I’ve talked about Spin City a few times here. It’s a rewrite of The Arthur Kane Stories that I started when I was 16. I wrote some silly adventures following Arthur starting when I was around 13 or 14, but it wasn’t until I was 16 that I wrote anything really worth mentioning. It was after my Dad died, and I wrote through my grief. It helped me process, and it changed my relationship with writing.

We have some tough times in front of us. Earlier tonight, TikTok was shut down, with a message praising Trump for his promise to help bring TikTok back after his inauguration. Never mind the fact that he’s the one that got the TikTok ban started back in 2020 as a reaction to people on TikTok trolling him over one of his rallies. He tried to ban TikTok with an executive order and failed. But the 170 million people that loved TikTok today are probably not going to remember that little detail.

This isn’t about TikTok, or Trump, or anything overtly political tonight. This is about writing when the times get tough. Sometimes it’s easy, and sometimes it’s hard.

While writing Spin City, I had to take a break because of something that happened during the story. One of the characters met an end, and it made me sad. She had become one of my favorite characters to write, and it would have been an injustice to her and to the story to bend the plot to save her. She died in the story, and I had to stop working on it for a little bit to mourn. But then I kept going.

I’m working on The Psychic Out of Time and the tough times are two-fold. First, real-life is rough. It’s hard looking at what’s going on in this world, the rise of an oligarchy, the death of a free and open Internet, and not feel some amount of sadness. There are solid reasons to be sad, and it makes it hard for me to put my head down and focus on the story.

Within the story, at the very beginning, Mel is grieving the loss of someone very important to him. In order to make a character like Mel be real, I need to go with him through his emotional journey, and the emotions he’s going through at the very start are not pleasant.

“But Brian, if the story is such a bummer at the beginning, how will anyone enjoy it?”

It takes longer to write the story than it does to read it. It took me months to write the first chapter. A reader will breeze through it in under an hour, so they won’t have to linger with the darker emotions for as long.

Besides, the darkness makes the light that much brighter. And there will be humor and light in the story. Just not immediately.

This weekend, I want to get another chapter written down. The writing helps me get through the hard times, and there are a lot of hard times coming. If you have even a curiosity about writing, I encourage you to write something now, too. Pour it out on the page, and see what it looks like. It will probably make you feel good, and it may come out better than you expect.