“What vehicle did you sit in?  Write a story or memory that takes place at a drive-in movie theater.”

“Did you study?  Write about a time when you were taking some type of test.”

“How long until it broke?  Write about a toy you didn’t play with properly.”

“What would it be made out of?  Write about a monument you wished you could build to honor someone you know or knew.”

“Why didn’t you want to believe them?  Even if you don’t believe in fortune telling, write about a fictional (or true) experience where you visit someone who knows something about your future.”

Cripes.  This one didn’t make me cringe too much.

Oh.  And to finish up the last one for my friend Fred:  blah blah blah.  She got cold feet.

Sr. Antonio de Silva snugged the theodolite into it’s wooden case.  Pocketed the key.  And stood.  The sudden movement dropped his blood pressure shivering him to an unsteady balance between consciousness and unconcious.  The moment the blackness thinned and he could see the tripod, he snatched out an arm to steady himself.

The project plan neatly curled in a tube at his feet and his whole weak body told him he’d not live to see this monstrosity fly.  His brain and his heart—not the organ in his chest—rebuked his frame with a question: who could take up the chore if he passed?  De Silva went to sleep with this question and chewed on it over breakfast when he rose.

Before I write a third four line graph I’m gonna cut off here.

Day 265

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“Where were your shoes?  Write about an interesting time when you happened to be barefoot.  Begin and end your writing with a description of your feet.”

Amy smiled at the shape of her feet.  Singley or paired their profile presented an authentic feminine appearance: petite, but not too narrow; distinct toes that neither blended into a mob near the pinkie nor highlighted the one that went to town as an overbearing brute; neatly trimmed nails; and most importantly a slender approach through the ankle.

She’d have to kill herself if she had cankles.  There were plenty of things Amy would have to kill herself over.  Cankles would surely fall in the first ten if she bothered to list them out.

“Come on Amy Baimy!” Jack called to her.  Amy’s thoughts swept back a two years or so when they first came to the beach together.  He tied his tounge trying to say ‘Amy Baby’.  Each time he tried and failed they laughed more until he gave up.

“Come on,” Jack pleaded from the waves.  Amy stood and brushed the sand from her bottom and adjusted her hair better in her big floppy hat.  She wished for her shorts so she could stomp in the water with Jack, but these white capris with their v-notched cuffs added a dynamic she couldn’t explain and she chose them instead.  Today would be about romance, not splashing anyway.

I’m just going to end there.

Day 264

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Why the hell should this matter to me?  Obviously I wipe it away before I begin typing.

Wait.  A real writer, a professional writer, could compose a 1000 words from any featureless request.  Couldn’t they?  Shouldn’t I at least try?

In High School I tried because I didn’t have a choice.  Mr. Brainard—he said he could see me becoming a pro—gave us a prompt and expected results before the end of the hour.  He didn’t grade on quantity or quality or creativity.  I’m sure he prised those things, but he didn’t mark against a lack of any of those.  He marked against nothing.  He didn’t grade on the relationship to the prompt either.  As I recall, at least once I refused the prompt and wrote what I wanted to write.

As I write this, it comes to mind that writing to a prompt gave me the freedom not to worry over the output.  I blamed the prompt for uninteresting results.

Still, I find it difficult to treat prompts as if they were a workout, a training regimine.  Prompts don’t parallel free throws and layups as much as they do a game of HORSE.  I guess shooting more baskets is better than shooting less regardless of the scenario, but adding nine other guys to the court, a second basket, a ref, and a time clock is not a linear progression of difficulty.

This week I’ll work from prompts despite my thin enthusiasm for them.  I will try really really hard not to waste my time clicking through the bad ones to find less bad ones hoping to find good ones.

http://writingfix.com/classroom_tools/dailypromptgenerator.htm

Day 263

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So.  Giants?

Let me disregard cultural elements of giants and humans and return to the physicality of it all (write the word one more time and I’ll not be certain of it’s definition any more).  I suspect that I’ll not be able to separate such things much longer, but I’d like to build from what I feel is the easy part.

