Good morning, Hank, it's Tuesday!
So a few weeks ago, somebody at AFC Wimbledon, the 3rd-tier English football club we sponsor, asked me to make a video message for the team, because the Dons have had a rough go of it, and my pep talk did not, like, uh, magically turn things around, but I wanted to share some excerpts from it today because I, for one, could kind of use a pep talk.

When times suck, it is hard to know how they will ever change. My daughter, who is 8, recently said "when it's winter, I feel like it will never be warm again, and then when it's summer, I feel like it will never be cold again." But despite that, the seasons go on changing, the way things are is simply not the way they will always be.

So listen: I don't know anything about your problems, except that they're as real to you as mine are to me, and that knowing other people have worse problems doesn't really help me solve my problems, or make them less real. What I do know, and have lately felt quite strongly, is that in the depths of winter, you feel like it will never be spring. But before we get to that, I want to say something about motivation in dark and dreary times.

In the first part of my career, I was motivated primarily by resentment and fear and a little bit of righteous indignation. I wanted to prove to everyone that they were wrong about me: I wanted to prove to my ex-girlfriend that she was wrong for dumping me, I wanted to prove to my college creative writing professor that he was wrong when he said I wasn't even good enough to take his class, and I wanted to prove to the world that I could write good books.

And as fuel, that combination of resentment and fear and anger worked; it burned bright and allowed me to stay up late at night writing after I came home from work and write all weekend and I wrote a book and it got published and it won awards and the movie rights sold... but it also didn't work, because I was still full of resentment and anger and fear, and thought I had to be in order to work.

Also, as I became more successful, the pressure increased. Not just because there were lots of readers waiting for a book, but also because there were lots of people whose jobs depended on me delivering one.

The thing about anger and resentment as fuel is that it does burn bright, but it also burns dirty. It created this hole inside of me where my insecurity and anger lived and grew, this deep well of worry and fear that I thought I needed, in order to write. And every time someone said something nasty about me or my work online, which, of course, happened a lot, I felt this huge well of anger and I often lashed out in ways that helped no-one and hurt lots of people, including me.

It took me a long time to find a better fuel and I wish I had a non-cheesy name for it, but what works for me now is love. Love for writing itself, love for the people who will read my work, and love for the people I get to work with, my editors and colleagues. Love is the fuel that burns both bright and clean and love is not forged only in the good times. It is also forged in surviving and turning around the bad times together.

Now, of course, when I need to use resentment and anger, I'll use it. I'm not above it, I'll use anything that works, but I really believe love can pull us through hard times. Love for the games we play and the people we play them with, love for ourselves, for strangers across an ocean, for our teammates and for our families.

When I write now, I try not to think about what the story will mean for me, but instead think with hope about what it might mean for others, and when I can do that, the pressure and the fear just melt away.

It is winter, my friends, and it has been winter for a long time. It may be winter for a while longer, but spring is coming. Hank, I'll see you on Friday.