Media Advisory

Work: PM heat therapy/PM groom & exercises [rp, wv,cx].
Report: amenable during but galloped off upon dismissal.

Ramblings for the day: A well-known essayist [David Sedaris? unusual Google fail], said that his family no longer tells him anything because they are afraid to end up in print. Writer A.J. Jacobs allows his wife to forbid but not kibbitz, “In the past, he has given me censorship privileges but never annotations or rebuttals.” The Guinea Pig Diaries [S&S 2009]

Fortunately for me, my family members/subjects/victims aren’t able to complain. As long as the paychecks continue to fund the carrot stream, I doubt they even care. All of which is by way of introducing a press clips section on the sidebar. May they be joined by many more. Gotta pay for those carrots.

Mathilda in USDF Connection, “The Tail End: Square Horses and Round Holes”, November 2008

Rodney in Horse Illustrated, “Horse Tales: The Horse Next Door”, February 2012

Plus the original monthly blog posts on the USEA website of Rodney in “Back to Eventing”. Sidebarred under Past Incarnations.

Who is your favorite essayist or non-fiction writer?

Where Does The Time Go?

Work: late-PM heat therapy/EVE groom.
Report: lots of activity, little to show for it.

Ramblings for the day: One cost of having horses in the backyard is long drivetimes. A trip anywhere other than the feedstore is two hours of driving. There went the afternoon. The other cost of having horses at home is the gradual erosion of personal habits. Therefore, one must add in time beforehand to make oneself presentable to reenter polite society. There went the morning. A long-winded way to say that this afternoon’s simple, one-hour meeting kicked the stuffing out of my day.

What is your best time management tip?

Fotography Friday: Texture

Work: PM heat therapy/PM groom & exercises.
Report: Did all 6 exercises [crossrail, weave cones, plank, reverse poles, crossrail, log], including 2-3 reps of everything but the first crossrail, despite it being almost dusk. In the morning, I was out of bed in plenty of time but got caught up in fiddling with the black hole that is WordPress widgets. Must get moving earlier.

Ramblings for the day: New feature since
a) a daily blog was not sufficiently overwhelming.
b) I am ardent fan of Thursday Night Basset Blogging by TBOGG. I couldn’t begin to tell you the man’s political opinions which form the bulk of his posts, but I like me some Bassets.

Caveat: I am not a photographer. I can manage a workmanlike Horse-Over-Fence shot for show coverage and I have supplied pictures for articles when the real photographers where off covering bigger things, e.g. the behind-the-scenes stories at Rolex. So this is by way of let’s see what happens. Apologies in advance to the sensibilities of any photographers in the audience. What photos I have sold are taken outdoors, in bright sunlight, on – I cringe to say it – autofocus. Technical capacity zero. I had a passing acquaintance with the workings of my film camera but have not advanced into the digital age of camera manipulation. Apparently there are 8 Things Every Camera Owner Should Know About Their Camera. Not only can I not do these, I don’t know where most of the buttons are. I want that to change.

[Kudos to Sunflower for refining the photography idea. Thanks to Images by Ceci for the camera link.]


Can you name all 6 common barn textures?
[Hover for answers]

Me Next! Me Next!

Work: AM heat therapy/PM groom, no exercises.
Report: During grooming, he objected to being brushed on the head. I overruled his objection. [Option A from Head Games]. I just about brushed the star off his forehead waiting for him discover that the brush did not harbor tiny predators. That was enough of an adventure in patience for both of us for one day. Time will tell if we have progress or just a very clean head.

Ramblings from earlier in the day: We own two water horses. A sudden spring snap outpaced a fuzzy mare’s ability to cool herself, so she got her first shower of the year. As we walked toward the water trough/hosing area, Rodney came toodling along. After I hosed Mathilda’s undercarriage, I turned the hose on Rodney as an experiment. No halter, freedom to walk off should he choose. Not only did he fail to run off, he spun in a complete 360o like a kid in a sprinkler & then angled his head so that I could spray under his chin. I dehaltered the mare and they both stood in place as I spritzed one then the other. They would like a in-field fountain.

Now, if I could just remember to turn off the water & stop irrigating the field.

Has your horse ever been too cute for words & too annoying for words in the same day?

Guest Post: Judging a Book by its Cover – Maggie Dana

Work: day off

Back in January, Blithe Traveler was kind enough to review Maggie Dana’s first book, Keeping Secrets. Since then, I have discovered it is even more fun to give the authors room to comment on their own books and the process of writing. Without further ado, welcome Maggie:

It’s really all about shoes
You’ve written a great equestrian novel. Its characters ride like demons, their horses leap off the page, and your scenes explode with action. The ending is mind blowing. It leaves your readers breathless for more.

Now all you need a cover.

Okay, let’s back up for a minute. If you have a publisher who’s calling the shots, you probably won’t have much input on this. You’ll be at the mercy of an art department’s hurried choice of a horse doing something . . . whatever strikes their fancy, whether it’s appropriate for your book or not. Most people (especially editors and art directors at major publishing houses) don’t know a horse from a hamster, never mind the nuances of a horse’s reaction to a given situation.

Have you ever looked at covers for equestrian fiction?

Most are cringe-worthy. It’s the rare publisher who gets it right, never mind frantic phone calls and emails from horsey authors who know what their books’ covers ought to be depicting.

Case in point: Several years ago a big NY publisher was preparing to release my friend’s debut equestrian novel. They sent her the cover, as a formality, and she hit the roof. Hardly surprising, given the photo showed a woman in a flimsy nightgown with bare feet leading a droopy-eared horse from the wrong side. Fortunately, the author’s agent went to bat for her and they got the cover changed.

