Photo by Ina Centaur

I am going to give you something that you might not realise you need: A little bit of layman’s (or laylady’s) advice and insight on cybering. And if you don’t cyber or think you’re already God’s gift, hopefully you’ll still get a little giggle or two from them.

These posts were originally published on another blog, but Prad has kindly offered them a home here and that suits me much better. For those of my return readers who asked me to put these up and keep more topics coming, I appreciate your support and can assure you that new previously unpublished posts will be going up here too (and ongoing for as long as Prad lets me corrupt the minds of his readers).

OK, enough intros, let’s get into it:

Today I’m going to deal with tenses. We’ll start with rule number one: Choose a tense and stick to it. Are you writing from the present: “I am so biting your banana”, or the future “I am so going to bite your banana”, or a hypothetical time-point “I would so bite your banana.” There are advantages to each tense, and some suit certain situations better than others – I will cover these points soon. But whichever one you go for, do not change tense half way through: “I am biting your banana, it is so good, you would arch your back and ask me in your sultry voice to stop biting it because it’s the only one you’ve got, you’re going to love it when I bite it clean off, ooh baby, yeah”. (There is so very much wrong with that sentence beyond the banana biting and tense confusion (so to speak), but we’ll cover those other issues in future posts).

Right, time to pick which tense then. A fair few people don’t like the present tense (the “I am” version). This is because they find it reminds them too strongly that they are in a virtual world. You’ll get replies like “Um, you’re not actually biting my banana, I can’t imagine this, this feels awkward, can we just get back to the snail racing?”. Along the same lines, many people will only want present tense cyber if it actually is present tense “I am so rubbing my honky-tonk right now”. This will naturally restrict what you can talk about and where your minds can take you. To me, both issues are the result of a failure of imagination. If you can get past these issues – imagine the cyber as happening there and then even though you both know it’s not – then the present tense cyber can be the most intense – and natural – variety.

Some people are always going to prefer future tense cyber (”I will ride your BMW all the way to the cliff and take us both over the edge”). This often suits people who do fully plan to hook-up in real life, and for them it can be the most realistic option – because to them it is very real and possible. In which case they are getting excited specifically about what will happen. This is fine as far as that gets you, but you have the problem of the fact that cyber is meant to be a two-way input, and it gets a bit silly with the coming and going all in that tense: ” I will ride your car so hard I’ll break the shift-stick” “Oh yeah baby and I will adjust your headlights until they’re flood lights’ “and I will wax your hood until the car polish companies start calling you to appear in their ads..” You get the idea. The problem as well is that as they get more excited they find it hard not to slip into the present tense, and that’s our big no-no.

Let’s elaborate a bit on that, why shouldn’t you mix tenses? Easy answer is because it sounds dumb when you do. Slightly more thought-out answer is it interrupts the rhythm and jolts you out of the task at hand. Um, so to speak. It also makes both parties confused in what should be a natural and open conversation, while each wonders what tense they’re using now and how that effects what they’re going to say. Because it will effect things – the difference between what you’re doing as your in-world persona, what you want to do them in the future, and what you would do if it was possible in any world, is quite marked. OK, let’s return to the final tense, the hypothetical time-point; the “would”.

This is the worst of the bunch – it’s not happening “right now” so there goes your immediacy out the window. It’s also not saying it will necessarily ever happen so there goes that potential excitement. It is saying “If we were together right now, or were to be together at any point in time, these are the things I would do”. What the hell..? When you hear someone talk in this way it makes things feel very distant and disconnected. The brain doesn’t really like processing that style of speaking; leave it to the philosophers and their hypotheticals (and I would point out a lot of philosophers hate that way of speaking and approaching problems too). It is also the hardest one of the three tenses to consistently maintain and will make you more likely to goof up along the way. It is better than the future tense though in as far as it allows you to make more sense in an ongoing dialogue: “I would eat all your chocolate” “I would punish you for eating my chocolate” “I would let you, and then I’d eat all your broccoli too”.

So what have we learnt (besides the fact that I appear to have some weird fetishes)? We’ve learnt to choose a tense and stick to it, and we’ve learnt that the present tense is usually best.

That’s it for lesson one! I am ending this post now, or I will, if I would only decide what tense to end on