Era:
You know that guy who does the movie trailers with the deep voice? He always begins every trailer with the same phrase: "In a world where...." Whether it's a galaxy far far away, a Grecian amphitheatre with Euripides underway, a boxing match on the streets in the late 1920s, or Second Life last month, your novel will be set in at least one era and you should know a little bit about the zeitgeist of the age. Take some time to capture the reasons why you've selected one of these eras. Remind us (and yourself) of the key aspects of the era you're bringing to life.
Friday Night
The teachers had all gone home, the sun had gone down, and her mother still hadn't picked her up, so she decided ...
Chicken
So really, why DID the chicken cross the road?
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Chicken by Wolfgang Glinka
It hurt being called chicken. It wasn't just a name that guys hurled around in fun, it was true. He knew that only too well.
He had chickened out when, as kids, they had gone scrumping for apples - that was when it started. Well, he thought, what's the big deal about apples, anyway!
His friends, of course, never forgot it.
It was true later on as well. When they were all young lads on the town, he was the one who always backed down when trouble came a-calling.
When they broke and entered, he ran. When they saved their cash to share the services of a certan young lady, he stayed outside; crimson red faced and mocked.
Why did the chicken cross the road? they called when the saw him in the high street. Inevitably he avoided them by doing just that, crossing the road, to a barrage of mockery.
Why did it cross the road and what came first, the chicken or the egg? He didn't know the answer but the questions were hurled at him every day.
So it was unfortunate, when his chicken-farming father had a stroke, that it fell to him to take over the running of the farm.
It was too optimistic to think that his so-called friends would leave off the mockery. So, whenever they saw him, clucking sounds followed him on his way.
His was a sensitive spirit and a lifetime of being bullied had left its mark.
Then there was that chicken dance - harmless fun for most - a novelty song, a silly dance with flapping arms, elbows pointed. Inevitably, on the rare occasions that he had a date, the others would encircle the happy pair clucking and squawking until romance was stiffled.
"Why do they call you chicken?" she had asked, the one he had thought he loved. What could he say? Already he could read that defocusing of her eyes. He knew that there would be no second date.
Thus his success was born.
Whereas his father, a utopianist free-range poultry rearer believed that the birds should graze in open fields, the son, was made of sterner stuff.
He built a veritable town of giant chicken sheds on the open fields and multipled his poultry stock a thousandth fold. He masterminded the whole process....from the egg to the carcass, the birds his unfortunate product. Nowhere was their well-being part of the calculations but the turnover of eggs was a phenomenon.
And he loved his job.
He could sex the chicks, quicker than any of his staff...quickly dispatching the baby males with his penknife.
He broke all the rules by cramming the laying birds into spaces where there was no possibility of movement where all they could do was lay.
And when their time came, he delighted in the conveyer belt slaughtering machine. Excited by the flapping of their wings as he hooked them upside down, he dispatched them with a quick slash of his butcher's knife.
It was around that time, that his former friends began to disappear.
Wolfgang Glinka
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