The Horse in Your Western Novel – Horses are not Zebras or Misguided Unicorns By Connie Vines

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Ten Pet Peeves, or Horse-Related Mistakes to Avoid in your Novel

1)   Misusing the specialized and precise vocabulary of horsemanship, especially the size, color, age and sex of the horse.

2)    Defying the laws of nature. AKA: Creating the ‘superhorse’.

3)   Horses trained or controlled by either ‘mastery’ or ‘magic,’ ignoring the real behavior of horses.

4)   Mixing up Western and English terms and styles.

5)   The stallion!  (Not the mount of choice).

6)   The self-conscious or uncomfortable expert rider.  An expert is an expert—no need to hang on for ‘dear life’.

7)   Good riders are relaxed in the saddle.  No kicking, kneeing, or flapping of elbows are needed.

8)   Forgetting that horses are animals and need to be fed and watered.  Even in modern times, your transportation requires gas, oil, and water.

9)   Talking horses—horses who neigh and, heaven forbid, scream on a regular basis.  Horses are generally rather silent beasts, though they will whinny if parted from their stable mates, or nicker softly in greeting at feeding times.

10) Tada! My personal favorite, and, unfortunately, too often seen in print and on television—the mare who takes all night to foal while the hero and heroine sort out conflict.  (Nature ensures that healthy mares foal fast.  A long labor requires someone calling for the vet—not working out ‘conflicts’.)

The Facts, please:

Since horses are flesh and blood creatures, the faster the horse goes the shorter the distance he can maintain that speed without harm. If the ride involves difficult terrain, jumping, or carrying extra weight, both speed and endurance will suffer.

Modern Endurance Rides: take 11-15 hours to cover 100 miles (part of this time the rider spends running beside his mount).

1860s: The Pony Express averaged nine mph over 25 mile stages.

For additional information, check the records from modern Thoroughbred Racing.

The Terms:

Mare: a female horse.

Stallion: a male horse that is not castrated.  Also called ‘entire’ in England and in the West, a ‘stud’ horse.

Gelding: a castrated male horse.

Foal: a young horse from birth to January 1 the next year. The female is a ‘filly foal,’ the male is a ‘colt’ foal  this may change per region).

Filly: a young female horse, up to 3 years old.

Colt: a young male horse, up to 3 years old.

Yearling: in the year after the birth year.  A yearling is too young to ride!  Most saddle horses aren’t worked hard until they are at least 4 years old.

Height: horses are measured from the ground to the top of the withers in ‘hands’. One hand is four inches. The average horse is 15 to 16 hands.  17 hands is very tall and only unusual specimens reach 18 hands.  Ponies are usually less than 14 hands.

Gaites (‘Paces’ in England): walk, trot, canter, gallop—also ‘pacing,’ ‘ambling,’ ‘running walk’ –describe precise and different ways in which a horse moves its legs. 

Rainbow Colors?  Certainly Not:

The English horsemen use fewer and simpler terms than Western horsemen, partly because English breeding has selected for fewer colors. Essentially two colors are taken into considering when describing horses. The main body color and the ‘points.’ The ‘points’ in this context are the ear tips, the mane and tail, and the lower part of the legs.

Black body, black points: A Black horse—may be smoky black, jet black, coal black, raven black.

Brown body, brown points: A Brown horse—may be seal brown, or standard brown.

Red-brown body, black points: A Bay horse—may be dark bay, mahogany bay, sandy bay.  Every Bay horse always has black points.

Reddish body, self-colored (non-black) points: A Chestnut/Sorrell horse—in the West, reds of All colors. Western horsemen use ‘sorrell’ to describe all red horses.  Light sorrel draft horses are known as ‘blonde.’

Yelllowish body, (generally) black points: Buckskin is the term used in the West.

Other colors and terms (you may wish to conduct additional research) include: A Grey, a Roan, a Palomino, a Isabella, a Paint or a Pinto, White horses and Albino, Piebald, and Skewbald.  There is also, the closest thing to a ‘horse of a different color’, the Appalossa.

Information online:

Naming your horse:
http://www.horses-and-horse-information.com/horsenames/a.shtml 

http://www.equinespot.com/horse-names.html

For fantasy (naming your unicorn):

http://fantasynamegenerators.com/horse_names.php#.VYTRXPlViko

Caring for your horse:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99RH0I-Jj34

The dollars and cents factor of horse ownership:

http://www.moneycrashers.com/cost-owning-horse-alternatives-buying/

A horse is the projection of peoples' dreams about themselves - strong, powerful, beautiful - and it has the capability of giving us escape from our mundane existence. ~ Pam Brown

Happy Riding,

Connie

Two of my loves: Tulsa and Midnight
(during my rural life in Ramona, CA)

GOT TO LOVE THOSE VILLAINS - by Vijaya Schartz

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Reviewers always notice my villains, and this is no accident. I do like my villains as much as my heroes and heroines. I enjoy developing and refining my bad guys. I make them believable, strongly motivated, and intelligent. I believe the stronger the villain, the more heroic the hero or heroine will have to be, in order to defeat him (or her).

