The cock crowed thrice…

I was occupied in those delicate rural pastimes which give us country folk our reputation for sensitivity and finer feelings while thinking about tonight’s post. In other words I had my hand up a rooster’s nether end. It was warm, which was a nice change for my hand, on account of it being bloody freezing out. The rooster may have liked it less, but it was dead. My hand was bloody, but no longer freezing.

I was engaged in country art… having plucked the rooster, I was now occupied in drawing it. I could have won a Turner Prize for it, had I added a bit post-modern angst. Which kind of brought me around to the topic for to today, partly about roosters, and partly about art and the eye of the beholder.

Now, oddly, to you, for us chicken is a rare treat, which only happens when 1)my chooks stop laying, 2)Someone else gives us a chicken. Yes, I could start doing meat-chickens, and I will one day. But between writing, bits of farm work, building, fishing, hunting, growing all our veg, and raising pigs to magically transform them into bacon, I have quite a full plate, and life keeps handing me bits I’m not overly good at to learn like electronic wizardry, and auto-mechanic skills. We can eat quail, pheasant, ducks, turkeys, Cape Barren Geese – none of which I need to feed or keep alive.

I’ve learned one thing that really applies to writing from this: learn how to do simple stuff extremely well, before you venture onto complex things. I make bacon really well. Really, really well, I have been told. So why don’t I do… some really fancy-schmanzy pork product? I don’t because I’m still mastering bacon. When I’m totally confident with that I’ll move on. I do. I did Salami for the first time last year. Just plain Salami, and that was quite a job. It was good. I’m gearing up to tackle it again, better. Every time will be better, because I know and understand the basics really well. All too many people start writing the great, meaningful novel when really, they need to get good at writing a simple story that really holds audiences.

So going back to the rooster… One of my mates (that’s Australian for friend, before you jump to any conclusions) got himself an incubator, and ordered in some eggs and got given a few. His early success was pretty tepid – with the only success being one rooster from the eggs he’d been given. A cross, not a bad bird, but not what he was after. Still, that was his first successes, and got reared, while the second batch came in and hatched, this time successfully, with one rooster, of the breed he wanted.

You can see where all this is going, can’t you?

Well, not directly, you can’t.

The chicks having no mother-hen but him, followed him around, and were very tame and very pampered. He wanted eggs, and to breed. They’re not dinner chooks. They were heading for a good, long and pampered life, with every chicken treat lavished on them. They have a huge run, palatial nesting boxes, a warm roost, and cool perches for summer, get loads of fresh produce as well as grain and laying mash. Their master goes in and lets them eat from his hands and stand on him while they do it.

All they have to do is lay eggs… or fertilize them. That’s all the customer wanted, and he was prepared to put up with a bit of chicken-poop on his knees for it.

Now, usually roosters have a couple of features that tend to stick on the mind and not just the trouser knees.

One is: they crow. They crow a lot. And not just at cock-crow either. If they ain’t opening their mouths to eat, they’re crowing about how Alpha they are… especially if there is another rooster within earshot.

The second is they’re top of the pecking order. Chickens are patriarchal hierarchy in the epitome. Women’s lib doesn’t get much of a look-in. If chickens really are the distant heritors of T. rex’s dinosaur mantle, Rachel Swirsky’s dinosaur love would have told her to ‘get back into the kitchen and make me sammich’ which would indeed have been something unique and new in the annals of modern sf. I’m sorry, that’s chickens. They’re not PC. They lay eggs. They’re pretty good to eat. And two roosters in one pen… can get terminal.

Only this was not the case. The roosters got on fairly amicably… well one of them did. The second, desirable, pure bred rooster seemed to know the run was his by right, and while he was wary about making it physical, because the crossbreed was a bit bigger, he never shut up, and was a demon on the hens. The cross-breed seemed to figure he was there on sufferance, and within limits accepted being number 2. And pure-breed had to keep crowing about it.

Getting older… the pure-bred started feeling his oats, and took to attacking everything, even my mate, coming to feed him. And he crowed, all the time, to let number two know. Unfortunately, he let everyone else know too.

Now my buddy’s quite capable of killing chooks, but this one he’d raised from the egg. It knew it had as much rein as it liked. But when it finally half-killed one of the laying hens…

My friend decided he’d rather have the half-breed. He put the important one in a cardboard box, and gave it to Barbs for me.

It crowed all the way here.

And it got here, and crowed at me, three times. Once from the box, once when I grabbed its feet, and third time it stopped half way.

I gather the half-breed has stepped up to the position nobly.

I guess, besides a roast chicken dinner, there is something for this writer in all of this.

Firstly, even if you’re the best breed, and the chosen one… the customer who provides all that chicken food might decide he prefers the rooster who doesn’t behave in a way the customer finds offensive… and crows about it. As customers come from all over the spectrum – unless you’re targeting a very section exclusively – being loudly partisan about something that is bound to offend a large chunk of your readers is not bright. There are of course people who are selling to their ‘side’ and they gain by this. But many TradPub authors are not. They’re just used to being the chosen ones. The last you may see of them –metaphorically speaking– is a severed foot hanging out of a Labrador’s mouth (said Labrador looking puzzled but determined). But it does go further. None of us are that great we can afford to think ourselves above peeving our buyers.

Secondly, I guess the moral is IF you’re doing well, shut up and enjoy it. You don’t have to tell second-place Sam about it every ten seconds. He knows.

And then the subject of art? Yeah, well… One man’s art is another’s pile of drawn chicken guts. It often seems to come down to how confidently the ‘artist’ claims his painting – or book, is art.

Or some people just like chicken guts.

So now you can tell me fowl stories, but no foul language. I’m chicken, and it’s no use egging me on.