Bit of trivia. My college creative writing professor, Larry Harper, used to quote Hemingway. Hemingway said something like, "no matter how well you write, you'll never come up with a better way to say 'I looked at the dog, and the dog looked at me'." Larry wrote a a briiliant piece based on that line, one of my top ten favorite pieces ever. Because of him, in every piece of fiction I try to put in some version of "I looked at the dog, and the dog looked at me." I think my favorite was in the SM novel, which was something like, "He looked at the Tulgar. The Tulgar stared back."