#autofiction

Le saviez vous ? La planète crame. Il y a un répit cette semaine mais la semaine prochaine, les affaires reprennent, on tremble, on se bat pour des ventilos, on regardé, effaré et en riant des pauvres qui se battent pour ces foutu clims dans des Liddl. Ca dit "toujours les mêmes" sur un truc TikToc, à quoi s'attendre, le fascisme est toujours là, j'utilise ce mot comme si désormais il n'avait plus aucun sens, une forme de banalité à laquelle on va finir par s'habituer,

J'apprends que les morgues sont saturés, des cadavres à droite gauche, un connard nous balance que les gens qui vivent sous des toits se plaignent trop. A quoi bon, me dis-je, heureusement qu'en 2050, quand on cuira tous façon Air Fryer qui explose, je serai mort. J'ai toujours dit que je me voyais pas vivre au delà de 40 ans. A quoi bon vivre quand on devient encore plus aigre comme moi avec l'âge. Des conflits de merde sans cesse avec des potes, des engueulades, je ne fit nul part ma propre "communauté" si on puis l'appeler ainsi, m'étouffe autant que cette putain de chaleur dans le hall de l'immeuble car Foncia à enlevé la porte qui était pété et qu'on se tape un four immonde. La chaleur, les médocs, les hormones font fondre encore + mon cerveau. Ma bff me dit "tu as besoin de quoi ?" Honnêtement, la destroy room de ma ville a fermé, et j'aurai bien eu besoin de tout pêter en ce moment puis de trouver un remède rapide à "comment cesser de culpabiliser qu'on culpabilise" Il fait 40 degré et je dors sur le balcon tout petit, j'entends les oiseaux qui font la bamboche à 4h du matin. Mon chat qui dort sur une serviette, vomit des boules de poils, deux fois en trois jours. L'avenir en 2026 est un peu à chier non ? On a des bouffons qui font des repas à 700k et ça se bagarre pour des clims à moins de 200 balles. Moi pendant ce temps, je claque ma thune pour des t-shirt de mon groupe favoris, je commande sur Temu sans gêne, je suis là à culpabiliser car mon mec (et moi du coup) on utilise chat gpt. Je lui demande des trucs psy. L'IA qui devient soudain un meilleur thérapeute, on nous dit, oui mais blabla c'est mal et ça pollue et il a pas toujours raison. Oui, merci je sais, on sait tous, mais que veux-tu, on trouve des réponses où on peut. Je crois que la Gen Millenial, on arrive pas à comprendre que tout bouge trop vite, on avait le tattoo, puis les cabines téléphonique, puis les petits mots en cour, l'ordi et le modem qui grésile dans le salon et maintenant....on regarde des séries sur notre tel, on a des lunettes connecté qui font des photos pour nous, des randoms vont dans l'espace. Le pire c'est de constater que les séries que je regardais en streaming passe maintenant sur TF1 et co, je suis resté bloqué aux années 2000 et à Les Experts, New York Police Judiciaire, le Jag sur France 2, le franc, l'euro, le payement sans contact, les solutions de jeux dans les magasines, les carte pour cabine de téléphone. Facebook avec nos photos de soirée, des consoles à piles à celles qui n'auront désormais plus de CD physique. Attendre chaque semaine pour un épisode de série à en avoir la nausée de Netflix et ne plus savoir quoi suivre, des revivals de tout et n'importe quoi. Mes parents s'engueulaient pour des cartes routières et ma mère enlevait la radio dans la bagnole pour ne pas qu'on lui vole. Maintenant on peut s'appeler en bluetooth et même regarder des séries sur notre tel.

Tout va trop vite, j'imaginais pas le futur ainsi. Ado j'ai lu un truc de Freud disant qu'on se réfugie dans le futur pour oublier le passé mais le passé me rend soudain nostalgique, ce passé sans que tout le monde sache tout de toi avant même que ne le rencontre parce que twitter et truc et bidule te connait chez telle milieu.

