09.12.2026

Trying to work on Talisin's Journal little by little. It is difficult to find time but working a sentence or paragraph in between work or studies helps keep the story alive. Today I wrote the sentences: "During the good years, the fruits of first summer would grow fat and sweet from giving showers and the crop barons would grow hungry to hire cheap labour to capture the overflowing harvest."

I am trying to also replace doom scrolling with writing or at least destressing from doom scrolling with writing. Talisin's story is particularly important to me because it is a way to dump all my fears about the current state of the world into something creative. It's expressive. It also helps keep me away from chat bots.

It's kinda funny because while chat bots were fun for a while, the writing would be very repetitive and surface level. That would frustrate me when I tried to make the characters deeper or explore subtle mannerisms. For some, its kinda expected that bots wouldn't understance nuance very well. I kinda understood this? However, when I wrote, since I played with chat bots too much, I would lose the human mannerisms and nuance that I treasure so much in writing. I do get that bots can get people into writing. However, it is my experience that chat bots are too easily echo chambers in both writing style and ideas. My favorite writings are rarely echo chambers. They have fresh, interesting descriptions that make me look at the world in a new way.

Take Anthony Doerr's first sentences from All the Light We Cannot See: "At dusk they pour from the sky. They blow across the ramparts, turn cartwheels over rooftops, flutter into the ravines between houses. Entire streets swirl with them, flashing white against the cobbles. Urgent message to the inhabitants of this town, they say. Depart immediately to open country."

How interesting! It made me think: "what poured from the sky? What does cartwheels over rooftops or flutters in ravines? Rain? Floods? Monsters? No...it's leaflets!"

What a unique way of seeing leaflets coming from the sky! And how interesting the phrase "poured from the sky" is! It makes me imagine a great saucepan in the sky, spilling white papers to the earth like soup. It is quite surrealist and I like that. I hope my writing reaches that level one day.