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Beneath the Hat

Tag Archives: horses

Vampires and Horses

08 Sunday Oct 2017

Posted by beneaththehat in My Books

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Tags

Animal Instinct, horses, My Books, personal feelings, Writing

Some of you might remember a few weeks back I mentioned editing work I’d started when I was sixteen years old.  Well, here’s the result.

Animal_Instinct_eBook_preview

That’s right, folks!  The very first book I ever wrote is now available for pre-order on Amazon.

I started Animal Instinct when I was a wee sixteen year old high school student and finished it my freshman year in college under the eye of professors who knew far more about writing than I did.  I didn’t come back to it again until my last semester in grad school.  After blowing the dust off and wincing at the old bad writing habits, the real editing began.

It’s taken a decade for this book to see the light of day but I’m actually glad about that.  If I’d released it to the world as it was all that time ago, today it would only serve as a time capsule.  All the parts of me that I’d outgrown, lessons I hadn’t had the maturity to learn, would be immortalized.  And I’d rather not have one of my novels serve as a specter of past flaws, writing and personal.

If nothing else, I think my characters deserve better from me and I’m happy I gave it to them.

For a long time whenever anyone asked what Animal Instinct was about I’d give the shortest answer possible.  “Vampires and horses.”  That summary is still true but it leaves out a lot.

Appropriately enough, Animal Instinct is about learning how to be better.  It’s about people who believe they know the best way to do things only to discover something so much better was waiting just out of sight.  It’s a journey where the characters have to put aside the habits that had worn out their usefulness and take a good, long look at their mistakes.

But hey, there’s still plenty of vampires and horses.  Go check out the summary if you don’t believe me!

 

Animal Instinct is due to be released Oct. 21, 2017.  Go get those pre-orders in, friends.  I’ve got a personal goal of 100 and here’s where we stand so far:  2/100

Mysterious and Strange

28 Thursday Sep 2017

Posted by beneaththehat in Reflections, Travel

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Tags

Airport, horses, mistakes were made, paranoia, personal feelings

Today I was thinking about my Omens of Ill Fortune post and I realized that aside from my freshman year, something always went wrong whenever I was about to head back for undergrad at Sarah Lawrence.  More than that, it was a gradually escalating scale of bad.  You already know what was on the high end of the scale if you read the Omens post but in case you forgot, I have two words for you.

Walking pneumonia.

But my sophomore and junior year were similarly plagued.  Granted, the sophomore year incident wasn’t so bad.  The night before I was going to fly back I was cooking dinner and put my hand on a pan to get it out of the oven.  No glove because I’m a special genius who understands how ovens work.

(Still not as bad as when I put a towel in the oven because my brain told me it was totally normal, we always put the towel in the HEATED oven.)

So I scorched myself but I’d pulled my hand off fast enough that the skin only went a little red.  Thoroughly chastened, I put on oven mitts and and got the pan on the stove.

Where I then proceeded, not five minutes later, to stick my bare hand on the pan handle to adjust its position.

And yes, the handle is metal.

No, it hadn’t cooled.

This time the burn was not mild because I’d gone and wrapped my whole damn hand around the handle.  My palm got a taste of hell’s inferno right then.  The worst part had to be me just yelling out loud at myself as my mother looked on in bewilderment as to how I’d possibly made the same mistake twice in under ten minutes.

So I’d gone and done the cleverest thing possible.  I had a blister on my right hand not twenty-four hours before I’d need to be using it consistently to drag my suitcase around the airport and then later, you know, unpack my dorm room.  Awesome.  Wow.

Junior year a horse stepped on my back.

The story there is that Brego was still young and slight.  These days he’s a muscled-up freight train of elegance and poise (while still being a total dork sometimes) but in his early years he wasn’t the most sturdy.  You wouldn’t be either if you kept having dramatic growth spurts just as you started filling out.

It’s our last ride together and my trainer has us on the lunge line so she can control the pace of what we’re doing.  Everything’s fine, very routine, until something frightens Brego out of his skin.  Now I never saw what it was but according to witnesses a golf cart took a turn a little too quick and appeared.  Horses aren’t fans of things appearing out of nowhere.  To this day Brego does not like it when something loud and dramatic sounding happens behind him.

My experience goes a little something like this:

Brego leaps up and to the side, throwing the both of us off balance.  The lunge line is nowhere near enough to keep him steady and even though I had kept my seat, for sure wasn’t going anywhere, we were still tipping.  My weight at the angle we were leaning was too much for Brego to correct himself.  I had about a split second to figure this out and to then make the executive decision to bail.  I couldn’t think of a single good thing that’d be accomplished if Brego and I hit the ground together so I decided to take the fall alone.

