Consider the First Line

Geek With Exploding Brain Literary Devices 101 Resource: www.literaryterms.net The Big Four: Metaphor – conditional equivalence. Henry II was a mighty lion. Simile – so, as, like, than Aphorism – a concise, terse, laconic, or memorable expression of a general truth or principle Analogy – Peter De Vries, comparing the unknowable universe to a safe, wrote, “The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe." Next Rank Tool

The Gate Opens, But Not For You “ I am a ticket taker, many tickets have I torn” – Song By The Low Anthem Mary Ann, I am the ticket taker This is what I do. The gate opens, but probably not for you, Mary Ann. You’re not the one lucky today. You don’t have a degree from a hyphenated private college. Neither did you intern for a Congressman, or spend that semester in Bologne. Your father has never purchased a Senator, and you’ve never ever been invited to the Governor’s Man

Every writer goes down to the DIY. For some, the DIY is the obituaries, for some it’s the Police Report, for some it’s the family Thanksgiving dinner. The writer comes home with a notebook of nuts and bolts, a hammer, a sack of nails. For all writers, it’s observation that provides the lumber. Here’s your observation. You’re on the backroad 285 from Tres Piedres, New Mexico to Espanola, bicycling. You’re near a place that your phone names as “No Agua.” You pull over to stretc

BUILD-OUT OF YOUR COMPETITOR At the Santa Fe International Literary Festival, Jenifer Eagan was asked about AI and what it meant to “writers,” as persons, as a collective, as a profession. Her response was largely, “Look, we’ve faced these upheavals before, and the book world has been knocked on its head, and the answer is always the same. As writers, we have to get better.” OUR upheaval is AI. I like talking about the large language machines as Probability Engines = PE, and

There is a street that plunges down straight away from the front windows.

Those Awkward Clumsy Sentences: # 5 Broken By Its Own Weight Loose Sentences That Break Under Their Own Weight: This set of examples is...