Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Enjoying Life's Passions

Enjoying life’s Passions

I realize that this is a writing site and most readers here don’t give “rat grits” about my interests in RC modeling. Having said that I find that most of what I find myself interested in, cycles back into my writing. By this I mean my muse is trying to help me understand how to become a better writer by using analogies in different fields of interest that relate to my writing.

For example when I go to the flying field there are some interesting characters that I can template for my novels. Many are well into middle age but enough remains of their character to tell what they must have been like in earlier stages of their lives. As I listen to them I wonder what they would have been like in their younger days and take what they tell me about themselves (directly and indirectly) and put it into the context of thoughts about things I might be interested in writing about. I like to let a story come to me rather than trying to conjure it up in this pea brain of mine. People love to talk and it doesn’t take much to get them going on things that once happened in their lives.

What I like about the flying field is that the RC hobby is a demanding one and the acid test of what a flyer is trying to accomplish is repeated every time they take to the air. If something is wrong with the model it is likely to crash and even if it is flying perfectly the mistakes made in operating technique soon catch up with the unwary with dramatic and catastrophic consequences...(If you call a plastic bag full of balsa splinters “catastrophic.”)

The point is that those that are out there flying are still active in the game of life. They haven’t given up. One of my friends drags his oxygen bottle around and crashes half a dozen models a season. Yet he keeps coming back with a new airplane and on Thursday showed up with a new model preparation table… (Looks sort of like a picnic table, but it is for the pre-flight of model aircraft.)

He will probably die on the flying field and that might not be such a bad way to go. For my part I would rather be with my wife under circumstances that I won’t describe… but what the heck. Crashing a model plane and having a heart attack wouldn’t be such a bad way to take the jump to light speed.