I rode around in a trunk today.
Today two of my guy friends stuck me in a trunk and went for a drive, chatting idly. Yesterday one of those duck taped my hands and twisted them backward over my head. Kinky? No. Story research. (And no, the story isn't about kink, either.) And it is paying off.
Can you hear conversation up front from the trunk of a car? Yes and no. Of course it depends on the make and model, but a sample set of p=2 tells me that someone riding in the trunk can hear when the car is stopped, at a red light or a stop sign, but barely catch the voices while the car is moving. While writing the first draft of the scene I had believed that the engine would be the greatest noise interference, seconded by sounds of the city, but that is not so. It is the sound of the road. Even for a car with brand new tires, this is significant. Add in potholes, and conversation from the front seats is drowned out almost entirely.
But I learned much more about a trunk ride than how much my character will be able to hear. For example, logistics, like hair. I hadn't realized she would have to tie hers back, but it is an absolute must. Also, she'll have to be more petite than I had originally intended. Trunks aren't as large as I might imagine. She will have to be almost as small as I am to try to hide inside an opened trunk along with her backpack, and based on the diagonal line of sight that my friends had upon raising the lid, it's a good thing I hadn't been planning on her succeeding at it.
Did you know that although pull-down seats look flush from the inside of the car, they let a fair amount of light through to the other side? Air, too. Even without the light that is always on inside the trunk even when closed and the glow-in-the-dark emergency-open lever, the inside would not be as chillingly dark as it is stereotyped to be. Even with sunglasses I could see some things. Without sunglasses, I could see quite well and navigate my way around the small space. Add the light of a cell phone and the place barely crosses the line between dark and dim.
What else? An eavedropper in a trunk trying to position her head so as to place the ears optimally for hearing front-seat conversation in quite in danger of bumping her head. Repeatedly. This occurs because the place of optimal audio involves having the head right up against the back seats, and whenever the car goes over a pothole--bounce! Bump! Not too hard, but non-trivial enough to be worth adding to the story. Oh, and, neck cramp. In general the boot of a car is a pretty comfy place, but keeping your head in that place of optimal audio for an extended time . . . Yeah. Ouch.
Interestingly, the driver and passenger riding shotgun hear nothing of the stowaway. Whether it's crinkling on top of paper bags or getting a text message (phone at full volume, default tone), those up front are unaware of noise made by the trunkee. I didn't experiment explicitly to test that, but it was a surprise just how sound-insulated that area of the car is.
Inertial changes are, not surprisingly, perfectly perceptible. Also unsurprisingly, people with different tones of voice differ in how audible they are.
A random observation is that shortly after getting in the trunk both times I had the absurd desire to go to sleep. That could just be that when I stay up nights writing, a dark, cozy spot that I am, by definition, curled up in, tempts my brain to rest. When I didn't give in to the urge, after some time it went away.
Oh and, how on earth did I forget that in November in the northeast U.S. my character would be wearing a coat? (!!!)
Now, onto the bondage . . .
I had expected that the main concern my med-student MC would have after being tackled and having her still-bound hands twisted over her head and backward would be luxatio erecta dislocation, the rarest form of shoulder dislocation and one that almost always comes with complications. (And I spent so much time researching it!) Hand-on (hands-tied) experimentation revealed that this would not be the problem. The likely scenario would be that her arms would be that as her arms were pulled backward, her back would arch--hyperextension, as I discovered it is called. So she wouldn't be worried so much about nerve damage in her arms. She would be completely freaked that her spine was about to break somehow. I'm still researching exactly what that would mean in the mind of an over-achieving medical student. All I know so far was that my lower thoracic / upper lumbar vertebrae were the ones affected in the curve. My friend, though, couldn't pull my arms back far enough to induce pain--my back just kept arching until he said he would fall over if he went back any further. Then again, he said I was extremely flexible, and I have a high pain threshold (which this character *so* does not), meaning I don't even register something as pain at some points that would discomfit other people. So I'll be having to re-think this element of the scene.
The big lesson: Any writer should have friends he or she trusts to do weird-sounding experiments in the name of story research--AND SHOULD DO THOSE EXPERIMENTS. It makes the scenes infinitely more real, and won't lose the readers who actually know what would happen in such scenarios.
~
Other recent story research:
horse trailers, hypoxia, dog choker collars (those are cruel but the pronged ones are positively Medieval!), Bonaire, medical school curriculum and what it means, operating room tools, techniques of reducing a dislocated shoulder, blood vessels in the neck, the Mapuche (natives of Chile) and their conflict with the Spaniards, house foreclosure, structure of old barns, male/female superior/inferior speech patterns, (blunt force trauma) knockouts, medical description of what happens when the wind is knocked out of someone, various locations and travels grace a Google Maps . . . more I can't remember . . .
Upcoming & known:
Dutch, Papiamentu, more Bonaire, trans-national small boat travel (including harbor patrols, Customs, docking in the US and Bonaire, open-sea small boat travel, and small boats), pliancy and capabilities of a human chained by the neck, surgery in the area of the human liver, hyperextension spinal cord injuries, moving companies, cell phone tracking, more about medical school, parts of the brain (again--done it before, need more!). And whatever else my characters decide to throw at me.
