The 52 Project, and explanation of The Chicken Story (Patreon)

The 52 Project is a thing I'm doing where I'm releasing one complete short story a week, every week. Yes, I am obviously a masochist.

I've been planning this since 2009. The numbers have never been so auspicious. It's 2020 and everyone is stuck at home looking for something to entertain them. So here I go.

And, just for you guys, I'm going to explain where The Chicken Story came from.

Almost everything in the story has a *grain* of truth, but ridiculously exaggerated. My neighbor really did pave over his own back yard, which caused flooding in my garage. Did it make my car float away? No, but I had a dream about that, and my husband really did have a beige Vlad the Impala that we traded in for my minivan when we had our third kid. Did he really get sued because he disturbed ghosts? No. But my oldest daughter spent most of her time in this house convinced her room was haunted, and we really did get our insurance dropped because she decorated the yard to be spooky for a Halloween/18th birthday (her birthday's in October) and apparently the insurance was freaked out by the police tape, or something.

My husband has always claimed there is a Kraken in the harbor, and that it was responsible for the Great Baltimore Fire in the 1800's. My kids do not believe him. He also claims to have had a barbeque on the moon as a child.

Many of the chickens in the story are real chickens. The bantam Silkie cross who sings dubstep used to cluck in exactly the note pattern used by Deadmau5 on his song "Bad Selection". Eggy Pop really was an adorable chick who turned into an asshole rooster. I changed the names of some chickens, but we really did have an escape artist chicken, although her name was not Henry the Eggth.

The inspiration for the story was, firstly, events that were very, very similar to what was described in the story, about the incident with the chickens getting away, reclaiming them, the crazy woman, and the chickens turning out to be in the woods; secondly, a dream my husband had where the same thing happened and my son was hiding chickens in our neighbors' houses. We don't really have secret tunnels under any of the houses, not even our own, sadly.

I never actually did any of the things for revenge that the story claims I did, but I thought about them a lot. Also, I did not actually hunt down the crazy woman and find out where she lived; I don't really have the skills to do such a thing.

The truly crazy thing is how *much* of this absolutely insane story is actually true. Wow, I have a weird life.