I cannot be coherent...

[dancinghorse]

...but since I also cannot sleep, here I am.

Shattered Dance is drafted--after more 18-hour days than I can count. Sometimes it just works that way. Printed hardcopy today, to send to publisher tomorrow. E-copy will go to Ye Ed in the morning.

The last bit went as usual: Run through previous ms., proof, line edit, then write final couple of chapters while the rest prints out. I hoped to print it off OldPuter in its new incarnation as printer terminal, but printer and puter were not speaking. I had to haul out the desktop instead. OldPuter really needs a visit from the Dell geek. Printer drivers are not yet on NewPuter (I ran out of geek juice setting it up as a wireless network which has made for some very spiffy zappage of novel files over to OldPuter for backup) but will be soon.

In any case we have achieved Ms., three weeks late (alas) but better than never by all accounts. The next one will by god go in early--I hate late mss.

While finishing this, I had some Schadenfreude reading sartorias' objections to much of what I did therein, including the word "shattered" in the title, and various plot points and character types. What can I say? It's the market.

The horses are in Our Mom Is A Bad Horse Mom mode, aka Crying Neglect, but not too bad--we had a clinic-let last week and there will be neep of great quality and complexity, but not tonight. I can barely type this, let alone make sense about the tao of riding. (Also, new ramifications of seat, and in-hand work that needs further consultation with Teacher before I can be sure of it).

Pook is barefoot--reinjury of the coronary band is serious and we are waiting for vet and shoer to get together and figure out what to do. Shoer thinks leave the shoes off and keep the bell boots on and see what happens. Which is happening by default. He is, as a consequence, unridable until further notice. Pandora may got to the Dallas clinic after all. He's not lame, mind you, and his feet are excellent except where he whacked himself But Good right where the hoof grows out from the pastern, causing a crack that is not healing and may need Yet Another resection. Crack on other foot (caused by same form of injury--he went through a spell of hitting his front feet with his hinds a whole lot last summer) is healing well.

Spot-the-dog has a lumbar back injury, is crated strictly for at least another two weeks (my new weight regimen: carry 26lb dog outside and down steps then back up again after peeage and poopage, six times a day), and is on major meds. I am praying she doesn't need surgery. She seems to be improving, but it's slow and I hope I'm not delusional about the level or possibility of improvement.

Three-leggedy cat is having problems (he's old and has had a hard life and seems to be on life number 9), which I am hoping will not involve yet further vet bills.

Mentoring victims, er, clients will be glad to know that now the book blitz is over, the Doctor is back In and I'll start addressing the backlog of mss. this week.

And that's all the brain cells can squeeze out tonight.

Except the bit about the green flash--by all means, woj, do stay, but it only took me 14 years to see one....

Comments

Clients? Mentoring?

[shalanna.livejournal.com]

You take on clients for mentoring for writing? Really? How does one get into the queue to sign up? (I'm assuming this is something you get paid for doing . . . otherwise, you probably don't want any additions!)

Re: Clients? Mentoring?

[dancinghorse.livejournal.com]

:) Yep. $35 an hour (ponies need to eat). And there are some slots left. Email me at capriole at smoe dot org.

[rethought.livejournal.com]

Sorry to hear about all the animal woes.

How did Pook injure his coronary band, exactly?

[dancinghorse.livejournal.com]

Pooka is a slinky, in spite of looking like a fat Welsh pony. I have a photo of him looking like the Mustang logo, that's how flexible he is. He can reach up with his hind foot and pull off a shoe by the TOE, never mind clipping himself higher up. When he's in certain growth phases, he's all over the place. Curt the Wonder Shoer has his back feet trimmed now to derail this, but last summer he was having an orgy of whacking his fronts. The vet and the shoer both thought he had some sort of weird mutant foot defect, until [a] the vet took a good, hard look and said, "That's not genes, it's trauma!" and [b] I caught him doing it one fine morning--whee-boing-WHACK!. That time he actually drew blood. And sure enough, that's the one that's the problem now.

