I was hoping to veer out of the conversations The Driver and Olsen were having about sexuality, but all I could come up with was the front half of a convo about dipping Copenhagen. If you thought I was talking out of my ass when covering homosexuality then you’d have been in for a treat with my snuff chat.
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