Each year ChiWriMo challenges its writers to seamlessly incorporate an otherwise odd situation or image into their novel for a chance at winning prizes as well as sharing an excerpt with that scene at the annual TGIO Party.
The first year was Kathy Griffin running into a room screaming in pig Latin.
Last year featured a dancing cow.
This year, we're apparently keeping with the farm theme. Before I announce it though, allow me to go into how the idea came about. As we were leaving the midnight write-in, we passed a man dressed as Colonel Sanders carrying a KFC bucket of chicken running as fast as he could down the street toward us. After he passed us, we all looked at one another and wondered where he was going in such a hurry. A moment or two later, he sped back past us going back the other way - still running, still carrying a bucket-o-chicken.
Thus we arrive at the theme for this year's annual ChiWriMo challenge: seamlessly incorporate the following theme into your novel:
"Chickens with a sense of urgency"
Without going into specifics, as long as it works in the context of your novel, incorporate that theme however you seem fit. Bring that section of your novel to the TGIO Party and your name will be entered into a raffle to receive one of several prizes!
If you have any questions, please leave a comment on this thread!
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Tim
Municipal Liaison for Illinois::Chicago
ml-tim at chiwrimo.org
23,325 / 50,000
Nov 1, 2009 - 21 19
I suppose I'm the first one to achieve this...and I've already gotten over 500 words out of the chickens and still counting (and yes, they're alien chickens).
Thank you for these challenges, I always seem to get a good chunk of words out of them! :D
----------http://knitchick1979.livejournal.com
13,730 / 50,000
Nov 1, 2009 - 23 49
Lol. Yes, Knitchick, you definitely got a head start on this year's theme!
Unlike last year, I am going to attempt to work this year's theme into my novel. I can't guarantee it will be a very long scene with the chicken, but I will try!
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Here's to hoping I don't flop at this!
37,093 / 50,000
Nov 4, 2009 - 07 56
Two words. ^_^
Baba Yaga.
----------2009: Paper in the Water
17,000 / 50,000
Nov 7, 2009 - 14 05
This is my attempt at meeting the challenge. This is a first draft, etc etc.
I have attempted to censor out the objectionable words, but if someone finds something that I missed, please let me know and I'll fix it or take down the post.
Also, apologies for the length. I can't find a cut option.
Meanwhile, in Jersey City:
A Porche sat in line and waited for the light to change. Its horn blared. The two cars in front of it were at first confused, and then annoyed. An Alsemex security car pulled up next to the Porche. The police car was in the hazard zone and rolled down his window.
The officer inside worse all black.
"You folks want to keep it down?" He yelled out his rolled down pa**enger side window.
The driver of the Porche noticed the officer, probably for the first time. "You want to get out of my face?" The driver asked.
"You might want to rethink that comment, sir." the officer replied.
"Send over a real cop and then we'll talk" the driver of the porche replied once more.
"Okay" the officer replied without any trace of emotion. the officer , whose wife had announced that morning as he was leaving for work that she was exiting their bonds of matrimony as if she was asking him to pick up some milk on the way home. In face, that's what he thought she had asked until he drove to work and had that first cup of Columbian dark roast strong bean fair trade coffee with two cream.
He called his wife's cell phone, to which she answered "Yes, Roger, I'm leaving you. While I don't have another man yet, and I'm certain I can find one, and perhaps this time it will be a real man."
So Roger was understandably upset, and perhaps a little hurt by his wife's low blow at the amount they had spent on fertility treatments to address his low sperm count.
More then anything, Emily had wanted children. It didn't help matters that she had waited until her mid thirties to marry, and had waited until marriage to even consider reproduction. She was young and religious. And now she was middle aged, godless and bitter.
She hadn't found a new man yet. But Roger had ferried her out of her old life and into this one of dull suburbia and doctor visits and special underpants.
Their dinners had become silent theaters in repressed rage at one another. She regularly engaged in subversive warfare against Roger, continually shifting positions and attacking him in a pa**ive aggressive manner for not having known.
"So you didn't sort yet recycling this week?" She'd say to him upon arrival home.
"You said they put it all into the same bin anyway, so we're wasting effort."
"Yes, but now the neighbors think we don't recycle at all."
"We don't ."
"Can't you just sort the recyclables so I can not have to explain myself every time I talk to Tammy?"
"Didn't you just tell me that you had some kind of falling out with Tammy?"
"Don't change the subject. "
"I'm not. You brought up Tammy."