[rethought.livejournal.com]

Think he'll grow out of it, or will he be in the bell boots for the forseeable?

[dancinghorse.livejournal.com]

He should grow out of it. It always hits when he's growing and butt-high and overcompensates for the weird way his body is working. No one including veterinarians really believes how flexible he is until they see it. "That's not physically possible!" my vet said once as Pooka twisted himself into a tesseract to get away from a shot needle.

It's not just the physically untalented horses that get into trouble. The overly talented ones do, too.

The best one was the time he pulled off a front shoe...from the toe. With his back foot.

[casacorona.livejournal.com]

Not Judy, but leaping in -- Pook has a humongous overstride. He hits his front hoof with the tip of his back hoof. It's a substantial blow, and when it hits high on the hoof, i.e. the coronary band, it bruises and cuts.

So, bell boots to protect the hoof.

[neutronjockey.livejournal.com]

Kinkos/Fed-Ex has a nifty little program you can download and instead of printing to hard file, you send it to them to print, collate, and fed-ex hard copies to whomever. Works like a charm, saves ink, costs about the same.
*headdesk* Now I must 'to-bed' as well...
-=Jeff=-

[dancinghorse.livejournal.com]

Cool! I'll check it out. Thanks.

[dancingwriter.livejournal.com]

Congratulations on finishing the MS! Yay!

[dancinghorse.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

I love your icon.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I didn't reiterate it this round--the thrust of the discussion was specifically openings--but those tropes, including the dramatic title words, work for a reason. Some authors can make them fresh and alive, some beginners just do them because they don't see how anything else could be done (the fantasy world that simply has to have Elves, because what else is there?). You are one of the former, not the latter.

[raithen.livejournal.com]

You are one of the former, not the latter.
indeed!

and congrats on finishing the MS, Judy. small preemptive *squee*

[dancinghorse.livejournal.com]

Thank you. Egotistically, I figured as much, but you know how it is when you're slogging to the end and everything you write is garbage.

I had an interesting review a while back on a romance site--reviewer said they almost didn't read the book because, you know, white horses who aren't really horses, girl who hits a lot of the Mary Sue points, big magical blowout, and so on--but they decided to do it anyway and the review was a rave. There were some comments from readers to the effect that "with that many cliches it can't possibly be any good so we don't want to read it anyway."

I know for sure the books are totally ignored in fantasy venues because [a] they have "romance cooties" (coming from a romance publisher) and [b] they must be cliched dreck because anything about a girl and her horse must by definition be so.

And the books sell four to five times the numbers of my highly critically successful "legitimate" fantasy books....

There is an essay there, I'm sure, on reader expectations, genre templates, and why those templates can lead to false assumptions.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I thihnk so too--I've been feeling an essay coming on about how women do NOT have to be ashamed of reading romances or romantic fantasy--that because these books might focus on emotional innerscape as well as adventure outerscape, we no longer have to accept the male notion of "if it's about war and politics it's literary and meaningful, but if it's about relationships, its for grrrlz"--um, excuse me, but if life's most important issues are all war and politics, why is the planet so overpopulated, hmmmm?

[dancinghorse.livejournal.com]

Because the dominant-in-its-own-mind gender is in denial.

[larryhammer]

Yay draft!

---L.

[smoemeth.livejournal.com]

Yay draft! Boo menagerie woes. I hope Taminy is ok, and that Spot and Pooka get better soon.

And yay green flash!! Do tell!!!

[smoemeth.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I meant that to be its own reply and not threaded with Larry's comment, but LJ won't let me delete it. That's what I happens when I read lj pre-caffeine, I guess...

[larryhammer]

Silly LJ. Does it help to log out and back in? For the deleting, I mean -- that won't help with the caffeine. They're still futzing with the cookies, as part of the security issues.

---L.

[dancinghorse.livejournal.com]

Wow, this is weird. Lj are weird this week.