Currently, I’m operating from an all else remains the same perspective.  Trees, dogs, cows, rivers, grass, lakes, ocean waves, whales, lions, icebergs, rain, rocks, and elephants all stay the same size.  Giants are just bigger humans, not lumbering, not stupid, not less in any way.  This makes things odd.

Giants won’t necessarily feel dwarfed by a tree.  Won’t find forests daunting for their size.  I think a giant would react similarly to how humans react to bushes and bushwhacking.  They’d find them annoyingly in their faces and frustrating to traverse.  As a building material wood might not be a first choice.

Dogs are going to be cute, but not appealing or useful as companions.  Same with cats—not that they are useful.  Imagine not having a pet or no one you know having a pet.  A panting id with no ego you could guiltlessly confide in.

Humans rely heavily on cows and cattle for food, but how would a giant feel about them?  Their really more snack sized than meal sized.  Probably giants would have a relationship similar to ours with chicken.  But what fills the spot for cows?  Buffalo aren’t big enough.  Hippo, rhino, and elephant have got to be tough.  Maybe giants wouldn’t have killed off mastadons?

I doubt many rivers and no smaller streams would give a giant much pause.  This seems to be one of the things that would diminish exponentially in terms of perception rather than linearly with my 4x rule.  Sure large rivers would be difficult to traverse, but I doubt many would be impossible.  Many rivers commonly twarting human progress would be jumpable or trod without getting one’s shirt wet if you were 25 feet tall.

The weekly growtrh of grass wouldn’t even register in a giant’s world.  Even most tall grass would be ignorable or amusing.  Lawn care in general takes on a bonsai tree sort of feel.

Lakes.  Here I think we have an easily scalable geographic feature.  Most interactions with lakes would be nearly identical to our own.  I’ll have to think about boating though.  Tying logs together to create a raft might not be somehting a giant would redily consider.  Would you be willing to ride a raft made of broomstick handles?

As a young teen I recall getting swept under a Pacific wave and being ground into the sand.  Not having ever been to the ocean it terrified me.  Most waves would be inconsiderable to a giants.  I suppose this relationship would be like that of lakes.  I think it would be less equivalent though.

Shit I didn’t initially mean to turn that list into a working list.

Whales might be an excellent source of food or even companionship for a coastal tribe of giants.  While dolphins would be food.

What would even be able to successfully predate a giant?  A pack of lions could take a lone giant down but I don’t know if they’d bother.  Would lions be the same as cats are to humans.  I doubt they domesticate well.  There’s more to explore regarding predation though.  What’s it like to really really be at the top of that chain?

Icebergs would be the same.  Exact same.

Rain would be 4x less annoying.  It might even qualify for exponentially less annoying.  Though I can see it being an equivalency as well.  Rain gets as close to tempurature as I put on the list.  I wonder if a giant—made of the same materials—would react any different to tempurature differences.  Seems like they would be happier in the cold because of their need to dissapate heat from their core.  Their skin though wouldn’t be impervious to changes though since it’s just skin.

Screw rocks.  They scale.

Aside from whales elephants would be the only animal to match well with a giant’s scale.  Since whale swim I think there would still be useful mysteries that keep them at a distance, but not elephants.  I think elephants might even successfully replace dogs as companions.  Or food.

That was fun and will become my longest post ever I imagine.

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Yesterday, between that morning’s post and this morning’s post, highway workers installed tens of signs on the overpasses.  These sign indicate the minimum height of the opening under the overpass.  I have no idea how they did this all in between my trip on Monday night and my trip out on Wednesday, but a big thanks goes out to them.  These signs certainly came in handy for estimating purposes regarding all my giant questions from yesterday.

It looks like most gaps were 17 feet with the elevated roadway and safety wall making for another 5 feet.  At 22 feet overall I think I’m safe in saying that many 4x giants would be able to peer over the wall with ease and that climbing from one to the next would not be out of the question for most.  However, considering overpasses aren’t usually spanning huge distances a giant would be more inclined to just walk on up where the overpass runs into the bank.

The bridge issue resolved, I moved on to the lamp post thing.  Near as I can tell a 4x giant changing the lamp in a streetlamp would be like me changing one in the ceiling of my home: he or she would rather have a step stool.  Though maybe they just wouldn’t be that high because giants would be employed to change them out?

