Endings And Beginnings

Happy New Year!

I've said this before: 2020 was both the best and worst year of my life. I'm being a little dramatic, of course—but 2020 itself has been a dramatic year so...

I'm sure lots of you feel similarly.

But I consider myself luckier than most. For most, the best part did not happen. And that is okay. Because the year has ended, it's come to a close, it is done, finished—and we get to start again.

I've always loved endings and beginnings. In writing, and in life. In writing: they are the most fun—a good ending mirrors the story's beginning, but does it showing us what has changed, and what has stayed the same. Great endings offer an unexpected glimpse of clarity into the future. They give us, readers, the ability to foresee, at least for a moment or two, what might come—it's thanks to the journey that brought us here that we can foretell the journey that awaits us next. Or attempt to, at least.

In life: in the past few years, I've grown more and more a fan of Mondays. Yes, I know. Most people hate Mondays, but I see them as a chance to start over. If the week's been a great week—I am excited to start another such week, to keep the momentum going. If the week's been not so great—it's done. I get to try again.

And so it is with New Year's. We get to look back, and count our chips (few, many) and take a breath and start anew. And there is freedom in that.

When the pandemic hit in early 2020, and the first lockdowns started to be put in place, I remember thinking: 'We needed a break'. If we zoom out of the horrors that many people had to endure this year (and believe me, I am not trying to minimize the pain, the loss), I think we all know that, at a societal level at least, we all needed a break. We needed time to think, to look back and ask ourselves: What have we been doing with our lives these past 20 years?

Because so much had changed, and we'd never stopped to think about how that change might impact us in the long term. Caught in the proverbial rat-race, humanity (or most of it), needed a break. We needed time to reconnect with our loved ones, to realize that much of what we were doing was senseless, reckless, and unnecessary.

One of my favorite pieces of writing I read this year was Thomas Belvan's The Soaring Twenties. Tom argues that, much like it did 100 years ago after the 1919 Spanish Flu epidemic, the world is about to change. He writes:

I believe the immediate future will be tough. No denial, no equivocation.

But then, when we look back at Hemingway and the gang, World War One and the decimation of the Spanish Flu weren’t exactly a moveable feast either. And the rest of the Twenties subsequently roared on into cultural legend as a time of relative ease and plenty and prosperity and art and fun.

It’s the same story now, I say. The rhyme is apparent. At least to me.

So our immediate hardships today have, I believe, finally formed some cracks in the Monocultural top-down stasis that has existed since the mid-noughties, if not longer. In the same way that War and plague ended the Victorian ethos that preceded the Lost Generation (for better or worse).

A bit too optimistic? Maybe. But, like Tom, I choose to be so. Optimism is a choice, after all.

Anyways...

A Year That Ends

I know already that I will remember this past year, a privilege I can only assign to three, maybe four other years of my life. Not because of the pandemic (though that I will remember), or the lockdowns. But because of all I've learned.

2020 has been a year of long lulls of nothingness, followed by turbulent times of change, at least for me. After a 6 month pseudo-limbo following my graduation from College in mid-2019, this is the year in which I became a 'real adult' and, ironically, had to do it in the home I grew up in.

In terms of achievements and things to be happy about, the highlights are:

• I finally started Fiction Notes, something I've been meaning to do, but procrastinating on, for the past five years. And it's been everything I hoped for, and more.

• I was accepted and participated in, the On Deck Writer's Fellowship, where I got to meet a whole bunch of awesome people (some of you might be reading this). The conversations I had, the feedback I got for my writing, the sense of community... I think I've yet to find the right words to describe how much I needed that.

• I got an unexpected, pseudo-ridiculous (and secret, yes) job, and did it well.

• I wrote the bulk of a novel I've been working on for the past six years, only to realize I am not yet good enough of a writer to do it justice. This is a good thing, mind you. I'm almost there, I am, but there are still things I need to learn before I can keep going.

• And finally: Thanks to a series of other jobs, I found financial stability doing what I love to do: writing.

A New Year Beginning

It's been a long year. A strange year. But it has ended. And a new one takes its place. And so I will do what I always do when something ends, and something else starts. I will stop, for a moment or two, and let my mind and body rest and drift and think. As I said in my Christmas newsletter: I need a break, and so do you.

What I mean is: I've decided to take January off the newsletter, and use that time to give you guys a bit of a rest from me, and give myself some rest too, so I can come back better. I've got plans for Fiction Notes. Big plans.

Some things will change. Others, will stay the same.

But know this isn't goodbye forever. Not even close. When I return: things will be different. Better? I hope so. We'll see.

I'll leave you with three things. First, a book recommendation. If you haven't yet read Patrick Rothfuss' The Name Of The Wind, go do that. I promise it will be worth your will. You can read the prologue here.

Second: an ask in the form of another reading recommendation. Go read Tom Belvan's The Soaring Twenties. It will put you in what I believe is the right mindset started this new year.

Thirds—a lesson I've learned this year. An important one, I think. The lesson is: things rarely go according to plan. And that is okay. In fact, it often is for the better, even when it might not look like it at the time.

Plans, after all, are not to be followed blindly, afraid at every turn that something in them will break, and you'll find yourselves lost. Plans are a direction, no less, no more.

A guiding light in the distance, one you follow hoping to get somewhere, but that in truth is nothing but an excuse to explore the terrain around you. Because if you do, you never know what you might find...

Have a wonderful weekend and start to the new year.

Best, as always,

Matias