Random question of the day:
Do ferrets have theory of mind?
Can you hear conversation up front from the trunk of a car? Yes and no. Of course it depends on the make and model, but a sample set of p=2 tells me that someone riding in the trunk can hear when the car is stopped, at a red light or a stop sign, but barely catch the voices while the car is moving. While writing the first draft of the scene I had believed that the engine would be the greatest noise interference, seconded by sounds of the city, but that is not so. It is the sound of the road. Even for a car with brand new tires, this is significant. Add in potholes, and conversation from the front seats is drowned out almost entirely.
But I learned much more about a trunk ride than how much my character will be able to hear. For example, logistics, like hair. I hadn't realized she would have to tie hers back, but it is an absolute must. Also, she'll have to be more petite than I had originally intended. Trunks aren't as large as I might imagine. She will have to be almost as small as I am to try to hide inside an opened trunk along with her backpack, and based on the diagonal line of sight that my friends had upon raising the lid, it's a good thing I hadn't been planning on her succeeding at it.
Did you know that although pull-down seats look flush from the inside of the car, they let a fair amount of light through to the other side? Air, too. Even without the light that is always on inside the trunk even when closed and the glow-in-the-dark emergency-open lever, the inside would not be as chillingly dark as it is stereotyped to be. Even with sunglasses I could see some things. Without sunglasses, I could see quite well and navigate my way around the small space. Add the light of a cell phone and the place barely crosses the line between dark and dim.
What else? An eavedropper in a trunk trying to position her head so as to place the ears optimally for hearing front-seat conversation in quite in danger of bumping her head. Repeatedly. This occurs because the place of optimal audio involves having the head right up against the back seats, and whenever the car goes over a pothole--bounce! Bump! Not too hard, but non-trivial enough to be worth adding to the story. Oh, and, neck cramp. In general the boot of a car is a pretty comfy place, but keeping your head in that place of optimal audio for an extended time . . . Yeah. Ouch.
Interestingly, the driver and passenger riding shotgun hear nothing of the stowaway. Whether it's crinkling on top of paper bags or getting a text message (phone at full volume, default tone), those up front are unaware of noise made by the trunkee. I didn't experiment explicitly to test that, but it was a surprise just how sound-insulated that area of the car is.
Inertial changes are, not surprisingly, perfectly perceptible. Also unsurprisingly, people with different tones of voice differ in how audible they are.
A random observation is that shortly after getting in the trunk both times I had the absurd desire to go to sleep. That could just be that when I stay up nights writing, a dark, cozy spot that I am, by definition, curled up in, tempts my brain to rest. When I didn't give in to the urge, after some time it went away.
Oh and, how on earth did I forget that in November in the northeast U.S. my character would be wearing a coat? (!!!)
Now, onto the bondage . . .
I had expected that the main concern my med-student MC would have after being tackled and having her still-bound hands twisted over her head and backward would be luxatio erecta dislocation, the rarest form of shoulder dislocation and one that almost always comes with complications. (And I spent so much time researching it!) Hand-on (hands-tied) experimentation revealed that this would not be the problem. The likely scenario would be that her arms would be that as her arms were pulled backward, her back would arch--hyperextension, as I discovered it is called. So she wouldn't be worried so much about nerve damage in her arms. She would be completely freaked that her spine was about to break somehow. I'm still researching exactly what that would mean in the mind of an over-achieving medical student. All I know so far was that my lower thoracic / upper lumbar vertebrae were the ones affected in the curve. My friend, though, couldn't pull my arms back far enough to induce pain--my back just kept arching until he said he would fall over if he went back any further. Then again, he said I was extremely flexible, and I have a high pain threshold (which this character *so* does not), meaning I don't even register something as pain at some points that would discomfit other people. So I'll be having to re-think this element of the scene.
The big lesson: Any writer should have friends he or she trusts to do weird-sounding experiments in the name of story research--AND SHOULD DO THOSE EXPERIMENTS. It makes the scenes infinitely more real, and won't lose the readers who actually know what would happen in such scenarios.
~
Other recent story research:
horse trailers, hypoxia, dog choker collars (those are cruel but the pronged ones are positively Medieval!), Bonaire, medical school curriculum and what it means, operating room tools, techniques of reducing a dislocated shoulder, blood vessels in the neck, the Mapuche (natives of Chile) and their conflict with the Spaniards, house foreclosure, structure of old barns, male/female superior/inferior speech patterns, (blunt force trauma) knockouts, medical description of what happens when the wind is knocked out of someone, various locations and travels grace a Google Maps . . . more I can't remember . . .
Upcoming & known:
Dutch, Papiamentu, more Bonaire, trans-national small boat travel (including harbor patrols, Customs, docking in the US and Bonaire, open-sea small boat travel, and small boats), pliancy and capabilities of a human chained by the neck, surgery in the area of the human liver, hyperextension spinal cord injuries, moving companies, cell phone tracking, more about medical school, parts of the brain (again--done it before, need more!). And whatever else my characters decide to throw at me.
Random question of the day:
Do ferrets have theory of mind?