I wrote my first children’s horse book for Weekly Reader, a long time ago. They allowed me to choose the illustrator for the cover and interior art, and it worked out superbly well because the artist was a horsewoman. Then came a series of middle-grade horse books for Troll (now an imprint of Scholastic) that I developed with Jane Stine at Parachute Press (they produced Goosebumps). Again, it was a positive experience because Jane listened to my concerns over the visual parts of the stories.

Fast forward to the early 2000s. By this time I’d switched, temporarily, to writing women’s fiction and my debut novel, Beachcombing, was published by Macmillan in 2009 (it had nothing to do with horses). They sent me a PDF of the cover art—I was fine with it—but they’d changed the book’s title from my original (Painting Naked) to their choice, Beachcombing. I argued, and lost.

These days, publishing is a moving target—much like the fashion industry. I have wide feet, so I’ve learned the hard way that sometimes it’s best to buy shoes first, then choose an outfit to go with them—kind of like picking a cover for your book before you begin the story. This way you can make sure things match up.

How many times have you read a novel about horses where there’s not a dapple gray in the entire story, nor a woman with white-blond hair, yet that’s what appears on the cover? When writing for kids, it’s even more important to get these details right. Those eagle-eyed, horsecrazy eleven-year-olds will be all over you if you mess up.

However, with a little judicious tweaking, you can always make your story fit the photo you’ve fallen in love with. But don’t do it unless it’s absolutely right. Just be sure that whatever appears on the outside, reflects what’s happening on inside, and give yourself double brownie points if it doesn’t pinch your toes.

So, the whole point of this is: Choose your cover art, early in the process, and run it by people whose opinions you trust. After finishing book two of my new middle-grade horse series, I thought I’d found the perfect cover photograph to depict a dramatic scene near the beginning of the story. The photo had it all—the right color horse, doing the right stuff … all the way down to the gloves worn by the woman wrestling with it—till I shared my Photoshop masterpiece with several horsey friends and asked for their opinion.

The criticisms were legion, and they were right.

From Ellen Broadhurst: “I can’t work out what is going on with the rider. Are those reins she’s holding? … I found the juxtaposition of what appeared to be schooling with full show-ring garb jarring.”

Kathy* Walcott brought me down to earth with: “From a design POV, the base is busy—text and fence—while the top one quarter is empty. Also, why is she dressed in show clothes with gloves but no helmet? If she’s about to show, why isn’t her hair tidier? Why the jacket if she still has to tack up?”

I had no answers to these very pertinent questions. In the actual story, the woman in this scene was in normal barn attire—jeans, t-shirt, and riding boots, not white breeches and hunt jacket. And, as a professional trainer, she would’ve known better than to leave a trail of lunge line pooling at her feet. But for a moment, this particular photograph struck a cord with me and painted what I thought was a perfect picture.

It’s these mad moments of wanting the shoes to fit that need to be wrestled into perspective. No matter how many miles you walk, they will always remind your feet who’s the boss.

The moral of all this? If you have a choice of cover art, trust the instincts of your horse-loving friends. They will give your reins a sharp tug … to say nothing of laughing themselves silly over those sparkly, five-inch-heel heel muck boots you found on e-Bay.

Thanks to invaluable input like this, here is my final cover art for Racing into Trouble, Book Two of my Timber Ridge Riders series.

Maggie Dana
Author of books for horse-crazy girls … and their horse-crazy moms
www.maggiedana.com

Links to Maggie’s books
Book 1: Keeping Secrets
Amazon Kindle
B&N Nook
print version

Book 2: Racing into Trouble
Amazon Kindle

Thank you Maggie.
What is the best/worst cover art you have seen on a horse book? [RS]

Previous book posts: Keeping Secrets by Maggie Dana, reviewed by Ellen Broadhurst
Guest Blogger: Linda Benson, writer of The Girl Who Remembered Horses
Guest Post: Art Imitates Life by Jennifer Walker

[* I’ve know Maggie since I was wee, so she is allowed to use my childhood name. None of the rest of you are.]

Say Aaaah!

Work: PM1 heat therapy/PM2 groom, short walk.
Report: No amount of DST helps if I can’t lever my butt out of bed until brunch.

Ramblings: I have magic counting hands. Rodney’s gastric medication requires 14 pills per dose – there’s a lot of horse to dose. I’m amazed how often my randomly poured handful is exactly 14 pills.

Pounded into powder and mixed with water, these make a vile-tasting, bright yellow liquid that gets squirted over his back teeth twice a day. He’s really very good about it. He might wave his head a trifle or walk off a few steps, but once the inevitable is inevitable, he’s close to stoic. The second time you came near me with medical intentions, I’d be heading for the far side of the pasture at Mach 2. Mathilda fights us to a draw for worming. You would NEVER get paste meds into her mouth twice a day. I’m repeating myself [Head Games], but I want to be sure he gets all the props he deserves.

Can you count by handfuls?

Point of 100 Meetings

Work: AM rain/PM heat therapy.
Report: Instead of putting both heating pads on his back near the scar tissue, I put the second over his Bai Hui point. He got all soft-eyed, droopy-lipped, and sleepy.

Ramblings: At least, he was sleepy right up to the point when he gave a whole body shake and the pad fell off with a thud. Since the scar is on the saddle area, I can strap a pad down with an overgirth. The other one was just balanced on this butt. He did not appreciate a loud thumpy noise in the middle of his nap.

Some days, I think he is a wood horse who needs reenforcement to his yang meridians. Some days, I think his muscles are tight and he appreciates the heat. Some days, I think it makes him feel good in the moment but is an overall waste of time.

Have you done accupressure with your horse?

[PO100M name taken from an equine accupressure app put out by Tallgrass.]