Oh, So That's What People Mean By "Roan"

[dr_pretentious]

Today I spent about three hours hanging around a dressage stable, filling my brain up with horses. I haven't been on a horse since I was six years old. That's three decades now--how about that? This evening, my dad said, "You spent the day where? If I were to name the top three hundred kinds of places where I'd be likely to find you, a dressage stable would be nowhere on the list."

But the protagonist of the prequel spends spends several years with the Beltresin cavalry, so I can't get away with being stupid about horses. During Nanowrimo, I was willing to use flagrantly silly placeholders in the one scene where I did attempt to write a bit of riding. During Nanowrimo, it was kind of amusing to say, "Screw it, a horse is just a bicycle with legs." At one point, the horses Stisele and Harentil are riding have brakes and pedals. I think there may also be gear shifts. That's the beauty of placeholders in a zero draft: if you make them absurd enough that there's no danger you'll overlook them in revision, you can get on with telling the damn story. That was the right approach for a fragmentary zero draft. It's not the right approach anymore.

Today, I made my peace with the fact that the Stisele manuscript won't be in complete working draft in time for Seattle. If I want to produce the kind of book that I myself would pay money to read for pleasure, it's going to take me another year to do right by the research and then fill in the gaps. There are fast writers in the world--anghara wrote her 200,000 word first draft of The Secrets of Jin-Shei in, what, three months?--but I'm not one of them. I envy her the ability to turn out good product at that pace.

jaime_sama is the only local horse person I know. She's been urging me to come visit the place where she rides for months, but this is the first time our schedules have worked out. Bless jaime_sama for her patience. I asked the name of every artifact in the grooming stall. I was skittish around the horses for fear they'd be skittish around me (because "skittish" is the adjective most commonly paired with "horse" in the fiction I've read). I took notes about absolutely everything I noticed--ten pages of notes. Did you know that horses' lower eyelashes are about three times as long as their upper eyelashes? No? Well, I'm quite sure that's a detail that will never be used in my fiction, but it's in the notes, along with the angles at which the seventeen-hand chestnut fellow twitched his ears while we brushed his flanks.

Next week, I'm going back for a lesson. There's some risk that this lesson might involve me actually sitting on a horse. Do you have any idea how wide a horse is? They're enormous. It must be like trying to straddle the dining table.

__________________

In completely unrelated news, I love that in this New York Times article about the newly discovered fossil of the transitional fish/land animal thingy, we see proof that Gen X folk are coming into their own in paleontology: In an interview, Dr. Shubin, an evolutionary biologist, let himself go. "It's a really amazing, remarkable intermediate fossil," he said. "It's like, holy cow." Like, holy cow, indeed.

Comments

[vgnwtch.livejournal.com]

I haven't been around horses in years. I rode ponies as a kid (not ours, I hasten to add; my sister's still patiently awaiting the lottery win that will enable Dad to finally get her the pony she asked for when she was 3), and really loved it. They smell good and are warm and should be treated well. The Grand National is on today, and my parents are watching it. Ever since I went to the course out of season, I've been horrified by it; the whipping of horses seems to be very much frowned on these days, thank goodness, but the deliberately huge obstacles that lead to so many injuries and executions (most of the horses aren't being euthanised because they'll never recover, but because they'll never be able to make their owners pots of cash in races) are as terrible as ever.

You know what? My reaction to the "missing link" was "holy cow!" I feel all intelligent and academic now.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

One of the things that impressed me about Chestnut Ridge is that they have some rescued horses, at least one of which they're investing time to retrain in the hope that she'll be more adoptable.