First it was the peacock. Some people toward the west end of our place have (or had) peacocks and peahens. We could hear them screaming. Anyone who’s heard a peacock in full voice (they don’t have an “indoor” voice) will recognize it again, unless the competition is another unusual (for us) bird I heard at Read More…
Month: November 2020
Music, Horse Videos, and Approaching Completion
Toward the end of a day, I write in shorter bursts, interspersed with taking a look at Elphick Event Ponies, Life on the Left Rein, Footluce Eventing, and other vlogs involving horses, both training and competing in things I like to watch. I also listen to music (non-vocal usually) to keep the longer sections of Read More…
Rags & Tigger Show: Dies Irae, Farrier Style
Let me just say that I have had horses that were easy to trim & shoe, OK to trim (I keep mine barefoot here), mostly OK to trim, and unreliably OK to trim. Then came Tigger. And, once I had him, Rags, who is only now willing to give a hoof (the fronts anyway) and Read More…
Reader Help Needed!
In COLD WELCOME, chapter 37, Grace, MacRobert, etc. are flying west from Port Major across the continent to a city on the west coast where they will meet Stella coming in from off-planet. I do not have the final version of this book on the computer; it has them flying to Portmentor. I also have Read More…
The Veteran’s Rant
Veterans have many reasons to be annoyed (!) with Donald Trump. Not all are, because not all veterans think alike (shock horror, we’re not a monolithic post-military mob.) But many are annoyed (or more) and we–my husband and myself–are in that group. We also have reasons to be annoyed with him beyond our status as Read More…
Rags & Tigger Show
The setup: We have a small barn with a 30 x 30 space in it for horses (one end is the feed/tack room and a tool & supplies for non-horse stuff room). On each side of the barn is a fenced area 30 x 40 feet (in other words, the full length of the barn, Read More…
Soup & Story
Many people–I among them–have used the image of a giant soup pot for the writer’s mind and stories. Everything around goes into the pot, the pot bubbles along, and at some point out comes a bowl of something good. I notice increasingly though that what comes out depends on how the writer conceives of story…should Read More…
Seasons
First week of November: our trees and bushes are changing color. Last week we began noticing the glowing green of leaves losing some of their chlorophyll…sun shining through, and not just on, them. But this morning I walked out into a display of yellow: the ash trees, the bois d’arc trees, the western soapberries…bright buttery Read More…
The Green Light
Last summer, when I wrote “Bring Out Your Dead” it was the first short fiction I’d written since the concussion. The first that almost, nearly, sort of, had a true narrative arc. Short fiction is not my main talent. My agent asked if I’d consider writing a story for a particular editor & anthology, and Read More…
Rags & Tigger Show
This evening I fed the horses a flake each an hour before their supper, because, with the time change, they think they should be fed at 4 pm, not 5, and I’m easing them into the winter feeding schedule (I need light in the barn to measure their evening feed, and there’s only sunlight or Read More…