill you not only makes you stronger, it makes you a better writer.

That’s what I’ll keep telling myself, anyway. It’s all fodder. All just fodder. Whatever the hell it is that’s weighing me down is just another sentence on a page somewhere.

Onward…