Luke DeSalvo 2025: Progress, Rhythm, and the Dance of Becoming
- Luke DeSalvo
- Dec 7
- 4 min read
Progress is still progress — and that’s what counts.
If there’s one truth 2025 has taught me, it’s this: fulfillment doesn’t arrive all at once, and it doesn’t always arrive loudly. Sometimes it shows up quietly, in small steps forward, in consistency, in devotion to the rhythm rather than obsession with the destination. This year was about movement — about learning to dance with life rather than wrestle it into submission.
I feel fulfilled in my romance this year — on the keyboard, in literal affection, and in the many meanings of dance. By dance, I don’t just mean movement to music, though that’s part of it. I mean the way we all must twirl ourselves into alignment with life’s tempo. The way we adapt, repeat, stumble, recover. Whether it’s daily chores, creative work, play, breath, prayer, or brushing your teeth — it’s all part of the same choreography. And 2025 had many tunes.
The Lightspeed Archives — Bringing the Unconscious to the Page
One of the most meaningful releases this year was The Lightspeed Archives, a novella born from deep meditation, dream-states, and altered perception. This was a collaborative effort shaped by inner vision, symbolic language, and the desire to bring something ineffable into form.
The Lightspeed Archives explores hallucination, insight, fear, wonder, and revelation — not as pathology, but as mythopoetic material. It’s a bridge between subconscious imagery and narrative meaning, serving as both spiritual artifact and literary experiment.
👉 Read The Lightspeed Archives here:
This project reaffirmed something essential for me: creation doesn’t always need to explain itself to be valid. Sometimes it only needs to exist.
The Templar’s Folly — Psychic Noir Meets the Supernatural
The centerpiece of my fiction work this year was The Templar’s Folly, Book One of the Psychic Detective Malachi Monroe series — and writing it was an absolute pleasure.
At its heart, this is a supernatural noir steeped in romance, danger, and moral tension.
Short description: Agent Malachi Monroe, a psychic investigator operating out of Princeville, Hawaii, is thrust into a dangerous new role after surviving an exorcism and undergoing a Templar trial. Assigned to protect Valerie Delacroix — a gifted psychic targeted by a stalking vampire — Malachi finds himself pulled into a brutal clan war led by the ruthless vampire Orion. Torn between duty, love, and survival, Malachi must confront the supernatural underworld head-on or lose everything.
👉 Explore The Templar’s Folly here:
This book felt like a gemstone — distilled, focused, and charged. It carries themes of devotion, identity, responsibility, and intimacy under pressure. It also marks a deeper confidence in my voice as a storyteller.
Mindfall: Song of the Echo — A Dream Realized
One of my oldest dreams finally became real in 2025: becoming a published video game developer.
Mindfall: Song of the Echo represents years of fascination with interactive storytelling, systems design, and symbolic gameplay. Game development is its own battlefield — you’re not just a writer or artist, but a designer, programmer, level builder, tester, marketer, and problem solver. It’s a dance with many sharp turns and heavy stomping.
Short description:The colored kingdoms stand on the brink of collapse as a mysterious force known as the Medi spreads chaos across reality itself. A band of unlikely heroes must journey through imagination, memory, and doubt to uncover the truth behind the True Portal — and decide whether harmony can be restored before everything fractures.
👉 Play Mindfall: Song of the Echo here:
This project didn’t bring massive rewards — but it brought something better: proof. Proof that the dream could cross realms and become real.
Gratitude, Rhythm, and the Road Ahead
None of this happened alone. I want to thank my wife and my mother — for their guidance, patience, belief, and steady presence. I want to thank friends, readers, listeners, and quiet supporters who offered words when they mattered most.
Everyone danced this year. Everyone carried something. And despite everything, we made it through another rotation around the sun.
Some of my work is about success. Some of it is about failure. Most of it is about translation — bringing something from another realm of the psyche into this one and letting it breathe. That, to me, is gold.
Thank you for reading. Thank you for walking with me. Thank you for dancing in the dance of life.
What Comes Next - Dreams of a Schizo: Anima Rising
Looking ahead, the next project forming on the horizon is Dreams of a Schizo: Anima Rising. This work feels different from anything I’ve released so far. Where previous stories translated experience into fiction, this one moves closer to the source — the symbolic language of dreams, the inner feminine archetype, and the raw interface between psyche and meaning.
Anima Rising is not a confession or a diagnosis. It’s a mythic rendering of inner experience — a journey through dreams, hallucinations transformed into symbols, and the dialogue between consciousness and the unconscious. Jung spoke of the anima as a guide to the soul, and this work explores what happens when that guide rises from the shadows to speak in images rather than words.
This project serves as both a beginning and a reckoning. It is the prelude to future narratives and a standalone meditation on healing, integration, and imagination. My goal is not to shock or sensationalize, but to illuminate — to offer a map through inner terrain that many travel alone. Dreams of a Schizo: Anima Rising is about meaning found in fragments, and the quiet power of bringing inner worlds into the light.
Stay tuned. This next chapter has only just begun.
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