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I'm writing this with slightly sticky fingers and the particular kind of tired that only comes from dancing the frog dance around a flower-covered maypole at midnight in broad daylight.
Swedish Midsummer. If you've never experienced it: imagine a country collectively deciding that the longest day of the year deserves flower crowns, pickled herring, cold new potatoes drenched in dill, and the first strawberries of summer eaten straight from the punnet. The sky never goes fully dark. You stay outside until you genuinely can't tell if it's 11 p.m. or 2 a.m., and honestly, you stop caring.
I wouldn't have it any other way.
But here's the thing that hit me this morning, sitting in the soft, slightly wilted aftermath of it all. We don't celebrate Midsummer because summer lasts forever. We celebrate it precisely because it doesn't. Tonight the days start getting shorter. We know the dark is coming back. And so we make flower crowns anyway. We eat the strawberries. We dance the ridiculous frog dance with our whole hearts.
I've been thinking about Saelynn a lot this week.
She lives in a world that is actively, structurally designed to take tender things away. And yet she keeps them. Not loudly. She doesn't announce it. But she keeps them. That quiet choice, to protect a small soft thing when everything around you says there's no point, is what Dustling is really about underneath all the ash and the broken politics.
Celebrating the light precisely because the dark is coming. She does it too.
First Draft Update
Dustling (Age of Serpent #1) is now just past 25,000 words — about 30% of the way to the 95,000-word finish line. Some days it pours; this week it came one stubborn sentence at a time. I'm mostly writing longhand in my notebook these days, then rewriting each scene into Scrivener once it finds its feet. August 30th is still the deadline I've given myself, and I'm still — foolishly, lovingly — going for it.
There's a live progress bar on the book page if you'd like to watch it crawl toward the end alongside me. No pressure. (All right: a gentle, companionable amount of pressure.)
One thing I'd love to know
How do you mark the turn of summer where you are? Is there a day, a meal, a ritual, a single specific walk you take when the light changes? Hit reply and tell me. I read every single one, and some of them end up, quietly, in the world.
Happy belated longest day of the year. Eat the strawberries while they're good.
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