Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

The Author's Perspective

The Author’s Perspective

Whenever I write a blog about my new RC flying hobby my “views” plummet. The only thing that makes the “plummeting” worse are my blogs that reflect my political point of view. I can almost see my “Army” of readers when they see one of these themes…. “Oh my goodness, Percy is off on another tangent.”

I bet that most of my readers are unaware of the following aspects of flying an RC model from the typical flying perspective. This view is different from driving a car or flying a real airplane. In a car you have a behind the wheel perspective just like in an aircraft you are looking from behind the stick. However standing on the edge of a flying field while the RC model soars about in the distance is distinctly different. The most worrisome aspect of ths is when it turns and comes back towards you. At that instant, suddenly everything reverses. The same would be true if you were using an RC transmitter to drive your car. As it drives away the direction you turn the steering wheel is unchanged but when it comes back towards you everything is opposite. The same is true for flying inverted. In a real plane you experience the sensations from inside the cockpit but from a distance all you have is a visual perspective and when the plane flies upside down, everything becomes reversed.

In order to make the adjustment I wiggle the wings slightly and that tells me what the motion of the stick is doing. That is OK if the airplane is flying slowly but not so good if it is flying fast. Today I tried something I read in my “Getting Started” RC book. It said that if the operator, seeing the plane approaching from afar, notes one of the wings dipped lower than the other, that trimming to level, one imagines that the stick is actually up under the low wing and you turn it in the direction necessary to lift it back up. This works better for my brain that turning about and imagining I am in the seat.

Now I know my readers are glad they stuck around for that smidgen of esoteric knowledge.

A writer is in a sense more like an RC pilot than an actual one. In a novel the author sits on the sidelines while the Central Character does the actual performing. Often we are required to write about characters who have behaviors we find reprehensible and worry that readers will think that because we write so well about them we must have some vicarious affinity to them in real life. For example, since Percy Goodfellow writes sensual prose it must be a subject that occupies a great deal of his thought. What if the members of his church knew what he writes about? Why they might conclude he's some sort of pervert!

I work at writing in areas I feel I need the need to improve in and sensual prose is one I make no apology nor protest too loudly. It is an aspect of writing that I believe very few writers ever master and WDC is a good place to explore what works and what doesn’t. Finding out what doesn’t is like the RC pilot who crashes and realizes that what he tried didn’t work. Writing good sensual prose is as much knowing what not to say as boldly going where few writers dare to venture. I am glad I don’t write novels about serial killers. What would my fellow Methodists think then?