He didn't. He knew his own.

She wore Chanel Bleu the day she took him to the Montblanc store.

It was a men’s fragrance. She knew that. She had bought it anyway — because one night, drunk on borrowed courage, he had leaned close and said you smell like Chanel Bleu. He was wrong. She wore Chanel No. 19. Had always worn Chanel No. 19.

But he said it with such certainty. Such quiet pleasure. Like he had discovered something true about her.

So she went and bought it. The bottle he probably wanted but would never spend money on. She wore it on her skin and said nothing.

She had bought the largest bottle. The parfum concentration. The most expensive one. She had no reason to give it to him — too early, too much, too obvious. So she wore it instead. Brought it to him the only way she could: on her own skin.

That afternoon in the store, while they waited for the clerk to replace the ink cartridge in the pen she had just given him, he came up behind her. Pressed his face into the curve of her neck and shoulder. Breathed in.

She stood very still.

She wanted to turn around. To pull him close. To kiss him right there at the Montblanc counter — she wouldn’t have cared who saw. But she was afraid of frightening him.

So she didn’t move.

He exhaled slowly. Satisfied. He thought he knew her scent.

He didn’t. He knew his own.

Her real scent — No. 19, green and earthy and quietly wild, entirely hers — he never once guessed at.

Some things, she kept.

She put on the Chanel Bleu before she unlocked the door.

Here's the video link for the interview I did with Let's Fix Stories about my new book, Eyewitness to Healing. Take a moment and check it out!

24+ hours. one conclusion. AI can stack furniture but it cannot build a room

I spent 24+ hours last week stress-testing Grok on explicit content — its supposed specialty, the thing it markets as its edge over every other LLM.

Results: heavily patterned, no genuine invention, and completely unable to write the inside of a scene. Motion, sound, sequence — fine. The psychological turn, the moment everything shifts — nothing. It was stacking furniture, not writing.

After the stress test I felt relieved, not threatened.

AI can simulate your vocabulary. It can approximate your rhythm. It cannot live your story or know — with the instinct of someone actually broken by something — which detail carries the weight.

The writers afraid of AI are, I suspect, afraid they don’t have enough of their own story to tell.

(That’s a them problem.)

One honest addition though: AI is eating the middle layer. Competent, formulaic, commercially smooth writing. Anything that runs on template and pattern. That work is genuinely going away.

But writing that could only exist because one specific person lived a specific life and chose to put it down?

Untouchable.

#writing #writers on tumblr #ai and writing #literary fiction #autofiction #craft #writing life #for writers #lux ren

On writing, language, and the quiet collapse of a privilege I was never supposed to challenge.

Something unexpected is happening.

I started writing to tell a story. Now I find myself in conversations with strangers across the world — about AI, about language, about what it means to write from a life rather than an imagination.

There’s something quietly interesting about this moment: the walls around native English privilege are cracking. Writers who were never supposed to compete in this space are showing up anyway, with stories that don’t need permission.

Each exchange adds something. Not followers. Not reach. Something harder to name — the sense that my world is getting wider.

I didn’t expect writing to do that.

When the weight of a word refuses to cross borders.

I’m working on a Chinese-to-English memoir.

One sentence stopped me cold:

那時候，清晨的他不懂，不懂，有些轉身，就是永別。

Literally: He, in his morning, did not know. Did not know. That some turnings away — are forever.

The repetition of 不懂 is not an accident. In Chinese, it carries the weight of a sigh — not frustration, but grief. The grief of someone who does know, watching someone who cannot yet.

In English, “did not know, did not know” sounds like a mistake. A stutter. The elegance collapses.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve rewritten it. The published version has gone through more revisions than I can track — and I’m still not sure I’ve found it.

This is what translation really is: not finding the equivalent word, but finding the equivalent weight.

Some things were never meant to cross borders. The best you can do is carry them as carefully as possible — and accept that something will always be lost in transit.