Stewsters

It began with an innocent question, one my daughter didn't mean the way I took it. 

 

"Daddy, how do chickens lay chicken meat?" asked my middle daughter.

 

Oh, I love that girl but the question was like asking ‘how a bull lays a hamburger?’ or ‘How a pig lays a pork chop?’   I realized just how disconnected my kids were from their food chain. That was something I could fix.  All I needed was a stump, a hatchet, and a volunteer.

 

When I said I needed a volunteer, my youngest daughter immediately held up her hand.  I explained to her that only a chicken could volunteer, so she immediately went and brought me our largest, loudest, spunkiest buff orpington. 

 

Now the thing about orps is that they are about as spunky as a depressed teenager, so Alpha (as of course she was named) just sort of hung under my daughter's arm like a stump sized clump of golden feathers. Chickens can't stare with both eyes but the one she could fix me with said "Not this again."

 

"Not that one," I said to my daughter, and then explained that the chicken volunteer wouldn't be able to lay any more eggs for us.  Ever.  That meant no more pointy alpha eggs with maroon speckles all over them.

She headed back into the yard.  "I'll go get Tiny.  I don't like her eggs."

 

I had a different plan.  I've always said of my chickens, they could make me breakfast, or they could make me dinner.  Roosters have about half the options in that plan, and that’s fine by me.  Your average roo has only a couple of purposes in life anyway.  One is with the ladies, and the other is between them and something hungry.

 

A rooster is basically a walking chicken sandwich who offers himself up in hopes that the predator will be too full to snack on his girls.  Also, I've heard that you shouldn't feed animals chicken bones, so I'd guess that at least one roo has succeeded in gaining revenge from beyond the grave by choking his killer to death. 

 

That is what we call persistence.

 

My plan involved a knife, some boiling water, craigslist, and some unwanted chicken-sandwiches-with-feet.  Not exactly in that order.  Nature seems to split the pot 50/50 in every batch of chicks, meaning that every little boy chick can dream of having a hen to dance with at the prom, and cluck sweet nothings into her ear until they roost under the moon.  The reality is that there's going to be a few things standing in the way of that romantic trist down by the coop. 

 

Roosters originated the term "Cock-block", because any time a cockerel would like to get friendly with a hen, he has to get past every other male in the batch.  Turns out, just like in humans, not every woman needs (or wants) a man.  Also like humans, chicken men will kill each other over their women.  Note: That's where the human/chicken analogies in this end because if I behaved like a rooster with every woman I passed on the way to work, I'd wind up in a small cell, with an big man named Carl who has anger issues.  I will note that if hens carried mace, roosters would learn to be more polite.

 

In fact, most of the time, the Highlander rule is in effect:  There can be only one.  People tend to take care of this by getting rid of the extra roosters, so not every little boy rooster grows up to be an astronaut or president.  Just like some graduates get their degree to be able to ask "Would you like some fries with that" some roosters grow their combs and tails just to be the nuggets that go along with the fries. 

 

This was the case with the three I picked up off of craigslist.  #1 was a leghorn ,and you could tell he was not to be trifled with - he was halfway covered in blood, having killed another rooster that morning.  He looked like Mel Gibson in Braveheart, except that the chicken didn't get drunk and start ranting about jews, and the chicken could act.  The second was a polish, and he looked like a poodle had sex with a chicken.  The last was a tiny cochin rooster with iridescent black sheen and a long (well, for a cochin) red beard.

 

I brought them home in cages, and just like boys, they got into a fight on the way home.  Through the bars.  By the time we got there, they were both bleeding from a dozen places, and made the worst noise you've ever heard when I interupted their little spat.  See, they were ticked that I had intervened in their little death duel.

 

Then, one of the Orps wandered over.  Chickens cannot pole dance, but this one was molting, and I swear it worked like a strip tease for the three roos.  They fell silent as she clucked her way past, and then immediately set up crowing so loud you could hear them inside the house.  After I’d put them back in the van.

 

"Are they always this loud?" asked my wife.

 

I shrugged.  “The ones in the freezer never make a peep."

 

"I meant can they be de-crowed?"  My wife peered out the front window at the van.

 

"Absolutely."

 

My wife looked at the grin on my face and frowned. "Without cutting off their heads?"

 

"Why you always have to make things difficult?"  When she’d gone back to laundry, I got down to chores of my own.  My middle daughter watched as I worked.  "See these boys?  All they need is a shave, a hot bath, a cold shower and I'll show you how a chicken lays chicken meat." 

 

My eldest came out to see them, and pointed.  "It's disgusting!"

 

"Just blood.  It'll wash off."

 

"What is wrong with it?"

 

"It pecked --oh, that one.  It's a polish.  Don't worry.  Roosters are like men.  They all look the same undressed." 

 

She went back inside.

 

Now I had an eager audience at the back door, watching as I slipped the leghorn into the cone.  It had been years since I killed a chicken, but apparently it's like falling off a bike - you never forget how.  I had just finished bleeding the leghorn when a blood curdling scream erupted from inside the house.

 

My middle daughter stood at the door, her mouth open, tongue half way out as if she were attempting to gag and scream at the same time. "YOU..."

 

"Yes, honey?"

 

"YOU..."

 

"Yes?"

 

"You didn't say the roosters died!" She made the same face the cat does when it's going to spit out a hairball.

 

I checked the body and confirmed that it was really done dripping.  "Oh.  Well, the roosters die."

 

"No!" She stepped out and threw the holding cage open.

 

The polish made a run for it, the cochin calmly sat down and began to preen itself.  I finished up the leghorn with help from my son.  He was fascinated by the process, and about the time I took the feet off he piped up.  "It's a chicken!"