This was both good and bad.  Good because a horse didn’t fall on my leg.  Bad because Brego still hadn’t quite gotten his feet under him and I was in his way.

Now, horses don’t want to step on you.  They flat-out do not want it.  No thank you ma’am that sounds terrible.  So when his hoof landed on my back he was quick to get it the hell off.  But even with just a fraction of his weight, that is a goddamned heavy animal.  My saving graces in that situation were how fast he got off me, the give of the footing I’d landed in and the fact it was my lower back so my spine had a little cushion around it.

So after checking to be sure I could still move my legs and getting levered off the ground, we went to the hospital and made sure nothing was broken.  They gave me a Vicodin pill that sent me on a ride to Loopy Town but no permanent damage to my back was found.  I lived on Advil for about a week to keep my back from screaming.  Weirdly, it never bruised the way I thought it would.  At most there was a sort of shadow whereas I expected a technicolor spectacular.

Then once I got back to school I had to move furniture so, you know, great timing.

Junior year was actually triple special on the bad news front.  First, my grandfather passed away shortly before I had to go back.  Then the last ride I had up where the horses live ended in catastrophe.  And then when I finally got home to pack up, Hurricane Irene canceled my flight.  Talk about a series of unfortunate events.

Then finally there was senior year with the pneumonia.  I actually can’t believe I hadn’t thought of how bad luck would smack me up the side the head every time I went back to school after summer break.  That might be a good thing, though.  I might never have gone on to grad school there if I thought there was some malevolent spirit gradually upping its game every time I flew back for a new year.

Come to think of it, I also always got bumped from at least one of my chosen classes so I had to scramble to pick a new one every year.

You know what?  I’m making a note.

Never do anything important in late August.

Ever.

It Was Love in the End

31 Saturday Jan 2015

Posted by beneaththehat in Horses, Short Story

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Tags

horses, the feelings corner, throwback

So technically I know you’re supposed to do throwback posts on Thursday but hey, I am the Fairy Queen of my blog and if I decide it’s Throwback Saturday then it’s Throwback Saturday.

Plus I wanted to post this before I lost the courage.  I wrote this in a creative writing class in high school so consider that a disclaimer all on its own.  This is for Frances, the horse who we lost too young.


Continue reading →

Reason No. 137 I Love Horses

20 Saturday Jul 2013

Posted by beneaththehat in Horses

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

horses, Singing

Want to know something great about horses?

When you’re walking down the barn aisle singing Queen at the top of your lungs and they all stick their heads out to stare at you, it’s easy to pretend they’re staring because they want to admire your vocal stylings.

Their big, observant eyes seem to be saying, “You rock.”

Yes I do, unwilling audience.  Yes I do.

At Some Point I Will Have Real Problems

28 Friday Jun 2013

Posted by beneaththehat in Horses

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

horses, my brain is why

My post about Georgia is coming.  I’ve been here at least a day and have made enough inane observations to make a relatively interesting point but my internet is tenuous and I’m hoarding until I have a better connection.  Also there’s a whole post about how glamorous horses are, emphasis on the sarcasm, coming once I download the pictures.  A vet and indignity is involved, but that’s all I’m tellin’.

Right now I have a really inane thought to share.  It became a tangent and I decided I might as well post.

Today I read the line, “I want to ride you hard and put you away wet.”

Don’t ask me why I read that.  You don’t need to know.

Anyway, I immediately thought about how being involved with horses has limited some of the sexy talk I could use while engaging in intimacy.  For instance, I could never say that.  Or have it said to me.  My immediate reaction to that line was, I swear, “How irresponsible.”

And it is!  I’m not crazy.  If you ride a horse hard and put it away wet you are a terrible person.  That isn’t to say riding a horse hard is bad.  Sometimes a horse needs a good, hard ride and that’s perfectly reasonable.  But putting it away wet?  Er, no.  Not unless there’s some kind of emergency and even then I’m dubious.

First of all, are we talking about putting the horse away wet with sweat?  Because that’s pretty bad.  Do you want to be stuck in a stall dripping with sweat?  Does that sound fun to you?  The sweat will harden and it’s seriously unpleasant for the horse.  Ick.  Would a bath really take that much time out of your day?  Just hose the horse down!

That brings me to my second point.  If you have hosed the horse down and put him away wet, then what is wrong with you?  Again, emergencies aside, I am giving you the side eye.  Fungus will pop up on horses when you don’t dry them properly and put them back in their stall.  No one wants a horse to have to deal with fungus.  If it goes septic you will have serious health problems on your hands.  It’s just not right.

Oh, brain, why must you kill something that sounded so sexy in the abstract?

But hey, if its sexiness has been killed for me I might as well kill it for anyone who stumbles on this blog.  Have a great day, everyone!

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