Now that I’ve sorted out my initial foray into the physicality of giants I have been drifting into the culture.  This is tough.  Twining the cultures of man and giant resists going deeper than giants just popping up in human culture and being redily accepted and put to work building stuff for us.  Even when I ask questions about what the construction industry would be like I run into trouble.  Sure having giants around would obviate the need for forklifts and bulldozers for humans, but wouldn’t giants have just as much reason to use 4x forklifts for their needs?

Making the simple assumption that a 4x giant requires 4x resources, wouldn’t you have to pay one a 4x salary to match their 4x output?  Except that formual might not translate to less physical tasks.  But what if it did?  What if a giant’s 4x brain contributed 4x output?  Then how the hell do I justify them working for us?  Or them even deigning to work in harmonious equality with humans.  Why would they put up with that?

So now I’m thinking of ways to diminish giants to create a symbiotic realtionship with humans.  That just seems like a cheat.  Though it feels bubbly with tension and potential plot in the same way a teenage chemist looks at Poprocks and Coke, “That’ll do something for sure.”

Hmmmm

Day 261

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Can someone that tall climb up a highway overpass?  With ease, some difficulty, or not at all?  What about changing the light’s in a highway street lamp?  Any guesses where I was driving?

I considered finding some photos on flickr to scale giants next to regular sized folks.  I haven’t done this yet, but something tells me it won’t be as illustrative as I’d like.  You know, since I bet there are no pics of people standing next to overpasses and streetlamps.

I’m thinking four times as big might be able to wriggle into a normal sized door sideways and slow and painful as long as the interior room was large enough to lay down in.

A giant that size would still be reasonably hideable too.  Especially in the woods or among houses.  Not just standing out by the mailbox, but laying down in a backyard actively trying to hide.  They just couldn’t move around from one place to the next without notice.

Food and other required resources wouldn’t be too difficult to come by.  Unless these were raving giants that ate human flesh.  Depending on the culture even clothing and shoes would be doable.  It’s one thing to have custom made boots for a large footed person and another to give Godzilla flip-flops.

I’ll be driving again his evening.  WIll think more about it along the way.

Day 260

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“I see, Flower.  I see.”  Cuivva had watched the light through the trees grow since the last bend, but she always let Tanna discover their progress first.  It reminded her of times past when she could still let the little girl win a game of jumpers.  Finding the giant’s path was about the only thing left Cuivva could figure out before Tanna.

Sunlight from the south brightened the green leaves of the trees on th opposite side of the giant’s path while silhouetting the the nearer ones.  The effect from their smaller human trail gave the feeling of approaching a meadow–a very long, but not wide, meadow.

Cuivva spotted the redundant sign post with the unnecessary writing–which she couldn’t read–before Tanna too.  Everyone knew what lay ahead.

This isn’t picking up as smoothly as I’d like this morning and I’m fat fingering more keys than I’m not.  I think I’ll call this good for now and maybe sleep on it.

Day 259

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Just thinking about how much I was disappointed by Hellboy II makes me feel like a traitor.  The most brutal part of my unorganized negative commentary review would be this analysis: any randomly chosen four minute segment made sense and was good; any randomly chosen eight minute one was not.

Of particular offense was the Troll Market.  The tight streets and narrow winding alleys convinced me there was a ceiling on this sound stage.  It immediately brought to mind Diagon Alley and then dismissed it as quickly.

At one point I literally thought Perlman’s head was twice as big as his body.  Seriously I had problems with the make-up!

I have no idea why they were shooting at the tooth faeries with bullets in guns when in the just the previous scene we saw Liz expertly in control of her flames.  She was on fire near a kitten without toasting it.

The hand-drawn props and scenery that Mike puts in the books just did not translate to the movie format.

Oh well.

Sorry.

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Here’s the gist of where that would have gone…

Olsen pulls out a can of Copenhagen and offers some to The Driver.  The Driver refuses on the grounds that it’s nasty.  An argument ensues about the use of Copenhagen.  At the end The Driver proclaims himself a Skoal man.

