I just realized two things.

1) Spite is excellent motivation for writing.

2) I figured out why I ship Aral/Cordelia so much. There seems to be this trend lately in fiction and movies of marriages that don't work. That irritates me. I feel that there can be fully as much drama in a marriage that does work as in marriages that don't, and having lived through the implosion of a marriage in the past three years, I don't want to read about/see it. I want to see couples who fight and bicker and still love each other. It is possible, Hollywood-types.

I feel like more fiction depicting such couples might cut down on the number of divorces, if only by demonstrating that it is okay to fight with someone you love. Lois McMaster Bujold gets it dead to rights with Aral and Cordelia. They hurt each other all the time, but they forgive each other and move on. More positive depictions in fiction might help replace the Harlequin romance stereotype.

To explain 1: I got so sick of seeing all these stories in my Fiction Workshop II class about marriages that imploded or otherwise didn't work, so I wrote a story about one that did. Pretty much just because.