Debbie at ck2skwips&Kritiques said about the Ancient Enemy series:

"...the evil Captain Kavak certainly ranks as one of the worst villains ever encountered!"

Captain Kavak is a woman and a general. Her ancestors were once human, Anasazi taken to the stars by the Star People eight hundred years ago (according to Native American legends). The Anasazi were feared warriors, their name means "ancient enemy," according to my Native American sources, and after many modifications in the Pleiades system, they still are a bloodthirsty lot. But now they are part flesh part machine, and they call themselves Anaz-voohri. After slaughtering their captors and stealing their technology, they are coming to reclaim the planet of their ancestors... Earth.

In science fiction, the possibilities are endless. In this series, Captain Kavak is ruthless, part human and part alien cyborg. To enforce her authority, she sacrifices her opponents from the top of a pyramid. She hates the inferior humans. She wants to make Earth the Anaz-voohri home base, from which to build a fleet and launch her conquest of the entire galaxy. Unfortunately for her, her people and her fleet have been decimated in too many bloody battles, and she needs human breeders to birth her new army. She is more threatening due to the fact that she is desperate. Her motivations are all too understandable since her people face extinction.

Find it on Amazon HERE

In PRINCESS OF BRETAGNE and PAGAN QUEEN my villain also shines.

"Schartz is an accomplished writer, whose pacing, conflicts, and goals are always complex and whose good characters are always likeable, and whose villains are evil incarnate. You have to like her villains as much as the good guys! Mattacks is a magnificent example of this!" - 5 stars - Manic Readers

In BELOVED CRUSADER, I have two immortal villains. One is the Great Goddess herself, who turns against the heroine for disobeying and questioning her faith. The other villain is a Naga shape shifter, half serpent half man, an instrument of the Goddess, and possibly the Prince of Darkness himself. This is the first of my villains to be irredeemably dark.

But my villains also have their vulnerabilities. In the Archangel series, I have the reptilian devil himself being harassed and belittled by his nagging wife. It was fun to write. I also have a villain in book 1 who is so seductive and handsome, women hate themselves for liking him.

My secret to writing a great villain is  to make him, or her as three-dimensional, threatening, and interesting as possible, without out-staging the hero or the heroine. No matter what we are, we all have deep motivations, and I make sure theirs are clear and easy to understand for the reader. We can all relate to the thirst for power, the lure of riches, pride, revenge... In his mind, my villain is the hero of his own story.

Vijaya Schartz

Swords, Blasters, Romance with a Kick

http://www.vijayaschartz.com 

http://bookswelove.net/authors/schartz-vijaya/

I'm not a hoarder--or am I? Tricia McGill

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A friend of mine lost her mother last year and it took this friend and her family months to work their way through the years of junk collected by this person over her lifetime. Some of the disposable objects like scraps of paper with useless messages on them dated back to the year dot. Instances like this make me more determined than ever not to collect things. There’s my thirty or more elephants of all shapes and sizes, I know, but that’s another matter. Someone somewhere will cherish them after I’m gone, as I have.

As we get older we spend a moment or two now and then to ponder on the fragility of life. Another friend has just lost a family member who was an active member of society, yet was alive one day and gone the next. So now here I am once again lying in bed at night worrying who is going to sort through my junk once I am gone. 

I decided a while back that anything I hadn’t worn for over a year would go to the charity shop, yet on searching for something the other day I found a sweater my husband gave me not long after our wedding day and that was a long, long time ago. It must go to the charity shop soon, but how do we part with such mementos? There’s that mantra, voiced by the man of the house who has a million different sizes of screws etc. in his work shed—you never know when you might need them. My brother in law went mad when my sister threw out his various strips of timber that she considered to be rubbish but to him were treasures that might possibly come in handy one day. Oh, and there was that trailer that was going rusty lying out in all weathers that I decided to sell cheaply to someone as I was sick of telling my hubby I didn’t want to see the rusty heap in my garden a moment longer. It took a while for him to forgive me for that one. To be truthful I don’t think he ever did get over it.

