As a writer, as much as I try, I can't stop writing female characters. They have so much more to offer; they have to wear so many different hats. There's so much wonderful gray matter in a female's life that it just makes for a stronger character.
Don't fall in love with your wit. Your cleverly turned phrase may not, as you hope, show off how much gray matter you have, especially if the phrase is at someone else's expense.
The real barrier (to building a brand) is the human mind. It normally takes decades to build a brand because it takes decades to penetrate the gray matter in between your ears.
My mother used to say: 'It's not enough to be Hungarian. You still need a little talent, too.' To paraphrase her, its not enough to be conservative, you still need to have the brainpower to be a Supreme Court justice. And, if Harriet Miers is confirmed, she likely won't be in the same league with her colleagues in terms of gray matter.
When his brain died, all of the memories held in his gray matter, along with all of the knowledge he had acquired, would simply evaporate in a flood of chemical reactions.
For me, between "Reference" and "Sketching & Conceptualizing" is the "Get the Hell Out of the Studio" step. I most often NEED to shut off the computer, push myself back from my desk and escape the studio space to let possible ideas percolate in my gray matter before committing anything to paper or digital imagery as a sketch or a concept.
Everything is a reenactment. We are reenacting the world in the mind. The world is not inside there. It does not reside in the gray matter of the brain.
According to a recent study of the brains of identical and fraternal twins, differences in the amount of gray matter in the frontal lobes are not only genetically influenced but are significantly correlated with differences in intelligence.