I just wasn’t sure that I could fake out the audience long enough to make it seem like The Driver was against tobacco use when really he just despised Copenhagen specifically.  As I understand it things can get pretty Coke and Pepsi between these two main tobacco brands.

That’s what I didn’t do.

Continueing in the vein of talking about things I haven’t written, won’t be writing, or would like to write but wont be writing right now, let’s talk about giants.

For some time now I’ve wanted to write about giants.  From my experience they are a staple of Fantasy that doesn’t see near enough airtime.  Maybe I’m reading the wrong stuff and you can point me to a whole sub-genre of Fantasy writing I have never run across–it’s entirely possible.  At this moment giants are rare for me.

As far as size goes, I never wanted mini-giants.  I never wanted to write about some guys that were just really big and for whom normal human doorways were a problem but not a complete hinderance.  I wanted to write about giants of a scale that made it troubling for them to enter the city.  So big they couldn’t fit down narrow streets or so big that even if they fit down the street–barely–they still incited riots in the populace.  All of which makes me concerned that I need an explanation for their size.

Most fantasy gets away with very little in the way of practical explanation for the improbable creatures and situations it creates.  As a reader this lack is not a problem.  As a writer I’d like to have a way to cover my ass with regards to such things though because I know that gravity and bone structure and heat dissipation and fluid dynamics all pose real and immediate problems for unbridled scaling.

You can’t have a monster ant, because chitin just doesn’t do that.  You can’t have a 12 story giant because he’d crush his own legs under his weight and he’d get really hot and I’m pretty sure he’d need a couple hearts to pump the blood around.

My explanation wasn’t going to be wildly along the lines of hard science fiction.  I mainly just planned to have magic support them and maybe some big heat dumping ears and an extra heart or two.  But mostly magic.

Once I overcame that high hurdle I immediately collapse with slender logic I could explore the troubles of a gang of questers including a giant in their group.

Gentle giants.  Dumb giants.  Angry giants.  Lone giants.  Misunderstood giants.

Day 257

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“What is it with you people anyway?”  We’d been uncomfortably silent for several miles.  Me watching the road.  Olsen fiddling with his OSU cap.  I wasn’t paying attention.

“What?”

“What is it with you people anyway?”

“You people?”

“You people.  Your people.  F..gays.  Homos.  Whatever.”

“I’m not Jewish.  Or Mexican.  I don’t have people.  We aren’t ‘a people.’”

“Bullshit.”  Interesting–I thought he’d roll over on that one.  “Was that movie with Robin Williams real?”

“The Birdcage?”

“I don’t know.  The one with that anorexic chick.”

“Calista Flockhart.”

“Is she the anorexic one?”  Olsen throws a look at me that says, I’m trying to get to some other point.

“Calista is the one you think is anorexic.  She says she’s just thin.”

“Anyway was that shit real?  All the dressing up likewomen and shit?  And that fucked up butler guy?”

“It’s not real around here–too often.  And not like that.  But I guess it’s real enough for places like Miami.”

“Then you got people.”

Maybe he’s got me there.

These conversations seem to take different turns when the get out of my head.  They feel more burdened.  Less snappy.

“Seriously!  Don’t tell me shit like that.  I definitely don’t want to know you had a fucking crush on me when we were fucking Freshmen.  I don’t want to fucking know it.  I don’t want to fucking talk about.  And I don’t want to fucking know it.”  Olsen doesn’t even look at me to tell me.  It’s like he’s talking to the dashboard instead of me.  No eye contact will probably make this easier on both of us.

“Don’t worry about it Mark.”  Using his first name comes tough to my mind.  I called him Mark the whole year we were Freshmen.  It wasn’t until later–after–I started calling him Olsen like everyone else.  It’s hard to believe I have to calm him down.  I thought he’d laugh at that one off.  The next thing I say needs to come off as casually as I can make it because he needs to believe it’s true.  “Once I got to know you.  It wore off real quick.”

I make a show of checking my mirrors.

“Good, ’cause that fucking shit just ain’t gonna happen.”

Day 256

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