The best thing I've read all day.

By one of my favorite writers, Greg Rucka.

The Song I Can Never Write - Days of Atonement:

"Years ago, I mean years ago, when Jen and I first were married and struggling and, as I'm fond of saying, so poor we were gaining weight because we couldn't afford to eat healthy, we ended up settling in a town where my bride had, it turned out, a high school friend. I was just out of grad school and desperately trying to find 1) a job and 2) time to write. I had an agent and a novel that had been passionately rejected by just about every publisher who'd read it, I was writing what would become Keeper, we were in our early twenties, and it was, frankly, terrifying.

Then we moved everything to this new town so Jen could go to school, and that was even more terrifying. We didn't know anyone in the new locale, no one. Except for this high school friend of Jen's...

...What hurt then is that she was attacking our willingness to dream, and yes, I know that sounds cliche, but that's what it was. We were young newlyweds and we were terrified, but we each held onto this idea that, if we stuck through the hard times and we busted our humps and we put in the hours and we were smart in everything else we did, we could gamble on this other thing, this life we wanted to have for ourselves.

And to her (and more to her husband, I think), that was untenable. At best, they could only greet us with confusion and bewilderment. At worst, they viewed us with malice born of jealousy, that we were willing to chase something they either would not or could not pursue themselves, in whatever form they imagined it.

There are a lot of people like that in the world. A lot of them. They look at someone's passion, someone's dream, and they assault it. For most of them - to most of them - it's a justified assault, something they may not even be aware they're doing."

Click over and read the story. It's worth it.