One Track Mind .. Side Tracked!

.. Felicia isn't the only one!

I actually made the caption, then decided to expand it more. Since I wasn't sure if that was a good idea, I saved the original, figuring that I could post it here. Sort of a learning tool for people, including me! Fleshing out WHY I did what I did makes me stop and evaluate my craft, and hopefully will give other captioners starting out another tool in their arsenal.

The picture was supplied by Felix in his trading folder, and I thought it was dynamic and would work well in a caption. Her running away from something, and turning around was something to wrap a story around. Originally I had thought that he was running away from a wedding ceremony, but that was all I had in mind at the time. I wrote the first paragraph about a week ago, when placing the photo into the background. Due to this week's activities, both up north in Boston and personally, I really didn't have much time to be creative until this evening.

When I returned to it, I thought back to Felix' preferences, and she's a big fan of "failing to do things that I could in my old body because I am too young/too small/too weak." Having owned many SUV's, I know how much of an issue it can be for females, especially short ones wearing dresses and heels, can have trying to get into a full-sized truck. That outfit pretty much made me think of Felix being some sort of construction. From there, it wasn't too hard to whip up some obstacles to her being the person she used to be, which is what she wanted. Here is how the original looked:

When I looked it over for proofing though, I didn't like the way it ended. It went from A to B to C, but as Lebowski would bring up, nothing really tied the caption together (beyond using "clutch" as both a purse and a MANual shifting mechanism. How many of you caught that?) She changed from a burly owner of a construction company to an obvious frilly, high society woman. There was no way that she was going to drive that truck for any length of time, so ... transform the truck into something that the new Felicia would love! Of course, a salesman wouldn't screw over a big guy that obviously knew about machinery, but a young lady would more likely not know anything about cars .. especially with the not-so-subtle foreshadowing that she was losing her mechanical knowledge.

Obviously I needed some extra space so I cut out the sentence about the thong. It added a bit of detail, but wasn't as necessary as what I was adding. I was able to shrink down the text a bit without affecting readability and to me, the whole caption feels complete to me. I didn't want to touch the beginning piece, since the reason the change occurred doesn't matter in the slightest. The reader can fill in their own blanks. Hell, in a few days, she will probably only have a vague recollection of how it happened, only that she has been changed and all the girly things just remind her of how she used to be, not WHY it happened. I think that is a trap that new captioners fall into .. they are so deep into HOW a person was transformed, that is all they focus on. So Damien is now a girl .. what's next?

DISCUSSION QUESTION: Which version do you prefer, the final copy or the original? Does what I wrote make sense from a narrative sense as well as a structural sense? Anything else you'd like me to elaborate upon?