Air

Apparently the most common thing a trumpet instructor will advise is, "more air." Doesn't matter what the problem is, more air fixes it.

I read several articles and a paper and I still am not quite sure how embouchure works. Sure, pitch maps to volume fairly well, but you can sustain multiple volumes at various pitches. So it is probably a relationship between pressure and tension. A higher lip tension, the less pressure for the same pitch. The thing that makes me fairly sure about this is the more I practice and build my lip strength, the softer I'm able to play.

I still have a very long way to go before I can play the kind of things I'd like to.



Also on the subject of more air, I just finished another scene and the whole thing is feeling too compressed. Too breathless, too much being stuffed into every sentence. It needs breathing room. I'm also short on description, especially five-senses description, and character building, and interaction. (And I'm not sure first person is working for me but I don't see a way around using it.)

So I'm thinking I may need to try a completely fresh draft. Take longer, explain more. I have a sort of horror of saying anything more than once and that can be a problem if it is a plot-relevant something.

Sure, several of the hurried-sounding explanations are that way because I wanted to rough it in here and expand later in a different chapter. Thing is, another reason I may have been a little breezy is because I hadn't worked out all the details yet and I was hoping to keep the reader from noticing.

Point in case, the guy who is pointing the camera. He's there mostly because the camera needs someone to hold it (and he has a small secondary role that becomes clear later). But I don't know how he got hired, where he comes from (is he local?) any of that. So I've said almost nothing about him and it shows. There are places where my character would see more, ask more, want to know more, and I'm not letting her do this.

So, yeah. Maybe I should figure out this guy, and then instead of having a conversation with herself my protagonist can interact with him. And instead of jumping from her accident to being back at street level and glossing that transition with a handwave about her still being dizzy, I should flesh out into a full scene, take the random people who were in the accident with her and give them speaking roles, etc. etc.

And if I do that, maybe the scene I did today with the Mysterious Stranger won't feel quite so obvious.



(It's a thing known in game design as conservation of detail. If there has literally been no other conversation up to this point, then that conversation and that person is important. If she's met a bunch of interesting people on screen, that is in front of the reader, then this one won't stand out so much.)