The Longest Night Is A Beginning
Winter Solstice Marks A Return Of Longer Days To Come
Welcome to an entry “From The Future”.
This is a riff-in-progress. This will not stay the same. It will feed something unexpected, like all experience. Everything’s a draft for the next thing.
Future + Fiction is the formula for everything, essays, stories or chapters.
This is a short piece. Most pieces are best read online, via the Substack App, when you have fifteen (or more) minutes.
The winter solstice is more than the longest night of the year, it heralds the long crossing to the light of longer days. I used to ignore them, they were just another thing that happened every year, on the road to the holidays, and celebrating a countdown to a New Year. That changed five years ago.
Dad had to go the hospital a week before Thanksgiving. A few weeks later, the world outside went sideways. A long story. Dad’s story ended 14 months later. A new one began.
Five Winters ago, the winter solstice brought an endless twilight for my family, but since then, with each longest night more room and reason for happiness returned. It became a privilege, as life became less about countdowns, and more an accounting, and an accumulation of memories until an invisible clock chimes.
A good day. We made it again. My loved ones are safe and well. My brother has made up for lost time in his savings, and my mother’s health is better than it was a few years ago. My close ones are well. The writing still comes as I go deeper than expected through the thicket of a secret forest of words.
I used to write about different things, but inside, I was running, half-hearted, on the fumes of borrowed ambitions. I used to do financial charts and home-grown market notes but my field of vision changed. I wanted something else.
There are plenty of minds who excel at covering the markets. Meanwhile, I rediscovered something hidden inside since I was young. Stories waited inside me, cryogenically sealed, mummified by years of compromise and the mimetic envy and rivalry of thin models of desire.
I begin with the end of next year, of my future, like I did last year, looking back from the last day of the year to come.
I want to be clear about “why” I do this.
It’s not a “to do list” or some method to “optimize”, it’s a ritual to observe the end of the longest night and prepare for the return of light and longer days.
Below, a note from my future, the end of 2025, which I’ve written to myself.
December 31, 2025
What a year.
Unexpected. Some good. Some bad. Some disappointments. Surprises.
Some great days. I wish I could put those wins in a jar to turn bad days into good ones. Some of those hopes, looking back, it’s funny.
How the hell did I not see “that” coming when it did? Why did I worry so much about that thing that felt like such an awful something?
I’m not alone with a bad habit of filling in the blind spots with worries from undone and unresolved things. It takes up all the space from all the good things. I almost lost sight of all the good but I was lucky again.
Every year asks the same questions.
What did I want at the beginning of the year?
What was on the wish list?
The writing of course. The novel. The first of a trilogy.
The novel, “Box Of Stars”, has become something Dad would be proud of. And as the day of surrendering it to the editor and printer loomed closer, I was reminded that Dad started this “thing” inside my mind with a stack of books. Then the “thing” went to sleep until my unsettled spirit was stilled into action.
You remember that it began because there was a pause in the stars falling, so you could breathe again.
You made a tally of the changes in the sky and the world. Every word written marked a star fallen from an endless sky.
Kilobytes of text became megabytes of story. Fiat Fabula.
One of your newest friends, who became a trusted advisor, has been the editor who helped you sculpt the marble from the quarries of your mind.
The stones spoke daily. But at hundreds of thousands of words, the chorus became deafening. That is when you knew you “have something”, when the thing became much more than expected. Your friend helped you listen better.
The stones did more than speak, they sung.
The characters did more than exist, they began to live, the settings were more than set pieces, they became worlds detailed with the intimate tracery of reality.
You had time to edit and evolve the other two novels, “Harvest” and “Release”, which you wrote after the first draft of “Box Of Stars”. This trilogy, named the “Nested Stars”, is an epic story in reverse order spanning a thousand years.
But life was not just about words.
What else this year?
More meet and greets.
Even when it never felt easy at first, after you said “hello” or hit “send” it felt good. Even if it broke an axle, it worked out, it’s still rolled ahead. New friends.
All those people who did things you admired, something they wrote, made, or did. You told them how much it meant to you. Part of the reason was somebody said something wonderful to you and then you wrote, and wrote, and wrote, and then the light returned.
This included those who signed up for the Substack, both half-fed (so few emails) and over-gorged (archive), who were promised “The Future”.
More books on shelves (or on the floor), and more stories read or lived.
There is someone, she is important. It’ll work out when it works out.
So many details left out but this was more than enough.
2025 was such a year.
I hope everyone else’s 2025 worked out the way they hoped.
What was learned, all over again, every year, these past few solstices?
Lives and stories have a hidden thing in common are “Quests”.
The great quests are not destinations, they are departures - an exodus from what was missing, lacking, found wanting - to restore or reveal what was lost.
The Quest lives on in explorations, experiments, and escapes - Ad Meliora - To The Better.
If you’re still reading this, I wish for you, your version of “Ad Meliora”.
I made a visual “outline” for the writing, based on a year of work with my friend and editor Dylan, of Infinite Books, a true writing mind, to help me.
The first playlist which was there as the first Novel emerged, because I “heard” the story almost as well as I can “saw” it in image and text.
