Tag: second person

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Day 72: Your Flit Specs Revisted

From yesterday…

With most things you’re laid back and comfortable: you pick your old leather jacket over the chipped-out flexx, you eat apple pie before sushi, and you listen to Stream never xKreem. Your gear and your ride are different chapter, a different verse. Let’s start with your ride: a factory Bainbridge Hoverworks model 9600 Azure with custom iCe by South Bay’s own Greedy Petey.

Looks can kill and this Gorgon bitch drops them out of the skies like stone. Sure she draws attention–no you don’t want it–but you deal. Looks like these might clear the runway, but they don’t get you from here to there and that’s what counts.

Enter the 9600 HPM twin-turbine longitudinal lifter from Top & Dancer. These depatic overdumping fans suck in 50 cubic meters of air per second and redirect it to three main ducts (1 fore; 2 aft) and scores of other micro and nano trim-ducts surrounding your ride. The intake is so powerful at full throttle it blurs visibility in a halo-like arc over the flit’s elevators –small birds are suffocated and crushed prior to being cut and pasted by the depleted Promethium edged blades.

Cruising speed is officially CFD (”call for details”). But most open air riders carry an oxygen mask; no true rider has long hair. You’re bald, sexy bald.

It’s fun to write like this. Took me a long time to hack out the fake details, but I like the result. Digging second person too. I know most folk’s assumption is that it’s pushy to read. Maybe it is. To write however, it feels more like a pep talk you give yourself in the mirror before the big game. It sounds like a coach taking.

The following fits before the “Looks might clear the runway…” line:

Don’t let the Medusa reference throw you, other riders may drop, but it ain’t because she’s ugly. It’s respect and awe. Mostly awe since they don’t see many Bains out here in the stix. Like finding an uncorked 21 year old single-malt in strip-mall mini-mirrorbar. Heads turn, breaths hold, times stop. What they see looks like a hammerhead shark fucked an eagle…no, a hummingbird…no, an eagle. Underneath, Petey’s iCe is some light shade of blue they ain’t thought up a name for yet, but it’s between “If Blood Were Blue Not Red” and “Death by Glacier”. On top, the premium solex skin is a complimentary but darker hue–how Petey pulls that off is why Petey’s greedy.

The following slots in at the end of the blockquote:

At take off and landing the 9600 HPM lifter roars like a lion, but non-stop. It makes even you want to cover your ears like a little girl. You don’t though, you have black flesh-toned ear plugs for that. Even with the looks and the speed and the patented Vise-HoverTM, your favorite part is just as you transition to cruising altitude. The leonine roar fades into a feline purr.

Here you are pausing before the kill. Ah’Taconschientee hangs there like shit from a bird that ate mirrors. Are you savoring the moment or dreading it.

Word count: 262

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Day 71: Your Flit Specs

What a sucktastic run of posts. Nothing like joining a local webring and promoting your awesome personal blog with a heaping helping of suck.

Since I had good legs on vehicle descriptions for Johnka’s sledge let me drift on over to you flit and tell you how that works.

With most things you’re laid back and comfortable: you pick your old leather jacket over the chipped-out flexx, you eat apple pie before sushi, and you listen to Stream never xKreem. Your gear and your ride are different chapter, a different verse. Let’s start with your ride: a factory Bainbridge Hoverworks model 9600 Azure with custom iCe by South Bay’s own Greedy Petey.

Looks can kill and this Gorgon bitch drops them out of the skies like stone. Sure she draws attention–no you don’t want it–but you deal. Looks like these might clear the runway, but they don’t get you from here to there and that’s what counts.

Enter a 9600 HPM twin-turbine longitudinal lifter from Top & Dancer. These depatic overdumping fans suck in 50 cubic meters of air per second and redirect it to three main vents and scores of other micro and nano vents surrounding your ride. The intake is so powerful at full throttle it blurs visibility in a halo-like arc over the flit’s –small birds are suffocated and crushed prior to being cut and pasted by the depleted Promethium edged blades.

Cruising speed is officially CFD (“call for details”). But most open air riders carry an oxygen mask; no true rider has long hair. You’re bald.

Word count: 269

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Day 61: Brain Fodder

Think of the most improbable place people could live then skip two to the right and you have the ah’Taconschientee or in the suffixial patois, Shanty.

From a distance, Shanty gleams like a melting drip of a dragonfly’s eye. Nearer you make out the honeycomb of confetti-like solex clinging together and glistening in the sea sun. This could be a stalactite or an icicle.

You trim your flit to hover in a more or less safe zone back from the congested hive of flits, hangers, and sticks swooping and, well, flitting to and from Shanty. It is not hard to swap your fellow fliers for wasps and Shanty for the papery nest. The rear fans of your flit sense your curiosity and wind up a degree. You drift toward Shanty’s center of gravity.

You’re a killer. You have business here. Deadly business.

You chuckle at the melodrama and unzip your jacket to expose your décolletage.

This not an edit.  It’s a discussion of my thinking.

I like that I didn’t waste time with overly specific details.  Laundry lists of whats and wheres and hows don’t much appeal to me as a reader, so I don’t write this way.  When I make descriptions I like to overload the effort to include emotion, tone, and setting along with the information.  The stalactite reference juxtaposes the rest of the insect imagery but it’s still natural.  “…but it’s more alive.” tacked onto the end of that first paragraph might help it blend in even better.

I really do feel like I pull off the overloads I have worked on pretty well.  That’s not to say I shouldn’t continue to evaluate them closely.  My two concerns are that I don’t know when to pull back, that I linger too long on that type of description, and that I may not transition as smoothly as I think into the more plot-advancing stuff.  These descriptive analogies and extended metaphors bring the strange events and places proximal to the reader–that’s my intention anyway.

Considering my habit of scanning pages for dialogue and nearly always glossing the description, the way I write is the inverse of how I read.  Initially that seems odd, but the more I think on the two it may not be so strange after all.  I love dialog.  I don’t write it so I can’t screw it up.

Great.  I really don’t need to uncover another fear tonight.  Not after I’ve been running scared on the tacit word count challenge.  Good thing I am being introspective rather than creative.  This head writing is always dense.  At least I’ll make my unspoken quota of five hundred words a post on this one.

Using second person in this was an accident.  Or maybe a hold over of my recent training style.  When I train I direct the participants to do perform tasks: you click here, you drag this there, or you arrange these in a row like this.  Hmmm.  Not sure that I would have categorized second person as a training style.  I wonder if the immediacy and the improbability of second person could be better served with that in mind.  Maybe even mix in first person to make it read more like a trainer.  I do it this way, but you could do it this other way if you like.  Masia Freixa was second person too.  It was more of a tour however.  Actually that might be a better them to write second person in than training.  Less apt to get preachy, still allows the reader to make decisions about the events.

I might be digging on second person more than I would have thought.  I wonder how you can find well done examples.  I know of none.

Even before it’s clear this is second person–I think it ramped into that–it obviously doesn’t take itself seriously.  The writing is self-aware if not deprecating in it’s ‘let me tell you what I’m going to write’ way.  I think maybe people would be ready for an overt narrator like this.  Another bit of research to do on reading trends.

Brain fodder.

Word count: 520