Taminy seems to be better. His appetite is back and he's acting like himself again. I was really worried.

[larryhammer]

The LJ Wonks are still occasionally expiring everyone's cookies as part of toughening up security thang, each time saying hopefully this will be the last time. I'm wondering if they'll have to soon ban underscores in usernames.

---L.

[dancinghorse.livejournal.com]

Why are underscores a problem? Are they gates to the Netherworld?

[larryhammer]

I haven't followed the technical details closely, but two weeks ago several security holes were found in LJ's logon javascript code -- an exploit that was used by some, ah, let's call them grey hats take control of user accounts. They've spent the last two weeks plugging holes like mad -- thus the logging everyone out every once in a while, and the shifting everyone to the username.livejournal.com format. However, underscores can't be in domain names, forcing those user accounts to always be www.livejournal.com/user/username. Thus my suspicions.

---L.

[raithen.livejournal.com]

gah on the aminal woes. Poor Pook, hope he heels up quickly (when I put Joy up on her high-heeled - in HER opinion - boriums, she tends to interfere more than normal.... *sigh*).

and poor Spot. Perhaps doing some Ttouch (if you aren't already) would help with the healing?

and poor kitty.

{{antivetbillsquickhealing vibes}} to all!

[dancinghorse.livejournal.com]

Thank you. She does love her back rubs.

[seachanges.livejournal.com]

Yay on the ms! Candles lit and prayer kitties purring for the ill & injured critters. And mucho sympathies on the not sleeping. I was up worshiping Insomnia, Goddess of Sleep Deprivation myself last night.

[dancinghorse.livejournal.com]

I wonder if it was something in the air? Though my brain is on a hamster wheel anyway. Can't let it stop this time or I'll lose all momentum and go flat for a month--which I can't afford to do at all.

[wyldflamingo.livejournal.com]

Poor critters! Goodness, I hope they all are on the mend, or will be shortly, sans helpful, but often expensive vet help.

As a mentoring client (never a victim) I sleep better knowing my mentor is taking care of her critters!

[dancinghorse.livejournal.com]

Why, thank you kindly, dear victim. ;>

[larryhammer]

BTW, have you seen this? Researches tested the remains of recently found vicitms of the plague that hit Athens during the Peloponnesian war, and have identified it as typhoid. Now we know.

---L.

[dancinghorse.livejournal.com]

Hey, I hadn't seen that. That is cool. Thanks.

[alfreda89.livejournal.com]

Woman, you get more done than a dozen other people--other writers--that I can name. Don't feel guilty about three weeks late, or even a month slide on crits.

Feel guilty about months late and months slide, maybe, but critters gotta eat, and you gotta come back from the mountain (rest).

Many congrats on finishing the book!

[dancinghorse.livejournal.com]

Thanks. My mind is a hamster wheel. Trying to slow it down.

[alfreda89.livejournal.com]

http://www.thegeekempire.net/g/hamsterwheel.jpg

I cannot be coherent...

[brother-osric.livejournal.com]

since I also cannot sleep, here I am.

Very Cartesian, that. :)

Three quick items:

• Additional congratulations on finishing. And I like "shattered." Granted, what I know about book marketing probably fits in the round-file behind the cash register; but if it's the right word, then by gum it's the right word.
• <envy>Green flash?! You've actually seen it?</envy>
• Check this page (http://www.sff.net/people/michael-spence/)'s celebrations corner on Monday, if you would.

Re: I cannot be coherent...

[dancinghorse.livejournal.com]

Gratias.

Will check, thank you. :)

[tharain.livejournal.com]

I'm approaching a Horseback Riding Chapter in my MS. The sailing techinical stuff, I know. Horses, no know. If I start to get into technical difficulties, and sartorias and I can't sort 'em out, I may send that section to you for review after first draft is done. We can work out the details. That work for you??

[dancinghorse.livejournal.com]

Sure!