Horses being silly--for a reason

Next month, my new book, CAPRIOLE, will be out from Loose Id. Hooray! It's M/M and features Lipizzans based on this herd.

(No. No cover yet, sadly. I am anxiously waiting for it...)

Actually, for a much more detailed blog by a professional writer and breeder about using horses in fiction and for horsey worldbuilding ideas, I point you her posts on Book View Cafe. Me, I don't claim to be a horse girl. I never had a horse crazy stage. I rode a horse once in summer camp when I was maybe nine. I still don't know what color a bay or a roan is, though I do know that most "white" horses are actually gray.

And all this comes in handy when writing fantasy or historical, since so much of it includes horses, and horse details are so easy to get wrong even when you think you're right.

For a few ideas, I'll give you some Lipizzans in action.

Want to have a mischievous horse? The pose above is something the gelding started, and this mare, Tia, learned. A couple of the other mares can do this too. See the hay on the ground? This is where the horses get groomed and saddled, and we give them a bit of hay to keep them occupied. Tia and her buddies like to reach under the fence to get as much hay as they can reach. See the hose? The gelding has figured out if he tugs on it, he can get a mouthful of hay to come out with it.

Ahhh, nothing like a good roll, as Tia and Pandora like to do. Actually, Tia's down for a nap while Pandora is actually rolling, something all the horses like to do for several reasons. It provides a good stretch, it helps with itching, and the dirt helps to keep the flies from being so bothersome. In the summer we hose the horses off to keep them cool (in 100+ degrees, they ask for it,) and they usually go for a roll right afterwards and come up looking like paint ponies.

And here is my horse Carrma, the matriarch of the herd. That's Tia lying down for a snooze. She slept for about forty-five minutes that day. Horses sleep for around four hours a day, and while they can sleep standing up as their legs lock into place so they don't fall down, they do like to get the weight off their feet and will lie flat like Tia here (which panicked me the first time I saw it, because I thought the horse was sick or something.)

Or the horses will sleep curled up like Pandora is. And they don't often do it in front of humans unless they're totally comfortable. We had eight humans with the herd that day, and three horses decided to take a nap all at once, which means the horses really trusted us.

No, that image is not digitally enhanced to add the tongue. Camilla really is sticking her tongue out. It's a way for the horses to relax. Yawning doesn't mean they're tired--it means they're relaxed and releasing tension much the same way humans do. And if you see a horse lick and chew, it means they're happy.

Anyhoo. That's probably more than enough horse picture spam for today. If you have any horse questions, holler, and if I don't know I probably know who would.

All pictures copyright Evey Brett. Thanks. :>)

Building a House of Cards

Yesterday on my blog, I talked about worldbuilding for my series-in-progress. Like certain characters, elements in a fantasy world have a tendency to come out of nowhere and demand to be written. Sometimes the genesis of the idea is obvious, but the rest of it, the "why this?" is anybody's guess.

The idea for the demon hero in my world began to form while I was watching an episode of Firefly called "The Message," about a thief who got in over his head on a risky deal. Next thing I knew, I had an unknown person in my own head who was part Malcolm Reynolds and part Tracey (the overreaching thief), and he was playing poker in a smoky den with an angel.

Like the other players in that celestial den of iniquity, I never stood a chance against Belphagor. He soon had me researching Russian prison tattoos, train schedules on the Trans-Siberian Railway (they're complicated—and everything is listed in Moscow time, despite the fact that the route extends across ten time zones), and poker.

I figured it would be hard to find poker decks in Heaven (and I didn't want to give away my own ignorance about the game), so I found myself designing a card and dice game to go along with my demon. As things progressed, this impossible game turned into a divination deck as well—one that was capable of sending messages from the celestial plane to email accounts in obscure Internet cafes in Russia to be read by a computer-geek gypsy named Love.

Right around the same time the divination deck developed, I got stuck in a plot hole. The Russian Tarot of St. Petersburg was lying on top of my research books after I'd been looking up card equivalents to assign meanings to those in my divination deck. I thought, hell, the tarot's as good as anything to figure out this mess, so I threw down a spread. Strangely, it made perfect sense. Which, is, I suppose, how the tarot really works: we assign meaning to the archetypal images and make associations with things already in our subconscious.

This was the first time I'd used the tarot for plotting, but I've been consulting the tarot to help myself think through problems for most of my adult life. It never quite works as well for me, though, as it does when I read for others; I've been told that my readings are spot on. It's the way of such things, since it's difficult to be objective about your own future. But since a character is an "other," it seems to work well.

The tarot spread I use is a modified "Celtic cross," similar to the one below, with one additional card in the center.


The initial card, or the "querent," stands in for the character whose course I need to plot. Then I use a covering card and a crossing card, representing the element having an immediate impact on my character, and any outside influence that may be there to help or hinder (this third card crossing the first two isn't shown in the image above). Surrounding those cards, "the heart of the matter," are the overarching and underlying issues, and events of the immediate past and future.

It was surprising how much the character was able to tell me about herself from that familiar structure. Once I figured out the "heart" of her "matter," I read the final four card positions: Self, Home, Hopes and Fears, and the Outcome. My character was literally heading home, but didn't know what she was going to find there. To her (and my) surprise, the tarot told her that her man had a heart of gold and he would sacrifice everything to be there with her so they could face the outcome together.

I was so pleased with the reading, I had another character in the story who was using the cards to send a message give my character this reading instead. It was an unexpected bonding moment between characters who previously hadn't liked each other that would carry over into later books.

Care to try it yourself? The deck shown in the Celtic cross layout above, "The Mythic Tarot," is a great one for the beginning tarot reader, and perfectly suited to plotting, since it's based on the familiar archetypes of Greek mythology and the hero's journey. It comes with a detailed book that gives a history of the card along with the divinatory meaning.

So tell me, have you ever used "magical" assistance to get your characters out of a jam?


www.janekindred.com
The Devil's Garden, June 27, 2011, Carina Press