"And you refuse to make the slightest compromise to make my life just a shred easier!"
"Well I moved into this dump so we could be closer to your parents."
"This dump is the best we could afford on your lousy salary."
"Yes, heaven forbid you find a decent paying job. I'm only cosigner on some student loans for your masters degree in Corporate Finance."
"So now you're saying I'm not looking for work?"
"I'm saying you avoid work like the plaque. How the hell else could you not find a job for this long?"
"Maybe I'm too busy sorting the recyclables to even go on the internet to look for a job!"
"But you do seem to have plenty of time to post to twitter several thousand times an hour."
"So now you're tracking me?"
"No, I'm watching a public webpage that talks about how I don't make you feel like a real woman."
"Maybe you should spend more time on your career and less tracking mine."
"Fine. Do you want to know what I did today? I'll tell you."
"I've been thinking about getting into livestock."
"Like veterinary medicine."
"I didn't say that."
"Well what were you thinking"
"So I can't even think about something without reporting it to you?" Lynn
"Yes, that's right. Just like I can't come home late for the dinner you didn't cook" Roger fired back.
"Well Maybe I like to eat out with someone."
"And that someone would be who? Jim? Tammy's Jim? I know all about the bowling."
"You know about the bowling!" Lynn yelled, sarcastically!
"I guess the jig is up! I better tell Jim that we're going to have to either stop bowling or start F***ing, because Roger says I can't have any male friends!"
"Well you threw a fit when I went over to help Gloria next door with her hot water heater."
"Oh my god, I married such an idiot. Don't you realize that it's a euphemism?"
" A Euphemism for what? Poor plumbing installation?"
"You leave for hours and hours, and continently forget your cell phone, and come back hot and sweaty and mutter something about needing a shower. For what? To wash the smell of her off of you?" Lynn screeched.
"For gods sake, Lynn, she's nearly eighty years old! We went to her husband's funeral!" Roger yelled back, nearly matching her decibel level.
"Don't you yell at me!"
"Maybe you need to drop the attitude before I feel the need to bring up someone's little experiment with bio chemical manipulation when she was an undergrad!"
"You said you'd never speak of that again!"
"Well, looks like I hit a nerve. Or several nerves. Maybe I should ask the one who has the undergrad degree with honors in Biology!"
"Oh, this is rediculous."Lynn said, now lowering her voice to just below normal.
"Or maybe I shouldn't ask you at all! Maybe I should just take those papers you keep in the crawlspace and bring them straight to the Food and Drug and Administration! Or the Drug Enforcement Administration!"
"You need to pull your head out of your a**. What we were doing was revolutionary!"
"Yeah, that's why your professor took an unexpected ... what did you call it? Oh yeah, 'Sabbatical' to Antarctica after all those kindergarteners developed brain cancer!"
"Kindergarteners, who I'll note were doing calculus at a high school level before hand." Lynn retorted.
"Is that what this is all about? You were threatened by them? Mister High and Mighty PhD in Linear Mathematics who was afraid of a little competition who hadn't hit puberty yet? Is that why .. " Lynn began
"is that why what?" Roger cut her off
"Is that why you can't be bothered to sort the recyclables or even look for a better job?"
"I told you I'd work this job until I could get my foot in the door at the Research and Development division, and then you insisted we move to this hellhole!"
"So now my parents are the devil!"
"Yes, that's exactly it. Or I'm just an idiot for thinking just maybe we could have stayed in New York if you had just used your god damned brain and started on animals first. Like a normal F***ing program that wasn't just in it for the glory."
"And learn all about one animals brain after another? You'd put off the evolution of our "
"Evolution, give me a break" Roger said with a groan. "You can't even get pregnant, despite those wide hips of yours"
"Yes." Lynn replied, ignoring the shifting blame, "The evolution of our species by finding ways to enhance parts of the brain."
"Maybe then I wouldn't have spent part of today chasing the crates of chickens that fell off of a livestock truck after some a**hole in a Ferrari spooked the truck driver by honking too much. Maybe you could have given those birds some common sense."
"So you want chickens to have a sense of urgency?" Lynn asked, incredulously.
"Maybe. And Maybe I'd like you to sort the goddamned recycling yourself. The house is yours. I'm moving back to New York. " Roger said, and hung up the phone in a great huff. He glanced at his watch and realized that he had gone three minutes over his start time, and he was an hourly employee.
That was how Roger started his day.