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“And today,” Jack concluded. “We celebrate Blaire’s 26th birthday. We still love you sweetheart, and we always will.” - Harbinger, Chapter 8: Necropolis
It's April 27th, 2023, a pivotal day in the second act of the novel. As I've talked about in a previous post, dates play a significant role in Harbinger. Perhaps that's because dates play a significant role in my own life. What some might see as arbitrary marks on a calendar aren't all that arbitrary at all. It's not just one revolution of our celestial body around its star. Every new year matters to people. Even if we're the ones generating the significance doesn't make that significance invalid.
I recently had that discussion with the love of my life, who's just become my fiancé. Picking the perfect date for our wedding came surprisingly easy. We were both of a similar mind, even though we hadn't discussed it beforehand. It was just one more reason I knew we were truly meant to be.
Especially with each change of a season, you can wake up to a rush of memories from that time and place in past years. I think it's a natural part of our being, because we only have so many years on this pale blue dot in the great black ocean of eternity. Every year, we should be measuring our progress, how far we've come. Some years, that might only be a few steps. Some years, it could be thousands of miles. I think the important thing is seeing that trail behind you, that you are moving your feet.
I've done a lot of that in the past few years. The pandemic lockdown forced me to introspect more than I'm already prone to. On one hand, it gave me enough momentum to finally start writing real novels, but on the other, it got me obsessing over every stretch of time, seeing how far my progress was each year compared to years prior. As an engineer, thinking in terms of charts and graphs also comes naturally to me. Measuring trend lines of your own self-worth as a person can be a truly humbling experience when you preoccupy yourself by quantifying them.
So, coming to another real-life milestone in my novel, I was happy to look back over the past year and be truly satisfied by how much "lost time" I had recovered in so many different areas of my life. And that's largely because of my beloved future wife, whom I love more than anything.
I've written about so many relationships between so many different characters, and it still moves me how many things she brought into life unwittingly. I am truly blessed. As only the co-author of my own life, with the divine, I've been humbled immeasurably by my fortunes. All the money in the world couldn't buy me the happiness I've felt recently.
Now, I have so many more anniversaries to look forward to, as more and more chapters are added to my own life. That has been best captured by our favorite new song:
And, I still have an incalculable amount of chapters to write! I've got five novels outlined now, including my current Work-In-Progress. I also recently recorded the audiobook portion of the chapter I quoted at the start. So, along with my own exciting engagement, those are still on the way as well! Hopefully both will be out around this time next year.
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- Frank