Whoop! We're at post 30. How time flies. I have to be honest that I don't remember many of the posts I wrote at the beginning, but still they seem to come to my mind when I need them, so perhaps it doesn't matter?

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Today I'm typing from an old, unused Android tablet I had lying around. I actually left it in the US more than a year ago, on my last work trip there, but thankfully a cousin of my wife who lives there was nice enough to drive to my hotel after I left and pick it up. He brought it back to me this weekend, and it's only now that I've had the chance to properly set it up for writing. It's almost perfect; I was even able to connect it to a small Bluetooth keyboard. I only need to fix the font in Obsidian since, for some reason, it seems to be using the ugly Android default one.

Usually I write from my wife's laptop or my work PC, and it's nice to have a dedicated "writer deck". My wife usually lends me her laptop, but sometimes (like today) she needs it for work. My work PC is great, but I always have the nagging suspicion that my employer is spying on me (which is quite likely, even though they would never say anything about it unless I do something REALLY inappropriate). There's also my phone, which I also use to write from time to time, but I much prefer typing on an actual keyboard if possible.

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I've been thinking about stories more and more. Recently I finished reading The Frugal Wizard's Handbook for Surviving Medieval England, and at the very end of the book Brandon Sanderson shares that the seed for this book came to him one night as he was lying in bed. He mentions that his go-to strategy for "falling asleep" is to tell himself a story. I found my mind doing that yesterday without my prompting it, and while I don't exactly remember what came out, I do remember it was pretty cool!

It was a sort of children's story about a boy and his dog (with a similar vibe to Stephen King's Fairy Tale). The boy climbs a tree to look at something glimmering on one of the branches, and then he hears his dog barking; when he gets down they find they're in the same geographic place, but now everything around them is grasslands except for a small wooden cottage (of course) in the near distance. They go to the cottage and...

I think the boy might've been my oldest son. The story was definitely shaped as if I were going to tell it to him. Interestingly, I even found myself telling it in Spanish, which is something I almost never do. When I noticed I consciously switched to using English, but after a bit I found myself thinking in Spanish again.

I don't know how the minds of other "multi-lingual" people work, but usually the language I use in my thoughts is delimited by their content. Mostly everything that has to do with writing, stories, the mind, and programming is usually done in English. Actually, the majority of my thinking happens in English. But lately I've found myself thinking more and more in Spanish for some reason. I think maybe I've been paying less attention to my English "self"?

I frequently come back to this topic of language and creating in a language that's not my "everyday one." I always ask myself if I wouldn't just be better off writing in Spanish (I've even dreamt about this very question). But you know, I'm just more comfortable in English, so I guess that's that. Still, there's something to say about the fact that I often have to give my mind time to search for the proper English words, while in Spanish they come much quicker (which makes sense, as that's what I speak all day, except when I'm at work).

There's an interesting exception though: I feel much more comfortable writing "poetically" in English than in Spanish. Maybe my vocabulary in the former is just richer. I would expect it is, considering that virtually all the written content I consume is written in English.

At the same time, I of course struggle more with producing proper English grammar. Thankfully I can always pass what I write through a lightweight grammar checker (shoutout to Kagi's Proofread mode), which fixes most of my blasphemies.

I've always thought that I should connect more with my Spanish side. Ever since I got out of high school I have read ZERO books in Spanish. None at all. The language (when written) just feels so weird, clumsy, and "gross" (in the sense of "not subtle" like a hammer, not "yucky" like.. you know). But still, it is my cultural heritage whether I want it or not, and I'm surely missing out by willfully ignoring it.

One of the problems I have with Spanish is that it changes a lot depending on the country you're looking at. Most books written in Spanish are done in Spain's Spanish, which is very different from the one I'm accustomed to speaking. But even if you look at the Spanish of Latin America, it varies a lot not only depending on the country but also on who the author is and what their socio-economic status was.

... I'm way over my head here. I know nothing about Spanish literature. I'll abandon the ship before it crashes and burns.

If you have any Spanish book recommendations I would be more than glad to know about them!

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Well, that got out of hand really quickly! I was planning on writing about something else today, but perhaps we're already too far into this post to actually start a new topic :P