Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Big broccoli, big chameleon

I was working on a fantasy story this spring, and I had my characters riding ostrich-like birds. I was aware that this was a trite choice, and I was casting about for other ideas, so I asked my eight-year-old daughter for help.

She responded by drawing two pages for me, in crayon. Each page had been divided into a grid of boxes and each box contained a labelled choice. Here are some of the choices she offered me:

Giant Venus flytrap
Mini dragon
Big turtle
Big bunny
Live rock
Giant bear
Big scissors
Live crayon
Pterodactyl
T-rex
Big (hermit) crab
Big broccoli
Big camillion (chameleon)

I really liked the broccoli, but I ended up using the chameleon. So now I've got characters riding around on giant chameleons. They don't change colors for camouflage in their domesticated form, you understand. They just do it to show emotion.

2 comments:

  1. Wait, big birds are passe? But, but . . . they're so cool. Timeless, even.

    I recently got the Flash Gordon cartoon on DVD (very cheap) and it came with two trading cards illustrated by comic book artists, one of which shows Ming's daughter on one of her bird/reptile looking mounts. To quote Paris Hilton, that's hot!

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  2. I got the idea that big birds (not Big Bird, mind you) might be passe from the TV Tropes wiki...specifically this article: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HorseOfADifferentColor

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