the writing of sam hilsman
There is nothing
behind the curtain.
My mind seems to be some sort of twisted tenement. Rooms keep appearing while I sleep, and I have stopped asking who is building them.
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Six floors.
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Artificial Time Machine
Essays about the machines, written while they are still new enough that nobody, me included, knows what they are for.
latest 5 Beautiful Things About AI
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Poetry
Short poems, written fast and mostly at night, and left the way they came out.
latest Introduction
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Philosophy
Long essays on meaning and language and work and why people turn out the way they do, the same handful of questions asked again each time something changes my mind.
latest Twenty Answers
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Abstract
The pieces that would not sit still as a poem or an essay, so they ended up as both.
latest Gratitude is the Murderer of Comparison
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Corporate Drones
Fiction from inside the office. Darren is a Principal Technical Architect at Blitz, which sounds important, and he is at the airport again.
latest A Field Guide to Spotting Gatekeepers
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dark for now
Short Stories
Stories about ordinary people, usually in the week before something gives.
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a separate building
Wired World
Novels, at their own address down the road, starting with the one where the rich get eaten and going on to everyone who was left.
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Lately
Newest first, from whichever floor.
- A Field Guide to Spotting Gatekeepers Across different industries, different buildings, I keep meeting the same person.
- Twenty Answers What a word means to the room and what it means to each person in it, and how thin the overlap turns out to be.
- Look at the Teeth My grandfather, dying, said not to trust any of them, and especially not the nice ones.
- Borrowed Shapes An analogy is a shape borrowed from somewhere else, and this is about what happens when it gets asked to finish the argument.
- Departures Volume 1: Departures. Darren is at an airport and he is trying to get home.
- Ajar Track the fickle beastly tread
about
Sam.
I run a software company in the daytime and write this at night, and PlainTextPoetry is the name it all goes out under.
The essays go up on Substack and Medium first, and the novels have their own address at Wired World. The day job is CloudFruit.
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New pieces go out by email.
Subscribe on Substack and each piece reaches you the day it lands here, free, like everything on this site. There is also a Patreon, which goes toward the art.