The News From Poughkeepsie - Day 17
One thing that I’ve been wondering is how to deal with cliche’ aspects. Granted, I don’t read a lot of high fantasy anymore, but is it possible to write a unicorn story, or a magical sword story, or an orphan-with-a-destiny story without hitting every cliche’ in the book?
Yeah, it’s been done. I think there was even an edition of a magazine (I want to say edited by John Scalzi) that asked pro writers to tackle cliche’s and make them good. But I’ve never had the guts to do it. I shy away from traditional cliche’ forms to be the stigma they are. But I think trying the forbidden is the way to truly stretch yourself, so here goes.
A unicorn walks into a hardware store to buy a crescent wrench, but the hardware store doesn’t have the size the unicorn is looking for. Turns out the math system from whatever fantasy land the unicorn hails from doesn’t translate to metric. So what can they do to solve this problem?
(JR Blackwell tells me that in a daily project you will have off days. Dammit.)
The News From Poughkeepsie is a daily blog post featuring an idea for you to take and do with what you will. Read more about it here. This post is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. You can take this idea, change it, make something new, and even make money off of it. All I ask is if you create something - anything! - that this post inspired you to make, please link back here.
Like you, I am... shall we say, "dancing impaired." Or maybe "rhythm impaired" might be a better term. Even so, ...
I've already given up on the fear of warping my 4 year old daughter; it's inevitable. There's too much ...
As a fellow July 25ther, just wanted to send out a big happy b-day to ya!
--- Chuck (an, ahem, early ...
Send me an email, treed, and I'll get you hooked up. 
group humiliation?? hell, i am in! might even get daughter involved and possibly wifey 
I'm in! Email sent :) 
Would wearing my Keepsie's Bar shirt in the video be considered cheating?
Comment by Merrill on 9 May 2008:
For what it’s worth, the crescent wrench was invented here in Jamestown, New York. I’m not sure how this will solve the unicorn/hardware store dilemma, but I thought it was worth a line of dialog.
Comment by TerminusVox on 9 May 2008:
I may be looking at this question too literally. Coming from a family of mechanics I can tell you that crescent wrenches are often called “many-metric” wrenches. By definition ( http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/crescent%20wrench ) crescent wrenches are adjustable and will fit a wide range of nuts & bolts. As long as the fastener from fantasy-land has two parallel sides as do the hexagonal nuts & bolts we use in this dimension there will be a crescent wrench to fit it. Now if the unicorn comes from a dimension that uses polygonal fasteners with an odd number of sides… then maybe what the unicorn really needs is a pair of Vise-Grips!
Comment by Mark Maris on 13 May 2008:
Or, since the unicorn doesn’t have opposable thumbs, it is actually looking for a somewhat completely different tool (but the crescent wrench was in the front window and the poor creature was afraid to seem completely ignorant to the blustery hardware store owner).
And — oh, by the way — the exact size of the tool in question depends on the diameter of the unicorn’s horn. Because, of course, that dictates the amount of magic the unicorn can produce…
Comment by Ben Pung on 16 May 2008:
It’s all just too confusing. Where the unicorn came from, you remove a nut from a bolt with an enchanted squirrel that’s been warded against lightning.