On this latest clearing out tack I decided to work my way through my study. I’ve been doing something similar probably once a year for some time now, and considered I had thrown out most unwanted stuff. But yesterday I spent about 4 hours going through my piled up research notes. After all, who needs print outs these days when with a click of the mouse we have all the information we need at our fingertips. I forced myself to refrain from reading notes before they ended up in the recyclable bin, but there are a few that have to be kept back. After this 4 hours or so I would say I have made the tiniest inroad into the reams of paperwork. I just hope I don’t die before I get through it all.

This brought on another thought. Periodically I check online for updates etc. on Amazon or elsewhere, and came across a new review that had been added.

This one earned 1 and a half stars and when I went over to the reviewers’ site it seems this person has nothing better to do than go through the internet and insult or admire other people’s work.

“I would not recommend this book. I tried to finish this novel ,hoping it would improve. After reading over half i skipped to the end. The H& H were lifeless and the dialogue was redundant. The ending was predictable. If you love time travel novel pass over this one. Thank you for reading my review. Happpy Reading but not this book.”

I’ve left in their great spelling and other mistakes and was left to wonder just why this person took the time out to insult my work and then had the idiocy to thank the reader for reading the review.

Now this next one is for one of my best sellers on Amazon that has garnered a lot of 4 and 5 star reviews.

“So woman gets raped, finds a lover that takes advantage of her at every opportunity. What an awful love story.”

You may ask what this has to do with hoarding. Well, nothing really. It’s just that I was then forced to consider if these nasty people, who seem to enjoy insulting other folk’s endeavors, ever stop and think how many hours of painstaking research and work went into creating their stories. When I began to write in the late 90s I used the local library to take notes, hence the piles of printouts. I didn’t possess a computer back then. Ah, life is so easier these days (or is it?) We still have to take the time to verify facts, especially when writing historicals.

It doesn’t bother me that they don’t like my books, but what does bother me is just why people have to take time to insult the work of others without putting a moment’s thought into how hurtful it might be. I honestly don’t care if they hated my books—I’m grateful that many people have taken the time to tell me how they love them. It’s all a matter of opinion. I’ve read many books (or started them and not finished them) over the years that didn’t appeal to me, yet would not dream of going online and telling the world I hated them. I’ve said it before, if you can’t say something nice then don’t say anything at all.

So, to those people who spend five minutes of their time writing scathing reviews I say, please take into account the hours of research, writing, editing etc. that goes into creating a book, and next time try to refrain from telling them you hated it and just say, “ This one was not for me.”

Anyway, back to the de-hoarding, while sorting through cupboards and shelves I came across this newspaper dated May 8^th 1945. I have no idea where I acquired it or why I kept it, but have a feeling it will not be thrown out anytime soon. Someone, someday, might find it of interest. I guess it comes from the days when I was researching for my novel, Remnants of Dreams. I see the paper cost 2 pence.

This article caught my eye. I found it interesting as my eldest sister left England to settle in Australia with her husband in 1949, soon after this was printed.

Let’s face it, hoarding is really only a matter of saving remnants of the past, be it our own or our country’s. We all love museums, don’t we? As they say, one man’s junk is another man’s treasure.

You can find details of all my books here at Books We Love.

Or here on my website

 

Foxes, Horses, and a Runaway Girl by Mikki Sadil

(Young Adult author Mikki Sadil brings her Civil War historical to Books We Love, and joins us on the Insider Blog)

