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The Richardson-Blount NF32 “Jack Rabbit”

It’s nice to know once I drag myself away from the distractions of email and the Internet and begin writing that there’s a dog that wants out, a cat that wants in, and a phone to ring on the other side of the house.

I’m plucking a line from yesterday’s one-minute drill for some expansion. The line didnt capture as much as I thoink may have been in my head as I blurted it out. With luck I’ll be able to attenuate the image into something something:

“Bradford skimmed the landmarks outside the cockpit. He’d picked up the habit early. Stare straight ahead into the coming fight with your eyes, but skim with your mind the…”

A mostly blue Richardson-Blount NF32 “Jack Rabbit” skimmed the morning plains as the sun pinked the horizon from nautical to civil twilight. At ten meters off the deck it was closer to wrecking with the earth than it measured nose to tail. The pilot, Captain Charles “Not Chuck” Bradford, skimmed landmarks and hazards outside the cockpit with his thoughts. He ticked them off like a chef might run down an endless ingredient list: tree, rise, fall, tree, pond, copse, rocks, creek… Bradford’s Drivers’ Ed teacher—a coach probably—mentioned the technique in a classroom lesson. Explicitly naming objects gave them substance in your thoughts in a way that merely perceiving them with your eyes did not. Bradford reacted to information, data, not to ideas.

Day 435

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Inaugural One-minutes

The first thing I’ve written in 2010.

  1. Fog filled mornings seem to be the ones that inspire me to write but not enough to write more than these little speed drills. Hopfully I’ll wake up this year and get to writing before too long.
  2. Sebastian crept up the sunny side of the rock. He knew the shadow of his head as it crested the top might reveal his precense, but it was worth it if it didn’t. The…
  3. Water ran down the side of the mountain through roots and rocks and earth. It soaked the steep wall till they sagged with mucky moisture.
  4. Dorothy lay in the sun. In the grass. In a field just outside her Father’s house. The blades slowed the chill breeze…
  5. Trittles scurried toward the party along the crevices of the dungeon corridor. And then I slayed my inner dungeon master and wrote of it no more.
  6. Conjure, the floating city of Conjure, rested on the horizon like any distant cloud might: smudged and tinted with pink from the sunset. But it held intrigue…
  7. Then the phone rang and I ignored it. Then the phone rang and I ignored it. Then the phone rang and I answered it. It wasn’t a special call but it was a nice one. And then I hung up and wrote.
  8. Bradford skimmed the landmarks outside the cockpit. He’d picked up the habit early. Stare straight ahead into the coming fight with your eyes, but skim with your mind the…
  9. Metallic feet crunched into the meaty earth like something metalic and crunching would. The legs steadied and the gun whirled up to…

I couldn’t get to my normal twenty in the time I alloted.  Also these were generally horrid so it might have been best to stop anyhow.