Metaphors matter

"Metaphors matter: for human beings metaphors are casual—we function on the metaphors we ourselves fashion. We imagine a world, we create a reality, we bracket a piece of experience, and it becomes acute, hyperreal, dazzling, revealing, enabling, and also blinding, perhaps deadly. Metaphors set us in motion. Metaphors matter."

~~ from Fugitive Days: A Memoir by Bill Ayers

nine weeks to a novel's first draft

I've had success getting full first drafts out in eight to ten weeks, and I once heard an extremely well published and recognized novelist say that he gets a short version of first draft out in about six weeks and then revises it over a couple years. I will often revise for longer than that. Anyway, Brooke Berman may have the help you need to get past the first-draft jitters and shakes.

Of Book Cards and Barbers

Will it be classic book cards, Bill Barber and Bobby Clarke, or beyond?

"The Tick Before" by Nadia Kalman

Indulge in "The Tick Before" at Jason Teal's Heavy Feather Review.

#fridayreads

Find affordable Auggie here, here, here, and here.

3/17/26 update: And at Smashwords, too.

If a man comes into my hut

“Let us not reason like cowards,” said Okonkwo. “If a man comes into my hut and defecates on the floor, what do I do? Do I shut my eyes? No! I take a stick and break his head. That is what a man does. These people are daily pouring filth over us, and Okeke says we should pretend not to see.”

~~ from Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart