WordPlay

By Patty Wilber

“For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.”

“No hoof, no horse.”

Horse hoof care has always been a priority for me and I have hired professional horse shoers (farriers) to do this job. I have pulled a loose shoe off here and there, and I have done a little rasping of some ragged hoof edges, but have left the rest to the pros.

Until last month.

Three horses have been at the ranch much of the summer, and the ranch is remote enough that you either haul the horses off the mountain (a good two hours of rough rutted road) for new shoes, or you do it yourself.

If one is well versed in the art (it really is an art) of hoof care, pulling off old shoes, trimming the hoof and setting a four new shoes should take 45 minutes to an hour. If unversed…well, it can take days!

T’s Dad elected to do it himself.  I perused my Anatomy and Physiology text book for a while (preparing for the semester and all), but then I got bored and decided to “help”.

Tried to pull shoes off Alameda.  I don’t think I got ANY, but I kept busy a good long while trying.

Here is a list of the troubles I had:

1.  Wrong tools.  There is a shoe pulling tool, but we didn’t have one, so I used nippers.

2.  No technique.  Got some help on that, but then…

3. Awkward.  I had a lot of trouble making the tools do anything useful.

4. Horse kept pulling her feet away (well gee I wonder why?)

Shoes got off…Thought I’d try trimming the hoof.  Uh huh.

1.  Dull hoof knife.

2. No technique with clippers (got some help with that…)

3. Awkward.

4. Horse kept pulling her feet away.

Serious lack of success…

You know how in books the horses gallop hither and yon and their shoes never fall off? (Not to mention that the whole galloping hither and yon is completely unrealistic.)

What if one did fall off? The horse might go lame, or damage his hoof, or the rider might have to walk, or the big event might be missed, or the farrier might have to be called, and the young virile farrier might be quite the hot hand and cause the plot to veer wildly off course…

A few weeks later I got a second shot at farriering.  In the meantime,  I gleaned a few tips from my farrier and my friend Mark.

Cinco was my victim this time. Her shoes had been hanging on for over 12 weeks (six to eight is a more typical time lapse between shoe jobs) and were clinking-as-she-walked loose.  I still didn’t have shoe pullers, but I knew where to place the clippers and how to give a little wrist action, and by golly, I had those shoes off in five minutes!

The hoof knife was still dull, but I got it to peel a little bit of old sole off the bottom of the hoof.

My hoof nipping technique was better and my tool handling was more adroit! (I do not really know why, but the pieces just seemed to make more sense to my hands this time.)

A dude at the ranch wandered over to “talk shop” and asked if I was a horse shoer.  Snort!  Proved he was a dude.

In only  a hour, I had both front feet trimmed.  Ok, so, one was a little shorter than the other, but over all, I was pretty pleased!”

Thank-goodness I didn’t have to set (nail on)  any shoes. Premade shoes can be purchased from the feed store, and then banged around on an anvil until they fit a horse’s hoof. The idea is to hold them in place and drive nails through the hoof wall.  Deep enough to hold the shoe, but not so deep as to “quick” the horse.  “Quicking” is when the nail hits living tissue.  Horses don’t tend to like that much, and it can cause lameness.

Sometimes you can tell right away.  (They react, or they bleed.)

Sometimes they  go lame later.  In that case, you can say “he’s got a hot nail.”  The lameness is often resolved as soon as the offending nail is pulled.

That got me cogitating over the job of Ye Olde blacksmith,  in the days before pre-fab shoes. That would quintuple the difficulty of the whole process.

But from the point of view of some novels, WELL, that blacksmith might be a little covered in coal dust from his fire, but I bet he’d be strategically sweaty…(of course truthfully he’d probably also really stink because of all that sweat… ) But hey!  Twist.  The blacksmith was really a girl! (who didn’t stink, or sweat.)

Party time creeps closer!

(Is that disturbing, to have that sentence first thing after that title, or is it just me?)

Either way, here we are.  Demon Touch is available as a Nocturne Bite!

Actually, they’re calling it a Nocturne Craving.  This comes under the heading of, “Don’t ask me!” and “The author is always the last to know.”

The Bites line is transforming into Cravings, but it seems that somewhere along the way–even though the flavor of the stories between these two lines is substantially different–all of the Bites have retroactively become Cravings.  Even the one I had published several years ago.  Hmm.  It’s magic?

And, well, hmm.  I was about to send you to my web site, where I’ve just updated the various pages to reflect this release, but I just discovered I was interrupted in the middle of those updates and…

Well, I wouldn’t bother looking for them just yet.  

Luckily (and quite by coincidence), here are all the pertinent details, right HERE!

Demon Touch

Ever since the night Alex Donally found the demon blade in his hand—and in his thoughts—he has been driven to fight evil.

When he meets Deb Marchand, he is compelled to protect her from her violent ex—and aroused by the visions of passionate encounters they both experience when they touch. The blade is showing them what they can have—if Deb can risk giving her trust and heart to a vigilante…

Kindle
Nook

So sad.  Today’s blog is preempted by a batch of delicious, muse-pleasing, MUST WRITE ME NOW DAMMIT pages in my current manuscript.

That would be Night of the Tiger, which will be out in December as a Nocturne Bite, and if you happen to read it you can be all smug and say, “Yes, this is the piece that preempted that August 8 blog.”

(What do you mean, that “so sad” was hardly convincing?  Huh?  Me, wallowing in first draft?  Surely not!)

Yup, it’s the last week of the sale.  So it’s one more chance to click through to the comments, where some of the members of Backlist eBooks have provided links to their sale books.  Because, yeah…the sale is over in five…four…three…
=================
(here’s the original post!)

Oh, it’s true.  I get a little incoherent about this sort of thing. Just too enthusiastic (and sadly lacking dignity).

Well, Smashwords is having its big summer sale, and so many of us in Backlist eBooks are participating…we loves us a sale, and Smashwords makes it so easy.  How can we not?  From 25% to 100% off (with some books sitting at 99c), a site-wide promotion.  Everyone wins!

Of course, we also want to make it easy for readers, and getting the word out on the short available notice is a trickier thing.  So here we are!  My sale books (and links) are listed in this post; in the comments, you’ll find a collection of Backlist eBooks authors with their own linked titles and genres.  Go ye hence and feed that Kindle/Nook/Sony/e-reading device of choice!

My Smashwords Author Page
Books on Sale:
The Heart of Dog (dog stories, specfic)
Seer’s Blood (fantasy)
A Feral Darkness (fantasy)
Making the Rules (Action-Romance)
Hidden Steel/Making the Rules boxed set (Action-Romance)
Hidden Steel (free!) (Action-Romance)
And one free story for treasure hunters…

I need to get out more.

At a recent conference, where I was on the spot being an Author on a Panel, I mistakenly referred to the romance book expectation of “Happily Ever After” as “the Happy Ending.”

Oh yes I did.

More’s the pity, I had no idea why the audience burst into laughter.

Well, I suppose in some books, it IS the same thing…

Anyway, a kind soul enlightened me, and I turned beet red, and that was that. For the panel, anyway. But it got me to thinking about Happily Ever After, and how…well, I don’t tend to do that.

The thing is, in real life, there is no Happily Ever After–and I mean that in the best possible way. Those lovers who find their perfect match (against all odds, natch!) don’t stop being.

They face new challenges, and overcome those together, too. They continue together.

My characters are real enough to me so their lives go on, too. There are consequences to what they do in their grand adventures, both personal and practical. The things they’ve been through affect them; they grow, and need to understand what they mean to each other in these new circumstances. There’s always a next thing.

In Garrie’s case, her reckoner team needs to come to terms with an otherworldly half-blood they never truly trusted in the first place…but they do trust Garrie. Garrie needs to come to terms with the changes wrought within her, thanks to the new energies she’s faced. Trevarr faces both the mundane (Arizona rest stops) and the unexpected (how can this world not have the right food?). And irrepressible, unpredictable Sklayne…

Well. Sklayne wants to go home. And he wants to taste new things. Sometimes in that order, sometimes not. And just maybe, if he was to admit it, he wants his half-human partner to be happy.

Not that I’m going to make it easy for any of them…

But that’s how it is for me. Just because the book reaches the last page doesn’t mean the story doesn’t go on.

And I like it that way.

I spend a lot of time outside.

Brrr! Now that's outside...

When you add up the bird-watching, the flower-prowling, the agility training, and the horsie back riding…yeah, I spend a lot of time outside, and always have.

I started out working as a park naturalist in Ohio and then headed to the deepest Appalachians (100 acres, log cabin, endless mountain ridges); from there, I had an interlude in the western New York suburbs.  I eventually escaped to the rural southwest–first to the amazing world of Flagstaff’s San Francisco Peaks, then to Albuquerque’s unique South Valley, and most recently through the pass to the Tijeras Canyon foothills.

That’s where I am now, and that’s where, barring significant surprise, I’ll stay.

It’s  a journey that spans a treasury of different ecosystems, different weather patterns, different critters.   It includes the richest riparian forest; chill flat hickory and chokecherry woods; the rarified air of high desert, snow pack, and ponderosa pines; the hot bosque valley of the Rio Grande–and now the windward foothills of another sacred mountain.  Totally different flavors of life, and they’ve all become part of me.

All absorbed right through to my writing.

At first I resisted the lure of using my personal worlds in my writing. And at first the resisting was easier–I was creating worlds for my fantasy novels, so I could use what I knew without being (too) obviously referential about it.

But then I started writing more contemporaries. And while I can and have researched the ecological details of Far Distant Places, my own closer places keep wanting to come out.  (Most recently, this means a book of luxuriating in the complexity of Sedona, Arizona–from the striking red rocks to the deep canyons.  As if I could resist!)

It’s more than just the convenience of it–although the convenience of weaving location through the plot-building process can’t be denied.  But it’s because…you know, writing is about sharing what drives you, and about what means something to you.  And I don’t just live in these places, I live as part of them, soaking them in…wallowing in them, if I can wax just a little bit poetic.  So I love these worlds of mine…and I want readers to love them, too.

Here’s where it gets into nefarious deeper layers. Ulterior motives, even.

Because the things you know and love become things not so easily dismissed. If you know–even vicariously–the scent of the ponderosa pine, the deep green needles, the ridged, red-tinted bark…then when climate change makes them vulnerable to the pine bark beetle, maybe it matters just a little bit.  When fire rages through the mountains due to perfect storm conditions created by man’s intervention with natural cleansing fires, then maybe suddenly allocating resources to forest management matters, too.

And if it matters to enough people, then maybe it makes a difference.

One can hope.

So I guess that makes me an environmental proselytizer.

But you know, mainly…it’s because writing where I am is about writing what I am, and what I know and love–and being able to share that so it changes just a little bit of something in someone else.  It’s what I want to be able to say about my writing…that on some level, it matters.

Isn’t that what we all want?

first appeared in Terry Odell’s Blog

Between the trialing, The Heart of Dog anthology, the fret of being unable to ride while this hamstring sorts itself out, and a certain pack rat…let’s just say I have critters on my mind.  And it made me think of this blog, written last year for a guest gig…

There can be Only–  Oops.  Never Mind.

Animals of the world!  Stand up and represent!

What, you say? No opposable thumbs?  Language barrier?  Logistics issues?

All right, then. It’s time to do it for you.  Right here, right now.

Although maybe I should narrow that down. Between oil spills, climate change, and habitat destruction, the need is maybe a little overwhelming for one blog.  So, let’s stick to:

Animals of paranormal fiction.

Here’s the really cool thing about being a writer–especially about being a paranormal writer.  In order to create the most exciting stories possible, we have the chance to romanticize; we can build on paranormal themes to create animalistic more-than-human and other-than-human realities.  The human-plus, in our own vision..

(This, as it happens, is really fun.)

You’d think that gives us a certain carte blanche–our own realities are what they are, right?  If we want our animal-based human-plus to act a certain way, move a certain way, be a certain way…why, then, so it is.  Right?  The societal structures, the underlying behaviors…convenience trumps reality.  When it comes to alpha wolves, There Can Be Only One; when it comes to big cats…well, a cat is a cat. What you think you know is as good as what you really know.  Right?

Eh.

Maybe not.

The thing is this: Our created realities, in order to sustain themselves, must be built on the best possible truth.

And our created realities, in order to help sustain the very real life elements that appeal to us, also must be built on the best possible truth.

So that makes it kind of a win-win, and worth our while to pay attention to what that truth is.

It isn’t always, for instance, what everyone “knows” it is. Or assumes it is.  Or just figures they can fake what it is.  It isn’t (again, for instance) that wolf packs are ruled by a single alpha.  Or that strict social structures keep all the little betas in line, each little wolf in a specific pecking order.

As it happens, that particular outdated wolfie understanding, based on flawed studies conducted under artificial circumstances, has been repudiated even by the man who formed it.  (Surprise!)

There are of course dominant personalities in wolf groupings–the whole study isn’t hoo-ha–but the social interactions are far more malleable than a simple pecking order.  So it is the inflexibility of the model that holds flaws, but that very inflexibility has turned into the most common understanding.  The thing we all know…the thing we expect.

The endemic common understanding we then also tend to accept as reality.

*insert game show Buzzer of Doom*

But!  The truth is, the strict dominance and alpha conventions are pretty darned convenient in dramatic fiction, especially one that focuses on relationships.  You won’t find me advocating their complete demise.  At the same time, I think it’s worth building those elements thoughtfully–knowing exactly when a book’s reality diverges from those elements on which it might be based, and integrating the two with care.  It does, I think, do honor to both the wolf and the new reality.

That was the easy example–the one with instant resonation power.  But wolves aren’t the only ones taken for granted–don’t even talk to me about horses.  Or those big cats, who really aren’t interchangeable at all.  By not getting it right, we miss out on the luxury of exploring these creatures for who they really are…knowing how they fit into our real world, and how delicate that balance can be.

Knowing why we care enough to speak for them when the moment comes.

The other thing about integrating truth is that it’s fun. When the real animal gets to come through to affect the human, it adds spark to the character and to the story.  It adds the unpredictable…and the charming.

My favorite scenes–both reading and writing–are the ones where it’s obvious the animal within the characters influences their behavior.  Not with the obvious power dynamics or strength or posturing, but the quiet things.  The impulse to chase, to pounce; the subtle shift of body language and expression.  It’s the reason I reread favorite scenes…and the place where we–readers and writers–have the chance to connect to elements of nature we might not ordinarily have the chance to touch.

If, at this point, you’re secretly (or not so secretly), thinking, “Oh, please!  Lighten up!  It’s fiction/fun/made up!”..?

Well, it is fiction; it is fun. And it ought to be!

But at the same time, it matters–and I’m glad of it.

(first seen at Tor.com in June ’10.)

By Patty Wilber 

 WHAT? 

 Yep! It is done!  

 T’s Dad says:  

There once was a stud named T.
The vet said I’ll change THAT for a fee.
So a quick cut.
South of the gut.
And T was no longer a he.

On Tuesday, three vets from Meddleton Equine, a veterinary assistant, T’s Dad (working on the barn roof) and me were all here for the work on Tabooli (tooth work and castration), Buckshot (tooth work and chiropractic) and Show Boy (chiropractic).   

Normally, Tabooli is a cinch to catch while Buckshot tends to flinch and  move off as I approach (working on that).  

Tuesday, though, they both were wild-men, running about, tails arched up over their backs.  They rushed to one corner (it is a 1/3 acre pen) then turned to snort at me.  As I’d get near, they’d charge off, tossing their heads and looking at me over their shoulders!  

