Have you guys ever written a section of a story that jumps out as you as being your "favorite" part of the entire work? A section that you go back to again and again for inspiration and that you have trouble believing you actually wrote? Here's one of mine. Its just a descrïption of the story's heroine, Jessica St. Claire, told in second-person format. I use the second-person throughout the story to put us "in the character's head":

This is what it is to be Jessi St. Claire.
You watch as the man walks away, and half of you wants to kill him and half of you wants to run away and cry and half of you wants to start a revolution and half of you wants to submit – wait, that’s four halves, so two parts of you must not even exist.
The man’s hair is platinum white, his grey eyes are pools of ice, his blemishless white face is strong and ruddy.                                
You are neither strong nor ruddy, nor anything in between. Your hair is raven, your face covered in sooty freckles. You speak with an ignoble accent, and your hands, though small, are indelicate, even compared with those a Culture man. You are a dying species, a dinosaur, a living extinction.
You are “dark eyes,” and to be “dark eyes” is to be subhuman. Gradually, you will have to be phased out, like a fading trend. Meanwhile, Jessi St. Claire, you are a spot of dirt on the planet, to be bleached out by genetic engineering. It seems your kind was dealt all the wrong cards; you are more prone to be infected by the EDEN virus, your lifespan is twenty years shorter, and your spirit energy is said to be weak, undesirable for even the meanest uses. All of this has necessitated, by resistless but inhuman logic, the removal of your species and its replacement by a new, stronger species – Homo Atlantean, those with platinum hair and grey eyes.                                          
A wicked smile flashes across your impish face. You begin to laugh, for in the final estimate, all of their exacting notes regarding your genetic makeup fail to capture the real essence of what your life is. Your life is struggle, abject rebellion, the sting of a needle probing the heart. But all things are a balance; without the darkness within, you would not know the light without. It is from the posture of your beggar’s knees that you have found the most stunning views of the heavens above. You have seen things there in the sky, moving amongst the stars, that “they” will never see, for their eyes are always looking straight ahead at progress, and they look neither up nor down. You recall that night five years ago, on the brow of Abia Hill. You were bent down to the earth in tears, when you felt – no, you knew – that a life outside of you had reached down from the stars to touch the life within you. You were afraid at first; afraid that after all the prayers, the fasts, the tears and bent knees, the heavens would be but another Culture on a larger scale – that they, too, would cast you away for your imperfections. But it was not so. All the vibrancy of the stars burned within your breast, and unexpectedly, the stars welcomed you as their own. The light poured down into your eyes and called you by name, called you its own child.                                                                                                            
Those people out there are children of The Culture. They’re bred in its image and given assurance of the promises of the civilized world by token of their breeding.
You, however, are an animal by token of your lineage. You were bred by copulating animals, and so became, by genetic default, an animal yourself.
But since that night on Abia Hill, you have become something more.
Something more than an animal.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    
Something more, even, than a human.
You have become a child of the stars. You’ve been born a second time. Born of God, you partake of the Divine Nature, just as the child of human parents partakes of the human nature. Maybe it is not merely your face that makes you different from the rest; maybe it is something more substantial that sets you apart. You’ve always thought that the difference was merely superficial, that deep down inside you’re all the same. But now, as you reflect on this, you begin to wonder if you really are different.
The life without you merged with the life within you, and now you yourself are life and light and the vibrancy of creation. You are a flickering torch moving amongst these shadows. They own the world, and so what? You own all the worlds; you are all the worlds. With the wink of your star-filled eye, you can create another world in your heart, there to live in blissful isolation while they toil to maintain their dying globe. It is in that private world that you have been living for these past five years, and now as you look out at The Culture and its grey-skinned people, you pant with desire at the prospect that one day – maybe, by some small miracle – that world within will be projected onto the world without you: a flood of light pouring from your heart that will wash the world clean of every stain.
Maybe it is not you who are the stain afterall.

Here's another descrïption of Jessi in third person. I just love Jessi   I think I will marry her one day! There are two other main characters in the story, but she's my favorite.

Beside her was hunched a small porceline figure clad in a tatters of what had once been a white dress and black leather boots. The porceline girl’s hair was a midnight sky shot through with artificial galaxies of white frost. She was the kind of girl one would expect to meet beneath a glaring red light in the midst of a ghetto delirium; a harpy of the lower classes whose tempting smile would invite you home with her, seduce you, leave you naked and penniless in a place of her own design. And the next morning, you would not even think to miss your pennies. The night will have made you like her – tattered and white and full of unbridled energy. Before you even realize that you have left behind the world you know so well, she will have locked the doors and made you a permanent resident of her Place. You’ll never escape Her. Part of you will always be trapped in that cozy little room, breath on the windowpane, warm under the covers, the little gas lamp fading away as she whispers to you and tells you that this is the only real Place there is, that there’s never been a world outside, that you haven’t left anything behind. The scary thing is that you know that she’s right.                                                                              
She calls herself “Jessi,” and leaves Jessica at home behind a sewing machine – her very smile, defiant of its surroundings, marks her as a dagger in humanity’s back. She is the perennial half-nude cave dweller, who crouches beside fires for light and warmth and prays to strange deities and commits herself wholly to imperfect moral ideaologies.      
                                     

some pretty cool writing .... here's some personal favoite excerpts

Quote :

You watch as the man walks away, and half of you wants to kill him and half of you wants to run away and cry and half of you wants to start a revolution and half of you wants to submit – wait, that’s four halves,

Quote :

She calls herself “Jessi,” and leaves Jessica at home behind a sewing machine

Quote :

You are “dark eyes,” and to be “dark eyes” is to be subhuman. Gradually, you will have to be phased out, like a fading trend.

(not sure why "dark eyes" is quoted tho)

I like the 2nd person thing, switching to the 2nd person seems like a good way to introduce an important character

"Dark eyes" is a genetic caste in The Culture. They are considered to be inferior to those with platinum hair and grey eyes.