Artistry...............................

.......................or, painting pictures with words:

      She was cool, superior, and slightly snotty.  A male friend, if she had time for one, would have a hard body, a great tan, a gold chain, a two-seater Mercedes-Benz, and no sense of humor.  A commoner had little chance of peeling off her shorts.  Should it happen, she'd do it purely for the experience, like shopping at Kmart or sniffing glue.
     She knew what I was thinking, of course.  And she knew she was reaching me, with her information, money, and long athletic legs.  All management tools, properly deployed, well under control.  It was mildly irritating.
     Letting it percolate for a moment, I looked down at the battered, grass-green fiberglass hull of my boat, the brilliant white D'Arches paper, the black handles of the watercolor brushes.  It was all I really wanted to do;  I didn't want to fool with some rich guy's computers.   But a bigger boat would be nice, and money would buy more time to paint.  And New Orleans is a pleasurable place.
      "It sounds illegal," I said after a while.

-John Sandford, as excerpted from The Fool's Run