Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Models and Writing

Whenever I finish a model airplane I test it in my front yard. I taxi it around and see if it will briefly lift off before letting it settle back in the grass. It is better to find these little glitches where there is nobody else around, than have them rear their heads, unexpectedly, at the flying field.

Sometimes I get in a hurry to finish and when I do, the little shortcuts I took pop up and remind me that haste makes waste in building a model aircraft.

Sometimes I confront problems as I build that I've no clear idea how to solve. I always come up with some sort of "half-baked" answer and sometimes my friend Ron sets me back on the right track. For example yesterday I needed to link the forward steering gear with the rudder. Since this was going to be an electric model the throttle channel was taken by the speed control connection. Ron told me to link the rudder mechanically to the nose steering servo with a splitter wire. That worked. I'd been trying to figure out how I would do this with the radio transmitter. It's possible to do all sorts of amazing things with today's transmitters and sometimes I forget that the old fashioned ways are still the best ways.

Today I was testing my drone, using my usual MO when I hit a bump and the flimsy piece of plywood holding the front of the wing broke. The wing lifted up and fell backwards over the fuselage. The fuselage kept going straight and the wing did a one eighty and flipped over, breaking off the V-tail. I muttered a quiet obscenity as I went about piking up the pieces.

Today I finished the Exploratory Writing Workshop which I teach at New Horizon's Academy, here at Writing.Com. I had two good students who finished which is more than usually happens. The Workshop is a pretty intensive experience getting a writer to do the prep work for writing a novel. When the class is over they have an outline that is well structured and contains all the important ingredients so important to a novel.

The stories that evolved in the workshop this session were quite good and will give the students a solid framework for NANO or just writing a novel solo. Congratulations to Ashia and Kristina for a job well done.