I’m a dreamer. Not the kind where I have a dream to build a house where I can put all my family in one place—so that I don’t have to take a flight just to spend a few days with them. I’m a dreamer in the sense that when I go to sleep, my mind will start presenting bits and pieces of my life into a sequence and roll them with some editing and choices of genre. That kind of dream.
I had all kinds of dreams; One night, I was dreaming about a cooking school that got bombed (I can’t really tell this one now because of The Last Harvest). I wrote it down in my dream journal. A few months later, I wrote an opening scene for that dream in a first person POV. I wrote it down with a mechanical pencil I just bought, in a notebook I felt like I don’t really like. So once I finished writing–probably got distracted and forgot what I was doing–and put the book down, I forgot about it until last year. That’s when I realize that this could be something, and that the story is too big to be abandoned and not being loud about.
Now I’m dreaming of making this dream into a book. I got a hundred and fifty pages in the draft now. And I’m so proud of it. But that is not the reason why I write this piece. I want to tell a story, about a story, that teaches me about some lesson.
Lesson Number 1
So the world has been crazy since the beginning of 2026 if not since the last decades. I think we as human beings, collectively are experiencing–what I would call–an unfriendly weather inside our head. Well, let me just speak for myself. I’ll rephrase that: I have been experiencing dark clouds inside my head for quite a while. And for some reason, I tend to forget that my soul needs something to channel the anger, the grief and everything else into. Which in my case, writing.
When I started working on The Last Harvest, the cloud in my head started getting thinner and a little bit of light started creeping in. It's not so dark nowadays. It’s not like the storm is brewing inside it anymore. So writing, as I knew before, and had to relearn the hard way, is the simple and cheap cure. It’s a tool. To get through commuting without breaking any windows. To get through the day without screaming good profanities to strangers on the side walk. To get through the week without feeling the pull to find the lake where all the poets went to die.
The lesson mostly is for me though. Maybe it can work for someone else too. If writing is not your cup of tea, just believe me when I say that it works all the same with whatever your tea is. Simply put, art is the way.
Lesson Number 2
I find myself rushing in everything that I do. I rush myself leaving the bed when I wake up. I rush myself to make coffee in the morning to jump start the routines. I rush producing my words when I talk. Sometimes it makes me sound blubbering. I rush at everything I know that it’s not healthy. My nerves must’ve been fried by now. I don’t know.
But this rushing tendency is not only for physical activities or routines. I tend to rush my stories as well. Like when I start something, I find that I can’t wait for the end product. It makes me want to do things quickly, so I abandoned the development. Most of the time. This is one of the reasons why I can never finish a whole story without getting distracted on doing another piece. I just can’t wait.
The Last Harvest is different. Maybe because I love the character so much I don’t want to ruin their arc. Maybe the story is so dear to my heart I want it to be good so that I start taking my time. I enjoy the process more. I take my reading sessions about corn as the process of writing. When I watch the storm from my apartment window and internalize the spit of rain touching the glass, I take it as a writing process too. When I mindfully sit and listen to my loved ones talking, I call it a writing process too.
The Last Harvest, my third baby, taught me something important. That writing is not all about sitting and running my fingers over the keyboard to produce ten thousands of words into pages. Writing is me. When I wake up every morning and think about Suri and her sketches, it’s writing. When I put my head on the pillow and try to sleep and the voice of Alex plays in my head, it’s writing too. Taking notes of my friend Daniel’s insights and jokes is also part of the process.
Patience, taking time, and enjoying the process, is what I believe will make The Last Harvest Better than anything I’ve ever written.
Lesson Number 3
In between my work days and the weekend, last week, I made time to listen to a podcast of a friend. A podcast where he narrates my poems and prose. It has been years since the last time I heard or read the piece. So when I heard Reza Romano pronounce every word from my poem with a little bit of music in the background, I found myself crying. I thought to myself “who wrote that?” Because it sounds so beautiful and honest. And then I remember how I felt when I wrote the words, I wasn’t proud of what I made. I thought it was a mediocre line of yearning. But after spending years away from it, I can see it from afar and remove the criticism in my head when I listen to it, from someone else’s mouth.
The lesson was, we, I, can be the worst critics of our own creation. We think we can judge and look for the worst part of something, because we think we’re not hurting ourselves in the process. We’re not being fair to ourselves about our creation. Most of the time. At least in my case.
With The Last Harvest, I try to just pour myself into the pages. I just write everything as honestly as I can and not reread everything before I put myself away for sometime. The Last Harvest, as important as it is to me, taught me that to give birth to a good piece of art, I need to separate the editor and the writer in my head. They each can have their own time to be activated.
I wrote this for me. For someone like me, who happens to find this page in the middle of a struggle making their dream come true. For someone looking for a way to bring their imagination bleeding their way into our world. So that we remember, it’s not just about the end product, it’s about the process and what it taught you. Us.