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...