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Hello, I’m Mikki Sadil, a relatively new author with Books We Love. Jude told me to write something about myself, to allow all of you to get to know me. So here goes.I was born on a ranch in Texas, raised with Quarter Horses and Long Horn cattle, dogs, cats, and many unspecified animals, mostly wild. I was on the back of a horse…in front of my mom or dad or a ranch hand…from the time I was 6 months old, and was given my own Quarter Pony on my second birthday. On my fifth birthday, I was give a small .22 rifle and taught to shoot. As you may have guessed by now, horses and animals of all kinds have been a mainstay of my life…uh, .22’s, not so much.
My dad was in the service, and when I was 8 years old, he was deployed overseas and my mother and I went with him. That lasted about 2 years, then he was sent back to the US and we traveled all over this country.
When I was 10 years old, he was stationed in Washington, D.C, and we lived in a boarding house in Rock Creek, Maryland. One of his officers had a Civil War-type home ( read that as mansion) in another part of Maryland, with acres and acres of land. He also had horses…the Thoroughbreds that were used in Fox Hunts. Oh yes, Fox Hunts were real! This officer invited my father and me to take part in a Fox Hunt on a Sunday, and I was thrilled. I was not an English rider, but had had a few lessons in an English saddle so I could sit it pretty well.
That morning, there were about 40 people at this man’s home, all with their Thoroughbreds, and all of the adults dressed to the hilt in “fox hunting” clothing. Me? Well, I had on Western riding boots, jeans, and a long-sleeved shirt…not exactly dressed to the teeth for this event. My dad was far more presentable, as he had been in the Cavalry all his life ( before they turned the horses into tanks and military jeeps), so he had the proper boots and jodhpurs. I wouldn’t be caught dead riding a horse in such “sissified” attire, especially in a saddle that barely sat on the back of the horse.
Needless to say, the other adults were not exactly pleased to have a “child” riding with them, but as time went on, and I jumped the fences and went over the downed tree logs and splashed through the brooks as well as any of them, I was temporarily accepted. Temporarily being the key word.
The Fox Hunt was exactly as you’ve seen in movies or read about in books. We had a Hunt Master with a horn; we had a pack of beautiful hunt dogs, barking and straining at their leashes, eager to be let loose. There were broken fences and upright fences to jump over. There were the tree logs we had to guide our horse over or around, and there were the many brooks and streams to be splashed through. We started out, and rode for a while. It was a beautiful day, sun streaming down, gentle breeze blowing. The horses were gorgeous, coats shining in the sun, ears pricked forward, and the dogs were just being dogs.
Then…the Hunt Master let out a blast on his horn, the dogs were turned loose, and pandemonium began. Horses, horses everywhere. No longer was there any rhyme or reason for where one was riding, who you were riding beside. From a gentle canter it was now a full-out gallop, following the dogs. The dogs: yapping, barking, chasing each other, running as fast as they could. The scent of FOX was in the air. It was all I could do to stay in the saddle and handle this huge monster of a horse who was at least twice as big as my Quarter Horse, and twice as hard-headed. He was after the dogs, after the fox, and totally unresponsive to my pull on the reins.
Then, another different blast from the Hunt Master. Horses were reined in, slowed down. I looked ahead, and saw twenty dogs barking and trying unsuccessfully to climb up a tree. On a lower branch, a bit of orangy-red hung down: the FOX had been treed.
The woman next to me leaned closer, and asked if I’d ever seen how they killed the FOX? WHAT? KILL the FOX? My dad didn’t tell me that part of what a Fox Hunt was all about. I just looked at her, speechless. Suddenly, I realized all the horses were quiet. They were pacing forward at a walk. Only the dogs were still making a racket.
Oh NO! Kill the FOX? Not today! I gathered myself in the saddle, swung my crop against my horse’s side, and dug my spurs in. He jumped forward like he’d been stung by a swarm of bees. Yelling at the top of my voice, I headed straight for the dogs, the tree, and the FOX! The dogs quieted down for just a moment. They saw this huge horse and screaming “something” headed straight for them , and they scattered to the wind. The fox jumped down, and disappeared in an instant.
This Fox Hunt was so over.
My father and I were never invited to a Fox Hunt again.

You can find my books at Books We Love.

Rewrite a Novel or let it Die? by Diane Scott Lewis

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Years ago I read a novel called Desiree and became interested in Napoleon, especially in his exile on the strange island of St. Helena. I started to research this exile and found numerous resources at the Library of Congress (in those Dark Ages days before the internet). One resource would lead me to another, one book published at the very time, 1817, Napoleon was on the island (1815-1821). The description of the odd landscape, flora and fauna of St. Helena, a remote volcanic atoll in the South Atlantic fascinated me.

Approach to St. Helena

I’d lived on Guam for a few years, so understood the isolation of an island in the middle of nowhere.

A story formed in my head, and my alternate-history novel began to take shape. What if Napoleon met a woman on St. Helena, and rallied to escape his exile?  I worked for years on this book, even corresponding with a Napoleonic scholar who had visited the island four times. I read dairies of Napoleon’s servants who’d accompanied him there, plus information from his English captors who held him prisoner under the strictest of circumstances.

I wanted to humanize this much-written about man, without bending the facts too far—other than the escape of course!

I finally sold the book to a small on-line press and was thrilled. Until I saw the price they put on my ebook. As an unknown author, few would pay that inflated price, so the book languished.

I was so enamored of my own research, that to salvage some of it, I wrote a short novel that took place on St. Helena, A Savage Exile, in which I added vampires to the mix.

Next year my contract with the other publisher will be up, and I’m dying to rewrite the original book and present it to my current publisher. But now my ideas have changed. I want to replace my heroine with another, older, smarter woman, change the dynamics, and shorten this very long book. I have misgivings about the rewrites. Should I forget about it? It seems I’m constantly rehashing this story, but then again all those years of research going to waste!

St. Helena map, 1815

We’ll see how the summer goes, as I’m working on a time-travel at the moment. I might electronically drag out that dusty tome and hack away and see what happens. (in fact, I’ve already started).



For more information about my books, please visit my website:
http://www.dianescottlewis.org