 

"Yes, it was and is."

 

"No, it's a store chicken!" His face glowed with pride.

 

I took the feet and walked them over to the door, tapping the claws on the window. "And see, this is what was on the end of the drumsticks you love so much."

 

His face turned the same shade of green as the legs. 

 

I don't eat the organs.  You can have your gizards and your livers and your hearts.  I stick them in a can on the barbecue, and my orps believe that fresh cooked chicken innards are the best treat ever.  That's wrong in so many ways.  So the leghorn was down, the cochin was now napping in the heat of the day, and my daughter was trying to make peace with a polish rooster that turned out to be Satan with feathers.

 

It pecked the orps.  It pecked the dog.  It attacked the bee hive (and honeybees are not known for their sense of humor). Finally, it ran at my daughter and chased her clean on back to the house.  She went inside, while I hefted an oblivious cochin and confirmed what I already knew - there were more feathers on that bird than meat.  I put him down and he hopped into my sun hat and dozed off. 

 

My daughter re-appeared at the door, heavy winter coat on, butterfly net in hand.  "Stay there," she said in a voice like steel, "I'll bring him to you."

 

She did.

 

My eldest peeked out once during the operation.

 

"This is how you deal with a man who isn't respectful."  I'm never one to miss a teachable moment.

 

"That's so disgusting," she said.

 

"It's a polish."

 

"It looks so much better now that it doesn't have a head."

 

I cooked the "It's a chickens" in the crock pot, brothed the spare bits and made noodles.  It wasn't until evening that it occurred to me I was short a rooster.  I went outside to find my youngest on the swing, the cochin in her lap.

 

"I promise I will not ever eat you," she said to it as I approached. 

 

I knew I was licked.

 

Lucky (I insisted on the name) found a new home with six frizzled friends with hen-ifits.  You haven't seen strut until you've seen a cochin the size of a volleyball putting it out there for some new ladies.  He looked like a balloon with black feathers, and every single breath seemed to swell him that much further.  Leghorn and polish made a tasty soup, and my kids don't ask where chicken comes from, so that worked out well. 

 

In the new batch of chicks, I got two barred rocks.  One is beautiful black with tiny white stripes. 

The other....white with black stripes and a comb like a pink sawblade already.  I figure it's as close as I'm ever going to get to finding out what zebra tastes like.  Maybe I'll get to it young enough that it doesn't have the consistency of shoe laces.  If not, the crock pot is patient, and in this house there is always room for a stewster.

Character Motivations, Conflict, and Plot

If I had my life to do over again, I would be an evil emperor.  It's not just the power, the money, the women at my command.  It's not even the ability to obliterate the jerk who parked in the handicapped parking spot, then sprinted into the store.  It's the plotting.  If there's anything I enjoy, it's coming up with a truly wicked plot.

And plot, the thread that binds the loose-leaf scenes of a story together, isn't spun by leprechauns from straw.  You can't pay a frog to retrieve your plot from the bottom of a pond with a kiss.  Plot is a byproduct of something else, and should arrive naturally in a story as you understand your character's desires.

Everybody wants something.  Most of the time, they want several somethings.

From the brooding billionaire in his bat cave, to the sultry sex-tress in her latex allergy activating skin suit, everyone wants something.  That billionaire wants his parents back.  If he can't have that, breaking the noses of every two-bit punk in the city will have to suffice.  The sex-tress wants a nice cotton outfit with elastic, and some comfortable running shoes.  A bra won't hurt, either. 

The characters in your story want something too. 
Then they go after it.

When two characters want opposing things, we have conflict.  Conflict is the driver for the scene, producing the tension you need to keep a reader asking "What comes next?" and yielding logical outcomes.

Repeat after me:  My characters want something, and they are going to go after it.

Now, for the refinement.  Your characters are probably lazy.  They will go about it in the easiest way possible, taking the shortest path to their goal, unless other conflicts drive them in an alternate direction.  That villain in your story?  If he could get his billion dollars, would he want more, or accept it and go home? 

Plot is the series of actions that characters take to reach their goals.  The side arcs are where conflict forces the characters to pursue other things to allow them to return to pursing the main goal. 

Your characters should always act in keeping with their desires.  Note that they may have many different desires, competing.  This builds internal conflict and drives external conflict, because your character may take longer, or different routes to his main goal in order to fulfill different desires. 

While I'm ranting, for the love of $deity, remember this applies to every single character in your book.  All of them have something they want.  Now, admittedly, some characters are little more than cardboard stormtroopers, but if a character has lines or interactions, it helps to know what they want. 

Love interests aren't there to provide a convenient place to hang a pair of boobs or a dong.  They are people with their own set of desires.  Much like people in real life, your love interests will be a lot less annoying if they have goals beyond "Find someone of the opposite sex to complete me." 

A few days ago, I sat with another writer, read through a chapter, and asked "Why?  Why would the MC do that?" 

His answer: "I've always wanted to write a scene where that happens." 

That's not a horrible answer, but you get there by having someone whose desires drive them to act in that manner, not by writing the scene and bolting existing characters onto either end, then doing a find/replace to patch up names.

Desire leads to actions.
Opposing actions lead to conflict.
Conflict yields tension.
Tension keeps the reader turning the page.
Plot is the action and reaction as people act to fulfill their desires, receive or are denied them, and then formulate new ways to reach their desire.

The end result of character motivation driving their actions is that your characters are believable.  "Yes, Character X would do that, because he really, really wants [McGuffin].  But he won't get it that way, because he wants to be seen as [attribute].  So obviously, the wild scheme that involves more parts than a Ford truck makes sense, because it's the only way to satisfy the character's desires.

End of rant.