It’s hard to write.

It’s the holidays. It’s the drama. It’s the unexpected car repair, the meeting you don’t want to have tomorrow, the conversation you wish you hadn’t had today. It’s the fight with your sister, the lunch you forgot to pack, the accident that makes you reroute half an hour out of your way when all you want is to go home.

Life will give you plenty of reasons not to write. Life can drain you like a hole punched in an oil pan on a back road full of sharp rocks.

“Tomorrow,” you whisper to yourself, and you let the hours go, because today is just not the day. Tomorrow will be the day. Or the day after that.

But if you are lucky enough to have a spark in you that gives you the ability to write, fan the flame. Don’t let the things that happened to you today stop you from writing.

Write in spite of the bad news.

Write because you got bad news.

Write because there is an endless tide of darkness, and it is always coming, and you have been given a candle to light. Don’t wait for tomorrow to light it. Strike now, set that thing ablaze, and push back.

Push hard.