Maybe they were just being silly, maybe they were excited by the metal going up on the hay barn (which is not that close to their pen), or maybe Buckshot was telling Tabooli about the castrations he’d witnessed at home, Whispering Spirit Ranch. (If you click the link, Buckshot’s real name is  “A Para Dox”, and if you click the “Winners” tab, you can see me–whoo hoo–”kick ass horse trainer”…which might need to be the topic of a pyschology related blog…but ANYWAY…)  

Tabooli tired of the game first.  I tied him up.  Buckshot snuck in to be near his buddy and I sweet talked him.  Show Boy was, of course, perfectly happy to be haltered and led to the tie-rack.   

Then they waited.   

Tabooli, waiting.

Well, as long as we have to wait, might as well work on Buckshot's scardy-cat thing--looking pretty confident here!

Show Boy and The Supervisor (Risa). Penny is also supervising, but she is just not in the photo.

 T had his teeth worked on first (more on that next week  in “A Testament to Teeth”).  And then, the castration.    

 Warning:  The pictures show the real deal, so if you don’t want to see them, stop now!  

 Since Tabooli is four, the vet elected to lay him down rather than do the “procedure” standing.   

Drugged!

Supervising!

Down and getting cleaned. The ropes are to keep the vet (Dr. Jessica Marsh) safe and give her room to work

Making The Incision

Extracting the first testicle.

Risa says "HOLY COW! What on Earth are they doing? Don't look, Penny!"

Extracting #2! Note the metal instrument, called a "cremaster". It is clamped on to the severed artery and tubes, which were also wrapped with suture material to prevent bleeding. It stays put for about 3 minutes.

Both testicles, along with the epididymis (which you can't see) are shown.

Tabooli was still out of it for about ten more minutes.

    The epididymis is a series of coiled tubes that lie next to the testes.  They collect  and allow further development of the sperm, which is produced in the seminiferous tubules in the testes.  The seminiferous tubules can be 400-500 feet long! The normal ejaculate of a horse contains 6 BILLION sperm. And it only takes one…  

I am bringing up the epididymis because it if is left in, this is called “proud cut”.  Often when a gelding displays stallion-like behavior, people will ask if he is “proud-cut”.  Turns out, according to Colorado State Univeristy, the epididymes does not produce testosterone, so leaving them in should not result in a horse retaining stallion-like behavior due to hormones.  The testosterone comes mainly from the  testes.  

Complete sperm development takes 21 days, but sterility after gelding should be complete in as little as three days since once the sperm enter the epididymis, they typically don’t live more than 72 hours.  Stallion-like behavior, according to Dr. Meddleton, should be pretty much gone in 60 days, but opinions do vary.  

Horses gelded after sexual maturity, like T, may retain some stallion-like behavior that was learned rather than hormone driven.  Since he was always pretty low key, I fully expect he will end up a pretty typical, ho hum, gelding.  

Post castration care: Lunge 2x per day for 15-30 minutes and hose his nether parts.  Both of these should reduce swelling and chance of infection.

We had fun with that on Thursday because it was snowing! Lucky it was so warm on Tuesday!

Ok Ok Ok. Yow! Do I HAVE to do this?

Ok--crappy pic because it was just me and the snow, but see how quiet he is? The hose is laying on his leg and making a big puddle!

What, you thought you were going to get [deleted deleting deletized]?

Nah.  Not graphic language.  Just graphics. That within which I’ve been immersed, one way or another, since kicking off the Backlist eBooks adventure–both individually and the actual Backlist eBooks project with my author/artist partner-in-crime, Patricia Ryan.

I started my backlist work with an idea for a standardized presentation–a branding–and my alpha responders were all very positive about it.  However, the more one learns about the whole biz, the more one wants to stretch a little bit.

Sometimes, when you want to stretch, it’s a good thing to look through someone else’s eyes and skills.  So, sez I, all wheedly-like to above friend Pat:  “Heeeeey, Paaat….whatcha doin’?”

Which she was smart enough to interpret as, “Hey, Pat, did you say you were getting into cover art?  Because I have me an interest.”

I’ll fiddle with the short story covers myself (one of these days in my copious spare time), but right now the books are slowly enjoying a do-over.  First we did A Feral Darkness, and as of this week–ta-da!–Making the Rules has new clothes, too!

