The Chicken Caper! Win a Prize!
Every story has a theme, a conflict, an emotional tone, plot crisis, and denouement (day nom-ma, for those who – like me — learned the wrong pronunciation in elementary school and pronounced it Dee-now-ment for years!) Quelle embarrassment!
Stories have all these parts that can be teased out of nearly every plot. Critics love to discover them so they can dissect them. But I’ve discovered that, as a writer who writes by the seat of her jeans, something else keeps creeping into my story lines, something unexpectedly and seemingly unconnected to the plot as I envisioned it. I’m talking about those little secondary actions need a name. I’ve decided to call them — since I have to call them something in order to talk about them — Backstreet Capers: no, not the little round green things packed in brine and vinegar one serves with lox and bagels. A Caper, as in a frivolous escapade or prank, is one of those little teaser story lines that seem to have nothing to do with the book’s plot and are often played for laughs.
Where do they come from, these Backstreet Capers? I don’t know. Blame Da Muse! But they do arise naturally from my sometimes fertile, sometimes funky brain.
Shakespeare was a master at this. Duh! Did the man invent every literary device, or at least do it best? It would seem the answer is self evident. Even his most dramatic and tragic tragedies have elements of slapstick humor in them. Release the pressure so audience can breathe and thus regain it’s equilibrium so that when the next blow comes — socko!
Everything from mysteries to suspense to horrors use this story manipulation. But for mainstream fiction, dare I call it women’s fiction,
There was the ever-evolving persona of Currin MacAdoo in A NEW LU.
From Red-headed Iowan
to Goth 
To Rastafarian ( Don’t know why it’s pink. and I can’t seem to fix it!)
,
Currin was a work in progress.
Next up on my caper list is ICING ON THE CAKE.
There the caper involved a dying, shimmy-like-my-sister-Kate Bread Dough Mixer named Shorty! 
How does Shorty make Liz a star? Read the the book.
There’s another caper element involving my main character’s sense of smell. To say she tracks her man like a bloodhound might be over the top. 
But my Liz is something else. Tantric sex, anyone?
Which brings me to the subject of this blog. There a CHICKEN CAPER In LOVE ON THE LINE
STARTNG TODAY I’m initiating the first ever CHICKEN CAPER CONTEST!!!
The winner will be chosen by lottery from all the correct answers. So, if you haven’t had a chance to read LOVE ON THE LINE, pick up a copy — buy, borrow, but don’t steal — zip on through it, and discover the answer to:
THE QUESTION::
How do chickens fit into the DENOUMENT OF LOVE ON THE LINE?
I will announce the winner in exactly two weeks: June 27th. Good luck!
(Oh, you want to know what the prize is? Keep reading the blog!)