I, of course–OF COURSE–have to show it off. Because that’s really part of the whole writer thing–sharing the experience of what’s been written.

Or didn’t you know?

PS GO, PAT, GO!

========

Backlist eBook/Original: September 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4524-2556-6
cover by Pat Ryan Graphics

$2.99 eformats
Smashwords
Kindle
Nook

An orphaned Silhouette Bombshell original: Hunter Agency operatives Kimmer Reed and Rio Carlsen, overseas and cut off from the agency on their first assignment together, face an old enemy who wants it all: political terrorism, theft–and revenge. Not only that, she knows just how to get it–by turning their greatest strength into their greatest weakness: their love for one another.

So will FocusWriter, as it turns out.

(Oh, please.  If  Mikey means nothing to you, Google is your friend.)

FocusWriter is a really nifty little program. It’s pretty much the first draft program for which I’ve been looking–simple, straightforward, has enough formatting features to handle a basic fiction manuscript and a few perks for writers.

Notably, those include the statistics and alarms features. It couldn’t be easier to set the alarms from within the program as you start writing, and the stats bar, while a little buggy, keeps track of your file word count AND the percentage completed of the daily goal you’ve set in preferences.  So very easy to check and see where you are–and to obsess, if you want to!

At such things do a daily word-count writer’s heart leap.

The whole screen is dedicated to the prose, and that’s cool, too. If you want to see the menu items and stats, you just mouse over those areas. Plus it’s really easy to set appearance to a theme that’s the easiest on your particular eyes.

Getting the day’s work transferred over to Word Perfect wasn’t quite as straightforward. Tedious, in fact, because it won’t take a cut and paste and maintain the formatting.  (Don’t ask–it doesn’t make sense to me either.)

But all in all, I was having fun with it.

At least, for the first couple of days.  Then came Day Three.

On Day Three, I started my work with the usual File>SaveAs>FILENAME operation, and the program indicated it had done this thing.  And then I did my usual habitual Control-S every several sentences to save the work, and the program told me it was saving each time.

But you know what?  The program lied.

And you know what?

I didn’t find out until I’d closed FocusWriter to begin the tedious process of transferring the work to WordPerfect.

Yah.

Five pages.

Five pages of a transition scene that set up the logistics for the climax of the Work in Progress (Dark Blade), and incorporated the sly exposition that pulled all the plot pieces together.

And you know what?

Yah.  There was crying.

Rewriting such a thing isn’t the least bit simple. I’ve lost work before [delete Aurgh-filled anecdotes]; I’ve rewritten it.  This scene, I knew instantly, wouldn’t be nearly as rewritable as anything else I’ve had to do (and frankly, those were bad enough).  The complex interplay of motivation, personality, exposition, pacing…

Did I mention the crying?

The first time through a scene like this, the characters drive it forward and the muse keeps them on track.  The second time around, I found myself faced with such things as knowing Heroine had said something to Bad Guy that created a critical reaction…and having no idea what she’d said, just that I needed the reaction and I needed to show her character with what she said.

But no, I wasn’t able to brainstorm something new that would serve the same purpose, because the first time through, I hadn’t brainstormed at all. That’s not the way it works.  The characters made it happen.

The second time through, I was happening TO them.

Well, I got the scene done. Partly by giving up certain factors, which I’ll have to try to incorporate elsewhere.  Partly by spending an entire sixteen-hour day writing what had taken two hours the day before.  And partly because deadlines wait for no woman.

FocusWriter is a little open source program, free to the world (although I donate to such things if they prove themselves out).  In a desperate ploy to regain those lost words (I had already done every possible search of the computer innards), I emailed the programmer–who was most gracious, identified the bug, and put it first on the list of his fixes.

Will I try it again at the next update? I don’t know.  I might.  I liked its features.  I might one day trust it after a serious shake-down on something other than my precious Work in Progress.  But since there isn’t any warning on the software page about this newly discovered fatal flaw, consider this my little public service announcement:

Hey FocusWriter!  You ATE IT!

And you probably want more.  So, other writers out there?  At your own risk.